The Art of Selling Online Courses

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Jason Kleinberg was trying to become a rock star. That's genuinely how this whole thing started.

He played in bands, toured the world, recorded music. Sounds great until he tells you it mostly meant sleeping on floors covered in dog hair. At some point he started teaching fiddle, put some videos on YouTube for one student who kept asking him to film everything at 9pm when Jason was starving and just wanted to go home.. and somehow that turned into Fiddlehead, a full-time business doing just north of $200k a year.

He didn't plan any of it. He'll be the first to tell you that.

We had a really good conversation about how he built it, what makes his teaching approach different, community, AI, and what it felt like to finally get an app idea made that he'd been trying to get built for ten years. Developers kept flaking on him. He got it done with Claude Code in an hour.

Jason's just a genuinely interesting person to talk to. He's honest about what he knows, honest about what he doesn't, and he's clearly still really enjoying what he does. That comes through.

I think you'll like this one.

Check out Jason's business:
🌐 https://fiddlehed.com
📸 https://www.instagram.com/fiddlehed/
▶️ https://www.youtube.com/@fiddl3hed

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The job market is changing fast. My guest today thinks we've got about 6 months before it looks very different to what it does now.

Hemanand Vadivel is the co-founder of Code Basics, an EdTech platform out of India with 650,000 registered learners and over 6,000 five-star reviews for their courses and bootcamps in AI and data. They're doing about $2 million a year in course revenue... bootstrapped from day one, no outside funding, and no sales team.

What I love about Hem's approach is how straightforward it is. 80% of everything they put out is completely free. The idea is simple... if people genuinely love what you're teaching them, they'll come back and buy the paid stuff. And it works.

We got into how his whole team has shifted in the last few weeks, with everyone vibe coding and shipping products at a pace that would've seemed impossible not long ago. Development time that used to take six weeks now takes three days. They've built over 30 internal products recently with 12 already in production.

We also talked about why institutional education is struggling to keep up with the rate of change in the job market right now, and what course creators should be thinking about to stay ahead of what's coming.

Hem is a genuinely thoughtful guy and this ended up being one of the more interesting conversations I've had on the show in a while. Hope you enjoy it.

🔗 https://www.codebasics.io
📺 https://youtube.com/ ⁨@codebasics⁩

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What would you do if someone told you to put your entire best-selling online course on YouTube... for free?

Most course creators would say no way. Emma McAdam said yes. And it took her from 100,000 subscribers to nearly a million.

In this episode, my new co-host Dominik Dragun sits down with Emma McAdam, a licensed therapist and the creator behind Therapy in a Nutshell, a YouTube channel with over 2 million subscribers. They talk about how Emma built a thriving membership business while giving away her best content for free, how she sells online courses to people who could watch them on YouTube at no cost, and what her email marketing, sales funnel and evergreen promotions actually look like behind the scenes.

If you're a course creator wondering how to grow your online course business without feeling salesy or holding back your best stuff... this one's for you.

🎙️ Hosted by Dominik Dragun, co-host of The Art of Selling Online Courses

📺 Therapy in a Nutshell: https://therapyinanutshell.com/
📺 Emma's YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/c/TherapyinaNutshell

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Joseph Hoffman was halfway through a conducting degree when he started teaching neighbourhood kids piano to pay the bills. He fell in love with it, pivoted his whole career, and eventually moved online with a pretty unconventional idea... give every single lesson away for free.

That decision led to Hoffman Academy reaching over 200,000 students across 115 countries, $2M a year in revenue, and a team of 15 people building one of the most recognised online piano schools in the world.

In this episode Joseph shares how the freemium model actually works in practice, what he's learned about converting free users into paying members, why a 30-day free trial completely flopped for them and what they did instead, and how he's thinking about growing the business in 2026.

Really enjoyed this conversation. Joseph has built something genuinely special and there's a lot here for anyone running or thinking about running a subscription-based online course.

🔗 Check out Hoffman Academy: https://www.HoffmanAcademy.com
🔗 Find Joseph on social media:  @Hoffmanacademy  

#OnlineCourses #SalesFunnels #CourseCreators #DigitalMarketing

🤝  Get In Touch
If you'd like to talk more about how you can grow your course business, email me at john@datadrivenmarketing.

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Josh Wright is a classical pianist who's performed at Carnegie Hall, the Kennedy Center, and on America's Got Talent. He's grown a YouTube channel to over 200,000 subscribers and 20 million views, and built a whole online course business teaching piano students all over the world.

And yeah, that's all pretty cool. But maybe the more interesting part is how he actually built it.

His whole channel is built around sharing his weaknesses. Not in some cringe, overly vulnerable way... just honestly. "Here's what I struggle with, here's how I fixed it." And his audience loves him for it. He actually calls it the superpower of the channel, which I think is a really good way to put it.

So we got into why that works. Because I think a lot of course creators feel this pull toward seeming more professional, more polished, more put-together online. And Josh's experience is kind of the opposite. The more real he is, the more people trust him and want to learn from him.

We also talked about the fear of promotion, which comes up a lot with course creators. Josh was pretty open about how uncomfortable he used to be with it and how he eventually got over it. If you've ever felt a bit weird about putting your stuff out there, that part of the conversation is worth a listen on its own.

Really good episode. Hope you enjoy it.

🎹 Check out Josh's work:
🔗 www.joshwrightpiano.com
🔗 youtube.com/joshwrightpiano
🔗 facebook.com/joshwrightpiano
🔗 instagram.com/joshwrightpiano
🔗 Courses: https://learn.joshwrightpiano.com/

#OnlineCourses #SalesFunnels #CourseCreators #DigitalMarketing

🤝  Get In Touch
If you'd like to talk more about how you can grow your course business, email me at john@datadrivenmarketing.