Guide

Build and sell a course with Clipnote

The whole thing, end to end, in about half an hour — assuming you already have some recordings. If you don’t, you’ll make them as you go, because recording a lesson happens inside the course builder rather than somewhere else.

Create your school

Go to Studioand give your school a name — usually your business or your own name. Your school is the container everything else lives in, and it’s what students see first.

You get one school per account. It starts closed, so nothing is public until you say so.

Create a course

Press New course and title it. A course arrives with one module already in it, so you can add your first lesson straight away.

Modules are the chapters. Most courses want three to six of them; if you’re not sure, start with one and split it later — moving lessons between modules is a dropdown.

Add lessons

There are three ways, and they all end in the same place.

Record this lesson — the fast one. Clipnote creates the lesson, opens the recorder, and when you press stop the video is already in your course, in position. No download, no upload, no file to name.
Pull from library— pick from everything you’ve already recorded. Useful when half your course exists as Looms you sent people last year.
Empty lesson — block out the structure first, add the videos later. Handy for planning a course before recording a word of it.

Open a lesson’s ⋯ menu to write notes under the video, attach resources, mark it as a free preview, or move it to another module. The ↑ ↓ buttons reorder.

Re-recording is safe. Press Re-record on any lesson and the new video replaces the old one in place. The lesson keeps its link and your students keep their progress — nobody gets bumped back to the start.

Choose who can watch

Three options, in the sidebar of the course builder.

Invite only — nobody gets in without a link you generate. This is the one for team training, client onboarding and private cohorts. The link works for everyone you send it to, so one link per cohort is fine.
Free — anyone with the link can enrol after signing in. Good for a lead magnet or a public onboarding course.
Paid — set a price and connect Stripe. Buyers pay you directly; Clipnote takes 0%.

Any lesson can be marked Free preview, which opens it to anyone even on a paid course. One good preview lesson sells a course better than any sales page.

Make it look like yours

In School settingsyou control the background (paper, clean or dark), the type, your accent colour, a logo and a cover image. There’s a live preview so you can see it before students do.

Your own domain

Add a subdomain you own — learn.yourbrand.com — then create this DNS record with whoever manages your domain:

Type   CNAME
Name   learn
Value  cname.vercel-dns.com

Clipnote checks every few seconds and flips the domain to Live once DNS resolves — usually a few minutes, occasionally an hour. Until then your school still works at its clipnotehq.com address.

Use a subdomain, not your bare domain. Pointing yourbrand.com here would take your whole website with it.

Publish and share

Two switches have to be on: Publish on the course, and My school is openin school settings. The builder warns you if you’ve done one and not the other.

Clipnote won’t let you publish a course with no video in it, or a paid course before Stripe is connected — both would just fail in front of a student.

After that, send people your school link, the course link, or an invite link. Students see a classroom with a syllabus, a progress ring, and a resume point; you see who enrolled and who finished.

Getting it right

Keep lessons short.Five to ten minutes each. It’s easier to record, far easier to re-record, and the progress bar moves often enough that people keep going.

Record the outline first.Add empty lessons for the whole course before recording anything. You’ll spot the gaps while they’re still free to fix.

Use the drawing tools.Clipnote’s pen, highlighter and blur work while you record, which saves the editing pass most course videos need. Blur is how you demo a real account without leaking a customer’s name.

Trim the dead air.Every recording has a trim editor. Cutting the first ten seconds of “can everyone see my screen” makes a course feel twice as professional.

Watch where people stop. The completion list tells you which lesson loses everyone. That lesson is usually too long or in the wrong place.

Questions people ask

Do I have to upload video files to make a course?

No. A Clipnote lesson points at a recording in your library, so recording a lesson is the same action as creating one. There is no export step and no upload step.

How do I re-record a lesson I got wrong?

Open the lesson's ⋯ menu in the course builder and press Re-record. The new video replaces the old one in place — the lesson keeps its link, its position and every student's progress.

How do I take payment for a course?

Set the course to Paid, enter a price, then connect Stripe from school settings. Payments go directly to your own Stripe account: you are the seller of record, and Clipnote takes 0%.

How do I put a course on my own domain?

In school settings, add a subdomain you own, like learn.yourbrand.com, then create a CNAME record pointing it at cname.vercel-dns.com. Once DNS resolves, your classroom serves from your domain.

Can I run private training for my team instead of selling?

Yes — set the course to Invite only and share the invite link. Nobody can enrol without it, and you can see exactly who has completed which lessons.

What does it cost?

Courses are included with Clipnote Pro at $7 a month. There is no separate course-platform subscription and no cut of your sales.

Ready when you are

Name your school, pull in a few recordings, and you’ll have something to send people this afternoon.

Open Studio