If you’ve followed me for a while now then you know my thoughts around Udemy.
What I haven’t spoke much about is the danger of creating tactical courses. It’s why you rarely see me going over tactics in these newsletters as they come and go (whereas strategy you can use forever.)
Last week I met up with a good friend of mine who is making $50k+ per month from courses.
His business is split up in the following ways
- B2b course = own platform (he teaches high paid individuals how to perform better at their job)
- B2c courses = Udemy (he shows consumers how to use the tools from this industry)
All of the Udemy courses are highly tactical and all piggy-back on software.
We talked a bit about scaling companies but as soon as I mentioned buying time back and hiring he said: “Not for me. I’m thinking of shutting down this business every day. Too much work and hassle.”
Weird for a course business huh?
Here’s the reality
- If you don’t update your courses all of the time on Udemy then your position starts to slip.
- When you receive a couple of bad reviews it can knock you out of your position.
His courses are best-sellers with thousands of great reviews so what is the problem?
In his words “All of the software updates are killing me. The second a student doesn’t see exactly what I show him on his screen it is an issue.”
He cannot build any more courses as all of his time is spent updating the recent ones so they don’t start slipping in rankings and income.
Also one of the software companies sued him for teaching people how to use their product. One stream of income gone like that plus legal costs. I think this could have been avoided by not using Udemy as a marketplace (their legal couldn’t handle another public company using their brand’s name to make money).
Piggybacking on popular software is popular. I see this with Notion (templates, courses etc…) right now. If going into this space ever crossed your mind… simply be aware of what type of business you’re getting yourself into.
