Making $3,000 monthly shipping & selling courses

Hello! Can you introduce yourself and tell us about your business?

My name is Yash, I'm based in India.

I've spent around a decade doing 9-5 working on building AI Products, with over 7 years of experience in product management, including in AI, platforms, and apps, I have a diverse background in the tech industry.

I am also an enthusiast of generative AI, constantly exploring new ways to use it to solve problems and create innovative products. My goal is to use my skills and expertise to drive the success of my company and make a positive impact in the tech world.

I've now decided to go indie. I'm building courses and SaaS products for a living.

How did you start this business? Take us through the process.

I was working a full time job when i first created courses.

While I didn't hate the job, i often felt restricted. I've been wanting to do something myself for a very long time.

So I created course as an experiment to see if i can firstly pursue my passion of teaching and simultaneously also make some side income to leverage in the future.

Here's how I did it:

1. Figured out the niche i want to work in (AI was booming)

2. Invest time to read about it and look at other courses

3. Create a course curriculum and then broad overview of what you'd like to talk about

   - Invest some time in writing actual scripts

   - Record videos + spend time improving the quality and editing them.

4. I created the first AI Course on the platform

5. Soon enough the course got a lot of enrolments (topic was hot)

6. But a lot of negative reviews because things kept changing

7. I Iterated a lot. Almost every day. A total of 12k Students.

8. Started in February - crossed $25k today.

I have 2 more courses listed. The first one was hard, subsequent ones are relatively easy.

The initial receipt was not so great, i've outlined details of why that happened here:

But to summarise, this was the first time i was teaching international. So accent was a HUGE issue. followed by dynamic nature of ai at the time. But I iterated a lot. Spending wise it was mostly only time. 16 Hour days were normal (still are) but working on doing more of this now.

How did you get your first initial customers?

The initial customers were friends and family. They were also nice enough to give me feedback on what can be improved.

The only bit I didn't anticipate was the international customers.

I also had a running YouTube channel where i promoted my courses. Soon enough I had 100 students (in a month) all paid. Then in the second month, given the positive reviews, my course got selected in business, and from that point on both I and Marketplace were promoting my business. We got to 50 students a day and 500 / day on the best day.

Now for the new courses, i just take the leverage from these popular courses, I would send out a promotional email with discount coupons. Once you have 100 students marketplaces will start promoting your courses.

Since launch, what are your marketing strategies or channels to get new customers?

I still continue to use my Content network: LinkedIn and YouTube channels for promotion.

I've not explored beyond these channels given the organic network did trick for me. I'd send emails to students for them to enrol in my other courses.

As the Udemy Marketplace seems saturated with so many courses, it’s hard to cut through the noise and get your courses noticed.

But then good thing about marketplace is that it promotes your courses in your local region. So, if you're based in country X, marketplaces will try to show your courses.

Second, be niche with what you create. Instead of selling ai courses, launch generative ai content creation course. so you're niche now and you're competing with fewer players.

I recently launched another course (very competitive) - it's been a month and i've gotten to 200 enrolments. I was worried about the noise on this one too. So i just niched it down. I'd recommend building the course out first and then worrying about the noise.

How does your business make money?

I made money by selling courses on the Udemy marketplace.

Most users are one time. But the goal is to launch more courses around A.I and more specialised example: A.I for seo, product management and so on.

So we can firstly leverage the users who already have signed up for other courses and upsell while also ensuring new products / courses help build more revenue channels.

I'm also enrolled in Udemy Business (3% of their courses) - they allow you to offer your courses to corporate. But you get paid by the amount of time your courses are watched. I’ve always had one of the courses free to acquire students.

The payment is actually variable and there is either little or no visibility here. A rough estimate based on the data: $0.015 / minute so an hour would be around a $1 - but this also depends with niche, so can't say for sure.

For other Udemy courses not under Udemy Business, Udemy usually takes a flat 64% of all the revenue.

Most of the business’s cost is time. Marketplace takes care of the marketing, i do some marketing on my YouTube channel, LinkedIn and Instagram - but majority of the enrolments are from Marketplace.

Besides selling courses, I’m also working on building saas products like Snapy.ai, which has been instrumental for me to edit my courses faster.

Take us through a typical day in your life running the business as a solo founder

My months have a broad plan, days are dynamic, some days i'm hustling to update course, shipping products some days, shipping a new course, marketing. but it's a lot of shipping every single day.

I don't think i respect the concept of weekends anymore.

Before you go, what advice would you give to another who wants to start a business like yours?

Get the first version out, iterate later on. The best feedback will come from actual users.

Where can we go to lean more about you and your business?

Here are some links you can go to learn more:

Twitter: https://twitter.com/goyashy

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/goyashy/