The Art of Selling Online Courses

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Leo Coelho trained as a doctor, worked in medicine for about a year, quit to become a digital nomad, tried translating, tried dropshipping, became a tour guide in Lisbon, and then the pandemic shut everything down overnight.

So he started making YouTube videos about the Portuguese language. Fifteen months later he had 100,000 subscribers. Today Portuguese with Leo is the biggest channel for learning European Portuguese as a foreign language, with 2...

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Lindsay Müller built a Facebook group of 30,000 ukulele beginners without spending a single dollar on ads. She did it by showing up every day for five months, posting chord sheets, tutorials, and tips on a simple rotating schedule she made up herself. Then one day in January 2024, it just took off.

Dominik sat down with Lindsay to talk through exactly how she built that, and what she did with the audience once she had...

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Shelley and CJ Hitz have run the same low-ticket membership for over eleven years. That alone is worth paying attention to.

They built Christian Book Academy for Christian writers, people who want to finish and publish their books but keep getting stuck. The membership costs $49 a month. They have over 300 members. And they have had to figure out, the hard way, what actually keeps people paying month after month...

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Alain Picard spent years saying no to teaching. He believed, genuinely believed, that those who can't do, teach. It took a recession, a pregnant wife, no commissions, and his German wife looking him in the eye and saying "you're burying your gifts in the ground" to change his mind.

That one conversation set off a chain of small yeses that eventually led to a membership community called Cultivate, three instructional art books, a YouTube channel, about 25,000 peo...

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Billy Seol built his coaching business from Reddit. Not ads, not a big launch, not a personal brand with a large following. He started by showing up where people were already suffering and saying something useful. That's the whole philosophy in miniature.

Dominik sat down with Billy, a Buddhist life coach and former software engineer, to pull apart some ideas that don't get much airtime in the onl...

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Iwona Podlasińska picked up a camera in 2014 to photograph her own kids. Ten years later, she's run workshops in 17 countries, was named the most followed photographer on Flickr in 2017, and has thousands of students learning her distinctive dreamy, light-filled portrait style. John sat down with her to hear how that actually happened, and what running that kind of business really looks like day to day.

What came through most clearly was how honest Iwona is abou...

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Rosalie E'Silva spent years at CNN, NBC, Al Jazeera, and Bloomberg telling other people's stories. The whole time, she was keeping a secret: she'd been having out-of-body experiences since childhood and had never told anyone.

In 2024, she left broadcast journalism to teach Yoga Nidra for astral projection. She now has over 150,000 YouTube subscribers, more than 20 million views, and a course community whose students are so engaged they meet on Zoom and Discord without her, multiple times a week, just becaus...

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Jim Cockrum has been doing this for 24 years, and he still texted three coaching students personally this week just to check in.

That detail tells you a lot about how Jim runs his business. He's the founder of Proven Amazon Course, host of Silent Sales Machine Radio, and the author of a book that's been read by over a million people. His funnel starts at $7 and goes to $7,000, he's coached more than 7,000 students, and his Facebook community has 80,000 members. But the thing that struck me most in this conversation wasn't the...

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Elsa runs Peace of French, a YouTube channel with hundreds of thousands of subscribers, and she built the whole thing again in Hebrew. Every day, companies email her offering money to promote their language apps. She says no almost every time.

Dominik sat down with Elsa to find out why, and what he got was a really clear-eyed conversation about what it actually means to run a...

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Victor Damasio grew up selling newspapers on the Rio subway and working pub crawls to pay his way through law school. 
Today he has 729,000 Instagram followers in Brazil, nearly a quarter of a million YouTube subscribers, and a mastermind he charges $20,000 to join. This conversation is about what he figured out in between.

I sat down with Victor to talk about one specific idea: why course creators who already have an audience and existing clients are leaving serious money on the table by not having a high-ticket offer. Victor's argument i...

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Mark Wales has had a career that is genuinely hard to believe. Sixteen years in the Australian Army, four tours of Afghanistan with the SAS, an MBA from Wharton, a stint at McKinsey, and then he won Australian Survivor. Now he is building an online course business around leadership and resilience, and he emailed John to say he...

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Alicia Katz Pollock built something most course creators never think to build. She took QuickBooks training, a topic most people assume is dry and functional, and turned it into a tiered membership with over 50 courses, live community calls, a coaching program, five books, a podcast, and CPE accreditation that accounting firms actually require their staff to complete.

Dominik sat down with Alicia to trace how that happened. She started with a single beginner bootcamp, then kept adding courses every time a client asked about something new. Banking feeds, reconciliation, payroll, sales...

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Milo Andreo built one of the biggest piano teaching businesses on the internet in Portuguese. Over a million subscribers, 26,000 students, a full course platform with a community, a music library, the works. Then he decided to do it all again, in English, from scratch.

Two years in, his English channel Easy Fast Piano is already past 170,000 subscribers and 10,000 students. And he's running both at the same time, producing videos in two languages every single week.

I had a great conversation with Milo about what that actually looks like. We...

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Lauren Bateman has 650,000 YouTube subscribers, nearly 900 videos, and over 58 million views teaching guitar to older beginners. She also survived cancer at 16, quit a pharmaceutical job in her twenties, opened a brick-and-mortar music school, and now runs the online side of her business with a small team of VAs and an editor. There is a lot going on.

What I loved about this conversation was how clearly Lauren has thought about the trade-offs in her business. She knows exactly why she will not do high-ticket coaching, exactly what kind of life she...

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Gabriel lost his job. While applying for new ones and getting rejected, he started teaching Spanish online and writing short stories for his students. The feedback was so good he thought, why not share this with the world?

Eighteen months later, his site Fluent with Stories is pulling in 250,000 visitors a month through SEO, adding close to 2,000 new email subscribers every month, and his debut A1 Spanish course launched to testimonials most creators would genuinely envy. And he's been taking it seriously for all of five months.

I sat...

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Jeff Alipio had 170 followers when he launched his first course. Most of them were friends and family. He sold to nearly 500 students anyway, almost all of them complete strangers.

Dominik sat down with Jeff, a Philippines-based video editor and course creator with over 15 years in the industry, to talk about how he pulled that off, and why he thinks the obsession with follower count is one of the biggest traps course creators fall into.

What came through clearly in this conversation is how simply Jeff thinks about audience quality...

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I sat down with Dan Lee, a self-taught wooden boat builder based in the Cotswolds, who turned a lifelong obsession into a full-time business, funded almost entirely by online courses he runs from a farm workshop. It's a genuinely great story.

Dan started building model boats at eight and full-size ones at seventeen. When COVID hit and his previous business, making tree-shaped bookcases, looked like it was going to collapse overnight, he decided to go all in on something he'd always wanted to do. He built a website, started modernising old...

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Brad Yates has 425,000 YouTube subscribers and 60 million views, built over nearly two decades. He has never once sat down to plan a content strategy.

I had a genuinely fun conversation with Brad for this episode. He started out as an actor, trained as a hypnotherapist when his first child was on the way, stumbled into EFT tapping through a workshop, and then one day thought it wou...

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Dr. Andrea Furlan is one of Canada's top pain physicians, a full professor at the University of Toronto, and a senior scientist at the country's largest hospital. She's also a YouTuber with over 830,000 subscribers and 78 million views, which her colleagues definitely did not see coming.

When Andrea started her channel in 2019, she wasn't chasing subscribers. She just didn't have enough time in appointments to teach her pa...

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Timotej Bonifer grew up in Slovenia, never studied English formally, and now coaches entrepreneurs around the world to sound like native speakers. His secret? Twelve years on a microphone playing video games. The same habit that probably worried his parents turned out to be the thing that built his entire career.

Dominik sat down with Timotej to talk about how he built Flip English, what it actually takes to turn an obsession into a business, and why he genuinely believes non-native speakers make better English teachers than the natives do. That...

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Most people who build a 122,000-subscriber YouTube channel and help over 20,000 students learn an instrument have figured out marketing. Beth Blackerby hasn't. And somehow it still worked.

Beth is the founder of Violin Lab, one of the very first structured online violin curricula on the internet, launched before "online course" was even a phrase people used. She started in 2007 because she noticed that adults learn the violin completely differently from children, and almost nobody was teaching to them. So...

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Scott Gardiner does around $100K a month and has never taken a single sales call. No closers, no discovery Zooms, no objection handling. Every offer is evergreen, bought at whatever hour suits the buyer, while Scott is somewhere else entirely.

He helps men whose marriages are falling apart, guys whose partners have already said they're done. And he got into it the hard way. Six years ago his own wife told him she was done.

Dominik sat down with Scott to hear the full story, from being made redundant...

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Most productivity coaches tell you to do more. Carl Pullein built a business teaching people to do less, and better. And it's working to the tune of around $300,000 a year.

I sat down with Carl recently and really enjoyed this one. He's a British productivity coach based in Seoul, South Korea, with over 150,000 YouTube subscribers, 17 million views, and an email list of 25,000 to 30,000 people. He built all of it over ten years, one video a week, around two proprietary frameworks he developed himself.

We talked about who he's actually...

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Alex Dunitz has built one of the top Italian language learning channels on YouTube. 266,000 subscribers, nearly 30 million views, a custom app with gamification, private lessons, group courses, books, webinars, trips to Italy. The whole thing.

And yet, when I sat down with him, the first thing that struck me was how much opportunity he was sitting on without fully realising it.

Alex is brilliant at what he does. His co-host Marta Cappellini spends around eight hours preparing a single ten-minute video. They have a genuine teaching philosophy, a real...

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Derek Callan has been coaching business English for over 22 years, has clocked more than 10,000 hours of in-company training, and has built a YouTube channel with 250,000 subscribers and nearly 10 million views. He is, by any measure, someone who knows his stuff. So what I really wanted to get into with him was the messier side of the journey, figuring out who your real customer is, what they actually want to buy, and how to build a funnel that lines up from first click...

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There's a guitar teacher in Colombia who has nearly 600,000 YouTube subscribers, has taught over 70,000 students, and is personally answering WhatsApp messages from every new student himself. And that last part is completely intentional.

I sat down with Miguel Martinez, founder of ClasesDeGuitarra.com.co, to talk about what's actually happening to online course businesses right now, especially in the education space. Miguel has been doing this since 2012 and he's s...

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Natalia Rethmeyer had 80,000 YouTube subscribers and not a single person on her email list. No tripwire, no funnel, no strategy. Just videos going out every week into what felt like a void.

That's where Dominik sat down with her for this one, and what came out of it was one of the more honest conversations we've had on the show about what it actually takes to build something that lasts.

Natalia moved to Germany from Ukraine 12 years ago, c...

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Abbie Emmons built a YouTube channel closing in on 600,000 subscribers, 7,000 students across her courses, a Patreon membership she 10x'd in six months, and a traditionally published book on the way. And she teaches people how to write novels. 

In this episode, I sit down with Abbie to pull apart how she actually built and runs her business. We get into the move from Patreon to her own membership site, why she prices and sells courses both insi...

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Ross Rosenberg has 38 million YouTube views, over 200,000 books sold in 12 languages, and a podcast in the top 2% globally. 

Ross is one of the world's leading voices on codependency and narcissistic abuse. He founded the Self-Love Recovery Institute back in 2013 and has been building his audience online ever since, mostly by figuring things out as he went, which is both the charm and the challenge of his story.

We talk...

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Eddie van Dongen spent years doing what most musicians dream of. Touring Europe, playing 200-show theater runs, recording, performing. And then COVID hit, and overnight there was nothing. No gigs, no income, no plan.

That moment forced him to ask a question he'd never had to ask before: what would it look like to actually build a business, not just be a freelancer hoping the phone rings?

Eddie is a professional drummer from Rotterdam, endorsed by major brands and featured on Dutch national TV. But what makes his story...

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Gillian Perkins runs a multi-six-figure online business, has over 700,000 YouTube subscribers, and works fewer than 20 hours a week. She's also a homeschool mum of six. If you've ever wondered whether that kind of setup is actually possible, this episode is a pretty good answer.

John sat down with Gillian to talk through how she structures her courses and cohorts, why she's stopped running tripwire funnels with her organic audience, and why she actually leads with her most expensive product first. That last one goes against most funnel advice you'll hear, and...

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Kim Foster spent 20 years as a family doctor before walking away to build a global platform around identity transformation. She now has over 250,000 YouTube subscribers, a TEDx talk under her belt, and a book coming out in 2026. But what made this conversation really interesting wasn't the credentials — it was how honest she was about what's working, what isn't, and where she's still figuring things out.

We got into her YouTube content strategy, specifically this idea of bringing people in with what they think they want, but giving them what they actually ne...

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Most course creators build a course, put it online, and hope people stick around. Adam Morgan did something completely different.

Adam is a UK-based architect with over a decade of real practice experience, and the founder of Arcademia, a platform that's grown to over 4,500 members globally. Dominik sat down with him to find out how he got there, and honestly, the story is not what you'd expect.

It sta...

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David Duffy is an Irish musician and bassist who co-founded Secrets of Solo, the biggest online school for solo swing dancing, with his wife Ksenia, a dance artist with over 200 million views online. One of their videos alone has 14 million views on YouTube. And yet, when those viral moments happen, the sales spike they expect... doesn...

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Jayne Havens never planned to build a business. She just wanted to help her kids sleep.

But after one year of running a sleep consulting practice and feeling maxed out, she made a decision that changed everything. She stopped taking more clients and started teaching other people to do what she did. That was 2019. Today, roughly 75% of her income comes from a single $2,700 certification course, and she's still running it all from her kitchen table.

Dominik sat down with Jayne to dig into exactly how she built this, and...

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Bethany McBride started her business because she needed to make a thousand dollars to cover some bills. That was it. No grand plan, no marketing strategy, just a Facebook group and a love for teaching worship music. A few months later, she and her husband had replaced his income entirely.

This week I sat down with Bethany, the creator behind Simplified Piano, an online piano education community helping beginners, mostly people in their 60s and beyond, lea...

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Nicole Hullihen runs a full-time VP role in pharmaceuticals, leads a family, and still finds 25 hours a week to build a course business on the side. I honestly wasn't sure how that was possible, but listening to her talk about it, it starts to make sense.

Nicole is the founder of Execute The Vision, where she teaches Excel and business operations skills through courses, done-for-you templa...

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Pete Matthew runs one of the UK's most trusted personal finance brands, a podcast with over 8 million downloads, a YouTube channel approaching 150,000 subscribers, and an online academy that did £140,000 in a single Black Friday weekend. And he still considers it a side project.

I sat down with Pete to talk about how Meaningful Money actually works as a business, the honest gaps he knows exist, and the philosophy that's kept him going for 15 years without burning the trust of his audience.

We got into the structure of his three-course a...

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Leah Bolden built a YouTube channel with over a million subscribers and nearly 200 million views by teaching one thing really well: how to fix your home. And she did it by speaking to people exactly like a friend would, not like a tradesperson trying to impress anyone.

Dominik sat down with Leah to talk about how See Jane Drill went from a classroom suggestion to a full course business, and the conversation ended up being one of the more grounded and honest ones we've had on this show.

Leah...

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Arnel Nisbet has 1.3 million YouTube subscribers, 700,000 monthly views, and runs her entire business completely on her own, no team, no editor, no outsourcing. She's also a full-time mother of three. And when Dominik sat down with her for this episode, she openly admitted her biggest blind spot: "My email list is my weakness."

That kind of honesty is rare, and it's what makes this conversation so good.

Arnel started her channel out of pure necessity. She had three tiny kids at home, limited work options locally, and thought if...