From Student to Course Creator: 18 Months of Building Die Produktivitäts-Werkstatt
Hello Friend 👋
Eighteen months ago, I started building something I never planned to build.
What began as notes from Ali Abdaal’s courses and workshops slowly turned into a full 12-week productivity course — in German. I called it Die Produktivitäts-Werkstatt (The Productivity Workshop), and it lives at pwerkstatt.com.
Today, I want to take you behind the scenes of that journey. Not the polished version. The real one.
Where It All Started
If you’ve been reading this newsletter for a while, you know I’ve been deep in Ali Abdaal’s world. I joined his Annual Planning Workshop, participated in his Productivity Lab, and eventually took his LifeOS course — which I documented in a five-part series:
- ⭐ Life OS w/ Ali Abdaal - Day 1
- 🚀 Life OS w/ Ali Abdaal Day 1 - Pt. 2
- 💥 Reactive ⇉ Proactive (Life OS Week 2)
- 💚 LifeOS w/ Ali Abdaal, Part 3
- 🗓️ LifeOS w/ Ali Abdaal, Part 4
Every course I took, I found myself translating the concepts for friends, family, and colleagues. People who don’t consume English productivity content. People who would never sign up for an Ali Abdaal course — not because they don’t need it, but because the language barrier is real.
That’s when the idea hit me: What if I built a German-language productivity course that combines the best frameworks I’ve learned — and actually walks people through implementing them?
Not a weekend workshop. Not a YouTube playlist. A proper 12-week guided program.
The Building Process
Let me be honest about the timeline. This wasn’t a “had an idea on Monday, launched on Friday” story.
Summer 2024 — I launched a beta version on Kajabi with 20 participants who got to test the course for free.
There were no polished slides or pre-recorded masterclasses.
I created the videos for the next week during the previous week.
My tools: Loom for recording, Miro for visual presentations.
I time-blocked my calendar — dedicated blocks for recording videos, building presentations, and editing.
Here’s what a typical week looked like:
This was my Marshmallow Challenge moment — start building, see what falls, adjust.
Then came my first attempt at a paid launch. I promoted the course at a free workshop in October 2024. The result? Two sign-ups. Not exactly a stampede. But hey — two real people paid to join what I was building.
February 2025 — I reached out to Landsiedel NLP Training, one of the largest German-speaking personal development platforms, and got the chance to present my course to over 200 people.
17 signed up.
Over 5,000€ in revenue.
From two sign-ups at a free workshop to 17 from a single pitch — that felt like a turning point.
I built a community on Circle.so and refined everything down to the last detail:
Summer 2025 — Then something unexpected happened.
After taking codefast by Marc Lou and How to Build Your Own Apps by Nat Eliason, I decided to code my own platform from scratch.
Kajabi and Circle.so were costing me over 200€/month — and I wanted full control over the experience.
So I built the entire thing myself: signup flow, automated email sequences, video hosting, the works.
Now (February 2026) — I’m expanding the course with a dedicated AI productivity module.
The goal: implement the system of the Produktivitäts-Werkstatt with AI, working as a personal productivity coach.
What I Didn’t Expect
Three things surprised me about this process.
1. Teaching forces clarity. You think you understand something — until you have to explain it to someone who’s never heard of it. Every fuzzy concept gets exposed.
2. Building in German was harder than expected. “Deep work,” “time blocking,” “quarterly quests” — none of these translate naturally. Finding terminology that feels native, not imported, took weeks.
3. I became my own best case study. As I wrote about in The High Cost of Perfection — the irony of procrastinating on a productivity course was not lost on me. I had to use my own system to build the system.
What’s Next
Die Produktivitäts-Werkstatt is far from finished.
Every cohort teaches me something new, every student brings a different challenge, and every iteration makes the course a little bit better.
If you’re a German speaker (or know someone who is) and you’ve ever felt like all the good productivity content is locked behind an English paywall — check it out at pwerkstatt.com.
And if you’re thinking about building something yourself — my biggest lesson from these 18 months is simple: Start with 20 beta testers, not 18 months of planning.
Have a meaningful week,
Lukas 🚀
