Glossary
Evergreen and cohort courses
Also called evergreen course, cohort course.
Last reviewed 18 September 2026
Definition
An evergreen course starts on the morning after each person confirms and is therefore running continuously, while a cohort course starts on one fixed date for everybody, so nobody in an evergreen course is ever late and nobody in a cohort is ever alone.
Both work, and the choice is between a shared moment and a thing that keeps working while you do not. A cohort earns its cost when the shared moment genuinely adds something, which in practice means a live element, a group, or a leaderboard that only makes sense if everybody is on the same day.
The usual mistake is running a cohort because a launch feels like an event. Absent a live element, a cohort is a deadline you have imposed on yourself, and every reader who finds the page the day after it starts is asked to wait or to leave.
See also
- Email course
An email course is a finite sequence of lessons delivered one email at a time, in order, on a clock that starts when each reader joins, and it ends on a day both of you knew about in advance.
- Five-day challenge
A five-day challenge is a sequence of five daily emails that each ask the reader to do one small thing, usually with a sixth email that makes an offer, so the unit of progress is an action rather than a lesson.
- Drip campaign
A drip campaign is a stored sequence of emails sent to a person on a timer after some trigger, run towards a goal the sender chose, which is the same machinery an email course runs on and a different promise to the reader.
Read next
This term is covered properly in How to run a 5-day challenge by email, which is a longer piece on the subject.
Every other term is on the glossary index , the longer writing is in the guides, and what this site itself does is on the home page.
Thinking of writing one of these?
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