I advise everyone I know to create an online course. Everyone has something to say. Everyone has valuable knowledge that others could benefit from.

I believe that in 10 years online courses will be like websites today – everyone who works online will have at least one. And without one, you will be all but invisible.

What an “online course” looks like will probably radically change by then. It may look like a newsletter subscription, a private social media feed, an augmented reality lens, a swarm of conversational chatbots, or a virtual reality holodeck where someone can “walk through” your mind. 

But whatever form it takes, every knowledge worker in the future will need some way for others to access their knowledge without also taking their time. As long as you only sell what you know by the hour, you’ll always be chained to a desk, whether you have a traditional job or are self-employed. You’ll never gain the freedom and flexibility that working with knowledge makes possible.

Creating an online course, or other educational content in some form, is really about setting your knowledge free. Allowing it to have a life of its own, to stand on its own as something inherently valuable. And by setting your knowledge free, you will also be set free to spend your life as you want.

In this case study, I want to show you how profitable an online course can be today. It’s certainly not easy, but it is eminently feasible. In a follow-up post, I’ll explain my strategy for making my online course the centerpiece of an entire ecosystem of products, services, experiences, and content.

Financial Results

I’ll start with the money, since that funds everything else.

Revenue

My online course Building a Second Brain (BASB) has been available for sale for just over 2 years, with 712 purchases in that time. The price has ranged from $400 to $700 for the “standard edition,” and between $600 to $1,200 for the “premium edition.” 

Here are the details:

• The version numbers in the left-hand column refer to the iterations of the course I’ve released every 3-6 months. They include new content I’ve added, reordering the lessons, adding new forms of support, or other changes
• Gross earnings is total revenue, taking into account credit card and transaction fees
• Affiliates are people who have referred others to purchase the course, and who I paid a commission to
• Refunds are given within 30 days of purchase

These numbers do not include the other two online courses I offer on the Teachable platform, which together have generated about an additional $45,000 in gross earnings over the past three years.

Expenses

These are the expenses associated with delivering the BASB course over two years:

Course manager – $13,124

Starting with version 3.0, I hired a part-time contractor as a Course Manager. Their responsibilities included answering student questions, troubleshooting IT issues, issuing invoices and refunds, and in some cases creating new instructional material or leading live calls.

I typically paid about $25 per hour, and the time commitment varied based on whether it was a live cohort (taking place over 4-5 weeks via live Zoom calls) or self-paced (pre-recorded videos that students watched at their own pace). The live cohorts were much more demanding and required near full-time attention and quick response times, while the self-paced students were spread out over a longer period of time and the work could be batch-processed.

I’ve facilitated both live cohorts and self-paced students with and without a course manager helping me, and it is completely possible to do it on your own. They do take care of a lot of the lower-level admin work, can respond more quickly to messages from students, and provide a valuable sounding board for decisions.

My full recommendations for working with an assistant remotely can be found in A Productivity Expert’s Guide to Working with a Virtual Assistant.

IT support – $9,744

I worked with another independent contractor (who originally was the Course Manager, and later shifted their focus) who supported all the technology aspects of the course. This included:

• Setting up integrations between different platforms (such as syncing course participants with a Mailchimp list)
• Automated predictable, frequent tasks (such as automatically giving students access to the online forum)
• Responded to customer complaints and requests and documented these responses for future use
• Researched and investigated avenues for marketing the course (such as taking notes on a marketing webinar and discussing them with me)
• Investigated and helped carry out IT solutions to recurring challenges (such as moving the blog to WordPress)
• Created proof-of-concept software solutions (such as the first version of RandomNote)

Marketing agency – $8,418

Starting at the beginning of 2018, I hired a small social media marketing agency to help with the marketing of the course. We created a 1-minute “trailer” video; redesigned the BASB website to be shorter, simpler, and more accessible; produced a series of 1-page “tipsheets” to use as incentives for signing up to the email list; and refined our messaging to reach a more mainstream audience.

Although this was a productive collaboration, trying to outsource the marketing of an online course is not something I’d recommend. Marketing is not a specialized, cut-and-paste activity that you can just hand off to someone. It requires constant, in-depth experimentation and fine-tuning to build a mental model of who your audience is and what they are looking for. As a solopreneur, you don’t have a huge budget to throw at your market. You have to be creative, adaptable, and willing to try anything.