Hey friend! If you’ve spent any time online you might have seen a million posts and videos promising you riches if you create and sell a course. But they never tell you the fine print. So I’m going to tell you when and why you shouldn’t create an online course as a new entrepreneur or when you need cashflow, pronto.
Let’s talk about when it’s NOT a good idea to create and launch a course.
✦ You need cashflow asap
✦ You don’t believe in yourself
✦ You don’t have enough skills or experience
Disclaimer: In this article, I want to tell you what I wish I’d known (and paid attention to) when I started my business so I could’ve started making money right away instead of wasting years on the wrong things.
1. If you don't have a big audience
I’m sorry to burst the bubble everyone else worked “so hard” to create, friend. But the truth is that to make a decent living selling online courses, you need a relatively big audience.
An online course can generally sell for $67-$997 (or higher, but that’s less common) which means that you’re going to need to make many sales to reach your income goals.
Let’s say that you want to replace your fulltime job income of $50,000 by selling online courses.
If your course is $97:
- $50,000 / $97 = you need 515 sales every year.
- If you launch 4 times a year, that’s 128 sales per launch.
- With a conversion rate of 2% you need to have a minimum of 6400 email subscribers each time you launch.
If your course is $297:
- $50,000 / $297 = you need 168 sales every year.
- If you launch 4 times a year, that’s 42 sales per launch.
- With a conversion rate of 2% you need at least 2100 email subscribers each time you launch.
If your course is $997:
- $50,000 / $997 = you need 50 sales every year.
- If you launch 4 times a year, that’s 13 sales per launch.
- With a conversion rate of 2% you need at least 650 email subscribers each time you launch.
And that might seem easy enough, especially if you have a higher ticket course.
But as a new entrepreneur, it can be hard to grow your email list and nurture it enough to pull off these numbers in your first launch, let alone in the first year.
If you run ads, you might be able to grow your email list fast. But if you don’t have the time, skills or funds needed to run ads that attract the right people to your list? Ay, ay, ay.
Organic traffic takes a lot of time and that is if you optimize your content correctly so it ranks down the line.
Here’s the thing: Is it impossible? Not at all. But it’s not the walk in the park those social posts made it seem.
If you still have a fulltime job to help you fund some of your ads or other strategies to grow your list quickly, you can probably do it!
I’m not trying to tell you never to create a course. I’m telling you don’t create a course in hopes of having six figure launches overnight if you don’t already have a big audience to sell to.
You’re in for a massive disappointment if you do!
Let’s talk more about that…
#2 - If you need cashflow, pronto.
Maybe you’ve been laid off, or your boss is driving you up the wall, or you just want to share your passion with the world. No matter why you decided you wanted to be your own boss and launch your own business, you’re going to need cashflow.
As you’ve already seen in the previous section, creating a course requires a big audience, which in turn takes time and money to build. Not the ideal scenario when you need money, now. Right?
Even if you were able to grow your email list to 1000 email subscribers in your first month (which would be amazing), creating your course would take you weeks. Where’s the money going to come from if you don’t have your course ready to sell yet?
I hear you, what if you presell your course before you make it? Sure, that can work the first month. But the next month you’re going to be neck deep into creating the course for the students that bought it and you can’t launch again.
And what happens the next month? 
Plus, if you’re launching the same course every month, people will procrastinate on enrolling because they’ll think “oh well, I’ll buy it next month, no biggie”. So you will make fewer and fewer sales.
To top it off, people will unsubscribe from your emails because of the constant selling. Big turnoff.
Again, don’t mean to be a negative nancy but the facts are the facts. Creating and launching a course is a FANTASTIC way to scale your business so you can make more money while working less.
But it’s a terrible idea if you’re starting from scratch and you need money to survive right away. It’s just not sustainable financially, physically, mentally or cosmically (
).
3. You don’t believe in yourself
Boom. Creating a course sounds like a great plan when someone else is talking about it or sharing their experience going from being broke to striking it rich overnight without any work.
But when you sit down to do the same, oh boy, do the self-doubt, insecurities and imposter syndrome rear up their ugly heads.
Suddenly you’re talking yourself out of it real fast. You don’t think you have enough skills, or experience, or what will Susan from middle school think?!
And just like that… creating and launching a course goes from being something you could do overnight to something you spend a whole year on. That is *if* you finish at all.
It took me 2 years to create my first course cause I was completely sure I wasn’t good enough to teach anybody. When I finally finished it and launched it, I was so scared people would hate it and refund it, that I didn’t promote it at all outside of a few emails.
If you don’t feel confident in yourself and you don’t have ways to keep a healthy mindset during the course creation process, it might end up being a major waste of time. Heck, it might even dissuade you from being an entrepreneur altogether.
Make sure you know how to reprogram your subconscious mind for success so when the self-doubt kicks in, you’ll be able to keep it under control and stay the course (pun not intended 😉 ).
Before I tell you what I recommend you do if you need cashflow and money coming in fast, let me tell you about the final reason why you should NOT create an online course as a new entrepreneur…
4. You *actually* don’t have enough skills or experience or you’re reselling someone’s course
This is something I’m seeing more and more lately. MRR (Master Resell Rights) courses are taking the world by storm and I hate to see it, tbh.
You might think it’s the best idea ever because:
1) You don’t have to spend time creating a course
2) You know it’s something people want to buy cause everyone says so and you’ve bought it yourself and…
3) You can sell it over and over and keep full profit.
Sure sounds like a deal, doesn’t it? But it’s a horrible, horrible one.
If you have no experience with the topic, or creating courses, or launching courses, you’re in for a painful ride.
In the previous section I talked about self-doubt getting in the way. But this isn’t that, if you truly don’t have enough knowledge, experience or skills, creating a course or selling someone else’s isn’t the way.
You’ll get frustrated fast when you don’t make sales right away, feel like you failed while everyone else got rich quickly (hint: they’re lying) and you’ll feel stupid for having bought into it in the first place.
The best courses come from your own lived experiences and skills in a specific niche. Cultivate a skill you love and then teach others how to get to where you are with more ease. Then you’ll have a winning course! 🙂
❌ Forget AI, forget MRR, forget PLR.
There’s a better way to start making consistent money in an aligned way and from the get go. Now that we’ve gone over 4 important reasons or scenarios why you should NOT create an online course, let’s talk about what you should do instead.
Why you should offer services as a new entrepreneur in need of cash
Services! There it is. So simple yet less glamorized than digital products, courses, etc.
Having a business means you’re exchanging goods or services for money. And the best way to start making money quickly in your business is to offer services!
Why? A few reasons, really:
2. You don’t need a HUGE community because you only need to make 1-4 sales at a time (vs dozens if you were selling courses or digital products). Heck, just word of mouth alone can help you get your first few clients without needing an email list, paid ads, or spending months on content creation.
Over the years I’ve focused a lot on creating courses and digital products. But the bulk of my money has ALWAYS come from offering services and coaching to clients. And the best part is that I know I’m good at it, so the self-doubt and imposter syndrome rarely get in the way!
So there you go!
Over to you - Are you going to create a course or offer services?
It’s a big decision but I know you’re in a better position to decide whether creating a course or offering services is the right move for you now.
In this article you learned the main four scenarios where it’s not the best option to go straight to creating a course if you’re a new entrepreneur.
Whether you need enough money fast, you don’t have a big audience, don’t feel confident in yourself or you don’t have the skills needed to create a course, you’re likely going to get better results from offering services instead.
Offering specific services to your ideal clients is going to help you start making money from the get go, without needing a huge audience or having to spend ages creating content to grow your email list before you can make a single cent.
Let me know in the comments what you’ve decided to do and why! I’d love to know and I’ll be cheering you on 🙂
