Course vs. Coaching vs. Consulting: Which Model Fits Your Expertise? Before you build anything, there’s a decision that shapes everything else: how are you going to sell what you know? There are 3 primary models. Each works. Each has real tradeoffs. The right one for you depends on your expertise, your lifestyle, and where you…
The Minimum Viable Course: Why Smaller Is the Right Starting Point The first instinct when building a course is to make it comprehensive. Cover everything. Leave nothing out. Give the buyer so much value they couldn’t possibly ask for a refund. It’s a generous instinct and it’s almost always wrong. Here’s what actually happens when…
How to Know If Your Course Idea Will Actually Sell Most courses that fail didn’t fail because they were badly built. They failed because nobody asked for them before they were built. Building a course is a significant investment of time and energy. Doing it before you know someone will buy is one of the…
You’ve Got the Outline. Here’s How to Build the Business Around It. Say you’ve done the work in the earlier posts. You used the Vet-Toolkit, or you sat down and figured it out on your own, and now you have a course outline built from your experience. Good. That’s a real asset, and most people…
What to Charge for Your First Offer (and Why Most Get It Wrong) Pricing is where a lot of good first offers quietly die. Not because the number was too high or too low, but because the person picking it was answering the wrong question. Let me give you the right one. The two wrong…
How to Use AI to Get What’s in Your Head Onto the Page A few posts back I made the case that AI doesn’t replace your expertise, it removes the friction between your expertise and a finished product. Today I want to show you the actual method, because the single hardest part of teaching what…
How to Choose the One Thing to Teach First Here’s a problem that only happens to people who actually know things: you have too much to teach, so you teach nothing. You sit down to build your first course and your mind floods. You could teach this, or this, or this other thing that connects…
Worried AI makes your hard-won expertise worthless? It does the opposite. Here is what AI actually does for a subject-matter expert, and what it can’t.
The man who married my daughter, his mother was once my student. I didn’t know that when they met. I found out years later, and I had to sit down when I did. That moment told me something I’d known in my head for decades but never felt in my chest: the work you do…
There are only two ways to get paid. Most veterans only ever learn one of them, and it’s the one with a ceiling. When you leave the service, the obvious move is to go find another paycheck. Same instinct, new uniform. But the people who build real income on the other side of service make…
