How to launch a branded academy on your own domain

A course is one product; an academy is a school

A single course is one curriculum with a checkout. An academy is the school around it: your brand, your domain, many courses, learner management, and a place your graduates recognise. Launch a branded academy is the product; this guide is how to set one up well.

You can sell a single course without an academy, and many people do. The move to an academy makes sense once the brand, the domain, and the enrolment experience should all look unmistakably like you. Families, corporate buyers, and returning students remember a school, and an academy gives them one to come back to.

On Distinction you can publish courses and videos, enrol learners, and take payment under your own brand. Course sales keep up to 97%, with processing separate. If what you have is a single workbook rather than a curriculum, Sell digital products may be the better home for it.

Domain, brand, and a catalogue worth showing

You can launch on a Distinction host if you need to teach next week — typically youracademy.distinction.app while you finish your lessons — and connect a custom domain once the academy is the public face of your business. Setting up the domain and its certificate is a short, one-time task.

Branding is more than a logo: it is the colour, the name, and the landing page your learners bookmark. On Distinction, learners see your institute first, and every course can have a purchase-ready page without hiring a designer for the first cohort. Fill the academy with real courses rather than placeholders — a focused academy with two complete courses and genuine assessments makes a far stronger impression than a large shell of empty titles. If you have only one curriculum so far, create it first with How to create an online course with AI, then return here when you are ready to build the school around it.

You also choose what is public. Academy courses you make public can appear on the learners hub, while invite-only courses stay off it — which is exactly right for a private corporate academy, even after the custom domain is live.

Learners, payments, and running the school

An academy is more than a place to store videos; it is somewhere you can see how learners are progressing. Distinction includes learner management, so your team can see who has started, who is moving forward, and who may need a nudge — without a separate spreadsheet. Payments happen on the same platform, and learners are enrolled automatically once payment succeeds, so you do not need a different checkout for each intake.

Worldwide payouts are the default, and connecting a custom domain does not change the fee model. Complete identity verification and link a bank account before you promise a withdrawal date; earnings sit in your wallet after each sale. It is worth running a small test enrolment before you announce term dates to a large group. The details are in How payouts work and How Distinction pricing works.

Any live classes you already run can sit comfortably alongside Distinction lessons — the platform complements the tools you use for live teaching rather than replacing all of them at once. What it does replace is the patchwork of separate drives, chat groups, and payment tools that were never designed to work together.

UK tuition centres

If you run GCSE, 11+, or A-level tuition and price in pounds, UK tuition centre software and How to run a UK tuition centre or GCSE academy online are written specifically for you, with GBP pricing and UK workflows throughout. This guide stays general and international.

A launch sequence you can run in three weeks

1. Choose the name your graduates already use, and reserve the domain you will connect later.
2. Create the academy on a Distinction host for the first couple of weeks.
3. Outline two courses from material you already teach, generate the lessons, and refine the details.
4. Add one assessment per course where students most often need support, and attach a Video Studio explainer where a lesson would read better on screen.
5. Invite a private cohort, see where they pause, and refine before you advertise widely.
6. Brand the academy landing page with your logo, colour, and name, and preview the purchase page as a new visitor would see it.
7. Connect payments, complete verification, and link the bank account that matches the verified person or organisation.
8. Run a test enrolment to confirm the learner reaches the first lesson and the sale appears in your wallet.
9. Connect the custom domain, check the certificate, and open the academy on a phone.
10. Publish a public course if you want catalog discovery; otherwise keep the academy invite-only.

From there, let completion data guide your improvements. Plans scale as your academy grows, so you pay more only when you need more, while course sales continue to keep up to 97%, with processing separate. A strong academy looks like two real courses, assessments you genuinely mark, a domain families recognise, and a wallet that matches your sales — built step by step, not all at once.