Self-custody course · guided
A course that watches your work. Every one includes an hour with a real teacher.
Understand the problem Bitcoin solves, create your own keys, and back them up — guided, not alone. Currently delivered one-on-one / hybrid while we finish the online version.
Self-custody means you alone hold the private keys to your Bitcoin — no exchange, company, or custodian can move, freeze, or lose it for you. This course takes you from an exchange balance to your own cold storage, with a teacher on the call at the step most people get wrong.
Free tool · 3 min · nothing leaves your browser
Not sure which module you actually need? Twelve questions will point you at the weakest link in your setup and tell you what to fix first.
The villain · Seed Roulette
Free tutorials leave no one checking your work.
Self-custody by YouTube is Seed Roulette — you mis-verify a seed, skip passphrase hygiene, or never finish, and you don’t find out until the coins are gone. Every NovaSapien course includes a live hour where someone watches your work. That’s the whole difference.
What you learn
Outcomes, not jargon.
6 modules
- The problem Bitcoin solves and what custody actually means — so the rest of the course has a reason, not just steps.
- Generate a seed on air-gapped, open-source hardware. What's happening under the hood, and why it never touches the internet.
- Steel backups, passphrase hygiene, and the verification step most people skip — done with a teacher watching.
- Prove your backup works with a dry-run recovery, so you know it holds before it ever has to.
- Send a test amount, confirm it, then move the rest — calmly, at your pace.
- Ongoing habits: receiving, spending, inheritance basics, and where to go deeper.
Every course includes ~1 hour, live, one-on-one.
A patient teacher watches while you generate and back up your keys. This is the accountability layer that free content and premium platforms both skip.
Your instructor
Joshua Groth
Founder & Educator · Boulder, CO
Five years turning self-custody into a teachable practice, with a background in risk management and commercial aviation. He built NovaSapien around a simple idea: the hardware and tutorials already exist — what’s missing is a human who sits with you at the scary step.
In their words
Guided, not alone.
“I understood the why for the first time, not just the clicks. The live hour is where it finally clicked into place.”
EvanTook the course “I'd started and abandoned self-custody twice. Having someone check my backup was the difference between finishing and quitting again.”
Paul JonesCourse + setup “Patient, honest, no jargon flexing. I never felt dumb for asking the basic question.”
LauraTook the course
Questions
Straight answers.
Don’t do the scary step alone.
Get everything in one guided setup, or talk to a human first — free.