Building an Event Tech Training Business - Jen Santos on Course Design, LMS Migration, and When Events Work

Jen Santos is the founder of Smart Event Academy, a training platform she built after the pandemic wiped out decades of institutional knowledge from the events industry. Her premise: when events fail, the technology is almost never the real problem. It's the people around it - the teams who don't know what they don't know, in an industry that has almost no formal training for newcomers. In this episode, you'll learn: → Why event tech failures are a people and alignment problem - not a software problem → How Jen built a 68-lesson modular course and why she built the full program before creating any mini courses (counterintuitive, and she'll tell you why it worked) → How she prices for corporate agencies: seat-based, time-limited, and entirely B2B → When events actually make sense as a channel for membership organizations and associations - including the audience-size reality check most people skip → Why training events outperform summit formats, and what most borrowed-audience strategies get wrong → Her move from WordPress and LearnDash to LearnWorlds - what broke, what it cost, and how her platform costs dropped by roughly 75% If you run a membership site, an association, or an eLearning platform - and you've wondered whether events belong in your growth strategy, or whether your LMS is working for you or against you - this is a practical conversation from someone who has lived both questions. Connect with Jen: Website: https://smarteventacademy.com/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jenwaak/ About MemberFix: MemberFix provides managed WordPress operations exclusively for membership and eLearning platforms. We handle development, support, updates, and monitoring with SLA-backed guarantees - so you can focus on growth instead of plugin updates. Trusted by Echelon Front, TechServe Alliance, and hundreds of businesses since 2014. Book a free ops assessment at https://memberfix.rocks/contact