Course Selling

The business of building and selling a course — not how to build one

The business model underneath every course-creator success story: why anyone pays for curated, sequenced, accountability-bearing structure when most of the same information is free, and why the single biggest predictor of outcome is whether you already have an audience — not content quality. Compares Kajabi, Teachable, Podia, Circle, and Skool's own current fee schedules against self-hosted and lightweight alternatives, derives pricing and launch-sequence mechanics from first principles, and gives launch economics the hardest scrutiny in the whole course — naming and discarding an untraceable '1-3% of your list converts' benchmark, a self-reported '$1 billion in sales' launch-formula claim, and a cohort platform's own 'completion' claim that turns out to measure something narrower. Closes with real peer-reviewed completion-rate data (12.6% median across 221 MOOCs), an honest refund and FTC regulatory picture, and a kill-switch framework. Six modules, twelve lessons, confidence-tagged throughout. Standard-tier barebones build.

47 min of reading