Start your profitable online course business fast

I started ClickMinded, my online course business, as a side-project while working full-time as an SEO Manager at PayPal and Airbnb. I didn’t have an audience, email list, or even social media followers… all I had was an idea and the motivation to make it work.

Today, ClickMinded has over 30,000 students and has generated (this is so weird to write this) millions of dollars in revenue.

Learning how to create your own online course is one of the best decisions you could make — it has allowed me to:

• Pay off all my debt in my early 20s
• Generate 6-figures a year in profit since 2015
• Travel and live in some of the coolest cities in the world
• Work on stuff I’m passionate about
• Help other people grow their own businesses and improve their own lives
• Hang out with family and friends on my own schedule

In the time it's taken to get here, we’ve used dozens of tools, tried hundreds of tactics, and have made thousands… yes, thousands of mistakes.

I’ve talked about how we built this thing on podcasts like Indie Hackers¹, Tropical MBA², and Niche Pursuits³, but I was never able to really get into the weeds and share everything I wanted to share.

We decided to put everything we learned into one comprehensive framework to start and scale your own online course business as quickly as possible.

This is everything we wish someone had taught us when we were just getting started — and it’s everything you need to get the fastest results possible.

The global recession we’re entering will cause a massive explosion in the number of small businesses created.

• People who lost their jobs will start businesses
• People who still have their jobs but are afraid of losing them will start businesses
• Job security is dead
• (Almost) everything is moving online

With the trajectory we are now on, the world is being dragged into the future, kicking and screaming, whether we like it or not.

The previously held notion that “being an entrepreneur is risky” is being shattered, because it turns out that you might have to become an entrepreneur, again, whether you like it or not.

We're calling this "The Rise of the Little Guys."

In fact, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, Americans are starting new businesses at the fastest rate in more than a decade⁴.

More and more people are looking to upgrade or learn new skills that can help them find better jobs or start businesses.

There’s a popular phrase that sums this up nicely: When there's a gold rush, sell picks and shovels.

In this ‘gold rush’, knowledge is the new gold and selling courses online are the picks and shovels.

Udemy, the world’s largest online course marketplace, has published figures showing a 425% increase in demand for courses⁵ and new creators are capitalizing on this trend.

The opportunity to start an online course business is there, the circumstances are right, but getting started can be hard.

This leaves the door wide open for the great con artists of the Internet.

A quick youtube search for “make money online scams”, will take you down the weirdest, grossest rabbit hole you’ve ever been down. I wouldn’t recommend it.

Most of these bozos have perfected the art of the shakedown and will make you believe that you can:

• Quit your job and get rich overnight on the Internet
• Make money “while you sleep” (aka create a passive income business)

These are the types of people who attract millions of views, clicks, and subscribers.

If you’ve thought about starting an Internet business, you’ll quickly realize that it’s easy to put your trust in the wrong people — people that will take your money, time, and motivation and leave you with little else.

We refuse to play this game

Doing the “get rich quick” thing has never, and will never, be an option for us.

It’s just too gross.

My biggest nightmare is becoming this guy:

With that said, this doesn’t change the fact that we’ve been getting questions about how to start an online course business for years. We do our best to try and help because it’s fun. We’re nerds and we love this stuff.

So we’ve put together a framework on how to start your online course business from scratch in a way that’s the exact opposite of these exciting, get-rich-quick schemes.

It’s a plan that isn’t fast, it isn’t passive and it doesn’t involve overnight success. It’s designed for people that are ready and willing to put in the work to build a real business for the long run.

Since we are not planning to hype this the way that the get-rich-quick gang does, not everyone is going to be interested in what we have to offer.

You know what? That’s probably okay. In fact, it might be a good thing.

We are a lot more interested in finding the smart people that are willing to do the hard work and relentlessly avoid the sketchy shortcuts (that aren’t even real to begin with).

These are the same people that are willing to persist when things get difficult, and resist when the easy path gets tempting…

...because it’s worth it. I promise it's worth it.

Before we decided to go down this path, we asked ourselves: is there someone else out there that already does this well?

Our team spent over 100 hours taking the free and paid courses, watching YouTube tutorials, and reading blog posts and ebooks to find out.

The answer is no...

...or at least not to our standards.

So we decided to create the courses we wish we had 8 years ago—including all the nitty-gritty details and resources that all those other YouTube videos, blog posts, ebooks, and courses missed.

The result was 2 courses that will teach you the fastest way to create a world-class online course and the tactics to scale it to 1000+ customers.

There are many products out there that claim to help you start and build your online course.

This is what these mean:

• Start: finding a course topic and validating your idea — but other courses leave out finding which topic is best for you and how to actually get your first customers
• Build: plan your content, record it, and upload it to a learning management system (LMS) — but none of the resources we found explain how to turn “ok” content into “world-class” content

These are the most critical (and harder) aspects of these steps. It’s where people can easily get stuck, lose precious time and money, and ultimately give up on their goal of starting their own business.

The Start & Build course solves that.

This is arguably the most important aspect of an online course business — it’s the system you’ll use to continuously attract new students and grow your revenue, aka build a real business.

We were surprised to find that the biggest flaw in every resource we’ve found was that most of them don’t go over how to grow your business and scale your operations.

The Grow & Scale course is different.