We describe our experience organizing and teaching a CS1 “common course” pilot across 7 institutions during the 2023 spring term. A common course is a comprehensive centrally-designed course taught nearly identically across multiple institutions. It goes beyond common inter-institution sharing of ideas and resources, and instead is essentially the same course taught by different instructors, akin to multiple coordinated sections of a course at one institution. We describe the experience of 7 instructors who voluntarily joined the pilot, which included instructors at 5 state universities and 2 community colleges. The common course’s comprehensive design included a 15-week configured CS1 C++ online zyBook having weekly interactive readings, coding homeworks, programming assignments, and quizzes (all auto-graded); a midterm and final exam; a syllabus with schedule, grade weights, policies (late policies, cheating policies, etc.); support for teaching active lectures including detailed lecture notes and coding examples; and bi-weekly meetings among the 7 instructors plus an informal shared TA. Overall, the courses went smoothly for students, and the instructors all strongly indicated they benefited from the experience, and would do it again and recommend it to others. They listed key benefits to include time savings (which freed them to perform higher-value, more enjoyable tasks), state-of-the-art tools and pedagogy (like auto-grading and active lectures), the coding examples in the lecture notes, the ability to compare their students’ performance to others, and the camaraderie and idea exchanges at the bi-weekly meetings.