Why Most People Who Sell Courses Fail

I have sold courses for almost a decade. I know extremely well how this industry works.

And I will tell you straight up: it’s harder than you think. 

Someone looks at me and thinks, “Oh, but you make it look easy, Seth.” I probably do. We did the math and I have spent 21,840 hours of my life building and selling courses. 

Imagine that you spent 21,840 hours of your life doing one thing. (Just for perspective, if you spent 4 hours a day on weekdays honing one skill it would take you 21 years to reach 21,840 hours.) With that many hours, you’d probably make it look easy too, without even trying. 

When an NBA star does a one hand tomahawk, it looks easy. Why? Because he’s done it a million and a half times! 

So today I’m going to show you the dark side of building and selling a course. 

Why do most people fail at this? 

#1 Because they think it’s easy. 

If you set out to build a chapel, and you’ve never built a thing in your life, and you think it’s easy, guess what’s going to happen. 

You are going to get real discouraged, real fast. 

So my first advice to you is do not assume anything in business will be easy. Building a business is not easy. It's hard. And it’s going to be a lot harder than you think it’s going to be. 

This advice alone will save you from mountains of disappointment, and as a result, increase your chances of success. 

#2 Because they don’t choose a strong market. 

Simply doing what you love is a recipe for disaster and embarrassing failure. It is not good enough that you love what you do. 

The market does not care about what you love. It cares about what it loves. And if what you build is not what they want, no matter how much you love it or how much passion, blood, and tears you poured into it, your course won’t sell. 

So make sure that the market is hungry–I mean craving what you are selling. Otherwise, you are a charity. You are a 501(c)3 non profit organization.

#3 Because they assume they know what their customers want. 

Let’s say you are teaching blacksmithing. How to make swords and cool stuff like that. 

And the first chapter of your course is: A brief history of blacksmithing. 

But none of our clients care about the history of blacksmithing. They are not history buffs, they are highly practical people who want to learn HOW. 

No matter how articulate and accurate your chapter on the history of blacksmithing is, if your clients don’t want it, you are not just hurting sales and wasting their time. You’re wasting your time. 

This is why I teach my clients to ask their clients: what are your top questions about this topic? And their answers to those questions become the chapters of their course. 

#4 Because they don’t create a new market.

Let’s say someone loves pickleball. And he’s good at it. So he goes and searches online and notices a huge upward trend of pickleballers. 

And he says to himself, “Great! I found a market with demand!” And he goes  and creates his course, launches it, and then wonders why no one buys. 

I can tell you why. I just searched “pickleball” on Skool: 

"That Pickleball School" already stole that spot. He’s the category king that Al Ramadan’s book, Play Bigger, talks about. 

No wonder he’s the only one making decent money ($40,000 a month). A quick scroll reveals that one else on Skool is even close to making the money he’s making. 

He created his own hyperniche. He dominated his category. 

If you started a course on how to play pickleball right now and launched it on Skool, why would someone buy your training when, “That Pickleball Skool” already has a thousand members? 

Unless…you niche down and create pickleball training for families, or executives, or training that guarantees a much faster learning process–something that makes your product stand out as a brand new category. AKA, a hyperniche. 

#5 Because they're boring. 

“But Seth, I thought you said that anyone could create a profitable course.” 

I did. 

But just teaching the content is not going to cut it in today’s culture. You need to tell your story. 

Who are you? Where are you from? How did you learn pickleball? What challenges did you overcome? 

Unless you are an AI machine, you already have an organic story of ups and downs that will engage people and bring you and your training to life! 

This is why in Craftsmen we have a whole section called: Your Breakthrough Story. 

If you are boring, no one will buy from you. And I guarantee you this: your story is NOT boring. You just haven’t been taught how to tell it yet. 

#6 Because of perfectionism. 

Always planning, never starting. Always perfecting, never launching. 

Nothing kills the launch of a business like perfectionism. 

Let me make this clear: there is no room for perfectionism when building a business. 

It might work for a book club.

Or cooking. 

Or dog training. 

(All great topics for a course by the way). But if you apply that same level of perfectionism to your business, your competitors will chew you up and spit you out. 

Not the best but the ONLY way you are going to know HOW to build a product that your customers love is by getting it into the market and receiving real time feedback. 

Receive feedback. 

Iterate. 

Receive more feedback.

Iterate again.

#7 Because of a weak offer

I’m talking about your landing page or your Skool page where people go to buy. 

Your offer needs to be so amazingly good that someone would be dumb not to buy it. 

You need to deliver value at 10x the cost of the course you are selling. Otherwise, why are you in business? 

If you want a full video on how to do that, go here.

#8 Because of a lack of self discipline

In my training I teach my clients how to win their first 15 clients just using their phone. 

Sounds amazing, right? 

It’s tedious. This means you are texting anywhere from 25 to 100 people a day. 

You want sales? You have to reach out. And the best place to start is with people who know you.

Now before you freeze up and think: “I’m not asking my mom to buy my course,” the strategy we use is super simple: It’s called ERRA. 

You Engage, you Relate, you Request and you Ask.

And what you ask is not, “Will you buy my course?” but “Who do you know that might be interested in me coaching them?” 

But the problem is not the ERRA strategy. The strategy works. I’ve used it thousands of times and made a LOT of money doing it. 

The problem is a lack of self discipline to sit down and do these texts every single day. Most people simply don’t have the grit to do something tedious over and over and over again until they get results. 

No wonder Charlie Munger said,

To get what you want, you have to deserve what you want. The world is not yet a crazy enough place to reward a whole bunch of undeserving people.

When Kobe Bryant joined the Los Angeles Lakers in 1996, he was the rookie. He would be playing alongside experienced legends like Shaquille O’Neal, Eddie Jones, and Nick Van Exel. 

And because of this, Kobe worked harder than anyone, practicing 4 hours or more per day. 

It is this kind of commitment and drive that is necessary if you want to build a business, make a lot of money, and impact a lot of people. 

That’s exactly why Craftsmen has a monthly roundtable where the men hold each other accountable to keep going! 

#9 They don’t understand marketing

If you have zero experience in marketing, and you want to sell a course that makes you a lot of money, get a coach who knows marketing. 

Nothing feels worse than to spend hours creating a product to find out you have no idea how to get people to buy it. 

I could spend the next 3 hours explaining various marketing methods but instead I’m going to tell you a story. 

I’ve done $10.2 million in gross profits–not revenue–gross profits from course sales. 

But what most people don't realize is when I launched my first course, no one bought it. No one cared. My sales did not take off until I paid for a mentor. The 8 grand I spent made me $10.2 million.

Think about that for a minute. You could put 1,275 eight grands into 10.2 million. That mentor multiplied my investment by 1,275 times. 

If a casino announced that it guarantees you a 1,275 return on your money, the entire world would be on that casino’s doorstep.  

When you invest in yourself by getting a mentor or getting training, you pull the future toward you. You accelerate your learning process. 

What would you rather have? Trying and failing for 5 years until you finally figure it out? Or paying a mentor who can 1,275 times your investment?