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Why people make a living online out of courses on how to make a living online?

36 points by maxilevi ↗ HN
A recurring theme I see in the indie hacking community is selling a course or an e-book into how to be an indie hacker.

Why is this so prevalent and people see it as a viable strategy instead of focusing on product and customers?

34 comments

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scastiel
I sell courses and e-books, but I wouldn’t advise you doing it for the money.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s a great experience, and I’ll continue doing it. But it’s a terrible way to invest your time for money. Building and selling a product or freelancing is IMHO a much safer way to make a living ;)

Be careful, you easily see the 10s of people who succeeded in selling courses, not the 1000s one who barely make a few bucks each month, despite great content.

jqpabc123
This exists in lots of industries. The real estate industry is full of people selling courses on how to make money in real estate.

For example, see "Trump University".

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/trump-university-scam/

cratermoon
There's even people selling courses on how to make money in programming!
jqpabc123
Yes. If it was easy to do, they would just do it.

But instead of actually doing it, they sell advice. Wonder why?

cultofmetatron
funny enough, I was working at a cafe in Indonesia when I saw another guy teaching another how to do php programming. At some point we struck up a conversation and my experience with vue came up. He was interested in paying me to teach him vue so that he could turn around and teach it. He had no interest in building projects with it. It was such a werid experience for me as I dont' even consider teaching something unless I've amassed a considerable amount of real world experience using it.
matt_s
I was watching something recently about youtube ads and the top paying topics were all about money, videos about how to make money online was up there if not #1. You go and watch these and they all have the same content but presented slightly differently ("lets analyze X channel with Y subscribers, that channel gets $Z money per watch, its easy you just need to ...")

People are constantly thinking "I should do that" and will watch videos on it and even pay money to get an ebook or take a course on it. Maybe they start a channel, maybe they become successful?

I've seen a woodworking youtube channel turn into (in my opinion) a slimy "learn how to make money with a small biz" type of content where they just talk about their business. It feels like a lot of content is crafted to feed the algorithms for profit via ads.

travisjungroth
There's definitely a lot of unscrupulous "how to make money" content out there. At the same time, a lot of people watch woodworking channels and find entertainment in imagining themselves doing it even if it never happens. Maybe you could say the same for imagining running a woodworking business. Adjacent is watching product reviews for categories of products you will never buy.
matt_s
Oh I watch a lot of stuff I'll probably never do myself. Its akin to watching New Yankee Workshop with Norm. I was watching someone piece together a broken lambo engine/car because the engineer in me just likes that stuff. I've watched a lot of car reviews too mostly for entertainment. I'd respect a channel more if they started a second channel that was about their business rather than co-opt their main/existing channel about woodworking into a small-biz focus.
travisjungroth
Ah yes the transition from “unique thing I like” to “annoying thing that gets more clicks”. It’s like the friend you’d talk about economics with becoming a crypto evangelist.
cosmodisk
People don't think 'I should do that'. Instead, they think 'I haven't got a clue hot to better off myself, I'm stuck'. Then comes along an easy course and obviously they think they'll get unstuck by purchasing it.
Jensson
> Why is this so prevalent and people see it as a viable strategy instead of focusing on product and customers?

Because there is a market for easy money courses. As long as there is a demand and easy to do then people will work to supply that demand.

For example, imagine if there was just a single person making these "make money doing X" books, he would get very rich. People would copy him to also get rich, and then enough people enter until it is no longer easy to become rich making such books. So just standard capitalism.

dalmo3
The real money is in selling courses on how to make money by selling courses.
DarrenDev
The 'digital nomads' do it too. They all seem to be selling courses on how to become a digital nomad by selling courses to wage slaves on how to be a digital nomad just like me by selling courses to wage slaves on how to...
cultofmetatron
I'm a digital nomad with startup in the restaurant space but I've met plenty of aspiring nomads in my travels trying to find a way to travel fulltime. they take numerous selfies with the hope of making money as "influencers". I've had people wonder why I don't start a channel myself. the Reason I don't is that its hard work. we see influencers on youtube seemingly having fun at a restaurant and talking to teh camera like you're an hold friend. but that is a manufactured experience. Its hard work. Meanwhile, when I go to a hole in the wall restaurant in a foreign country, Im enjoying it for its own sake. I already have my day job.
travisjungroth
When I was in Tulum, Mexico there were a lot of people who made training courses for virtual assistants to life coaches of influencers targeting keynote speakers at inspiration workshops attended by people who make training courses for...
notahacker
The recursion is a large part of why there are so many such courses. People buy a course which explains how the guy who wrote the course makes money from a course with an optimistic spin on the numbers, so they try making courses...
p1esk
Those who can - do, those who can’t - teach.
rpastuszak
That sounds great on the surface, but come to think of it, the most productive engineers I know are also great communicators and mentors. Then, in product development doing/creating is also teaching/making the rest of the team stronger.

(I agree that the survivorship bias is strong within the indiehacker community)

sph
Those who can't teach, teach PE.
thenerdhead
If you follow a 99/1% rule, you will see that the 1% of people who do this can succeed with it.

It is a viable strategy to sell anyone a dream. You don't have to live it today, but it makes it a hell of a lot more compelling (social proof) if you do.

https://wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule

This isn't just in the indie hacking community. People sell real estate courses, stock investing courses, podcasting courses, youtube courses, small biz courses, and many more things you'd be better off by just reading a book or watching free videos instead of paying somebody an inflated amount of money for their "system".

There's no proven system. There, I just saved you hundreds if not thousands of dollars. That will be $499.

ravenstine
I wonder if I could make a living online selling courses on how to make a living on line selling courses on how to make a living online.
thenerdhead
It is already being done. Go look at any relevant TikTok hashtag about making a living online and they are either selling courses or templates on how you can do the same thing.
kylehotchkiss
Other favorites: * "Influencers"/Photographers selling their "Lightroom presets" * People who travel full time selling guides on how to make a living traveling full time.
HeyLaughingBoy
Flip it around: why do you think it's not a viable strategy to sell knowledge you already have in an easily-digested format, to customers you understand well?
maxilevi
What knowledge exactly? Most people I see online who sell courses don’t have a successful product, they became successful by selling the courses
HeyLaughingBoy
??? They're successful, but you're complaining that they don't know how to be successful?

In any case, just because you don't see them having a successful non-knowledge product, doesn't mean that they don't have the ability to do so. Despite decades of being known for his insights into strategy, Peter Drucker had never actually run a business until his 80's.

paulryanrogers
Because they're producing entertainment masked as legit knowledge. It's derivative noise.

Their only success is in selling your dream back to you with a bit of fluff and widely documented approaches.

rg111
Because otherwise I or any other sensible person wouldn’t buy it.

Who should sell books on how to make a living online? People who haven't made a living online?

Then, would you buy it?

Yes, people who earn money only by selling such guides and has little earning outside of these books/courses, then those should be avoided.

This is the reason I don't buy self-helf books from most authors. If your largest success is selling self-help books and milking corporate funds for "employee growth", then you aren’t getting a dime from me.

bell-cot
It's human nature. Selling snake oil ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snake_oil ) for a quick buck has a long history, and the world never runs out of optimistic suckers. My father used to tell stories about the very early days of broadcast radio - a century ago now - and the quack doctors and scam artists who ran some of the most powerful stations on the air back then.
kwere
its unfortunate there arent proofs of those times like there are for printed papers
bell-cot
I doubt that printed transcripts, let alone recordings, of ~99.9% of the broadcasts survive. But the history is well documented...if almost unknown to younger folks. For a start:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_R._Brinkley#Brinkley_and_...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XERA-AM#The_border_blaster

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brinkley_Act

(There probably are wagonloads of printed works - sales flyers, bottle labels, newspaper ads, etc. - documenting the literal "snake oil". Though you might have to do some digging in newspaper archives, libraries, and museums to find much of it.)

angmarsbane
The people who got the wealthiest from the California gold rush were the ones selling shovels and tools not the ones mining.

When you sell how to do something, you don’t have to shoulder any of the risk or good luck required to actually make the thing happen. A “how to do something” sale is shorter and more direct than actually doing the thing.

leadguit
As my second job is being a composer for film and TV (no, not playing in the big league), I see a ton of composers producing content on "how to make money" etc.

What always crosses my mind with most of these people is - are you making money from composing music, or is your income actually giving "advice" to people? I get the diversifying of income streams etc of course.

But theres a point - invisible to the viewer - where the person is not "doing some videos on the side to help people" anymore, but transitioned to being an "educator" instead of being a composer.

Is your job actually being a working composer, or are you an online-course person? There is a course by a composer which is $4000-$7000.

If you want to make money, portray yourself as the authority and sell the advice and wisdom of your underappreciated genius. The online courses are the modern 8-page ebooks.

But really - its almost impossible to see if the person is just doing videos or courses to help others or to pad their income vs becoming a fulltime content creator and doing the very thing they create content about as a hobby so to speak.

nicbou
Everyone likes the idea of being self-employed and financially independent. I think that being exposed to more and more well+paid tech workers, digital nomads, and influencers makes people wonder how to get their own ticket to such a life. Teachers report that every kid wants to be an influencer these days.

But like what we used to call wantrepeneurs, they love the result, not the process. So they try to replicate the success of other people without bringing in any special skills or unique insights.

Those courses are an obvious recipe for people who want a recipe to get rich. It fuels an industry of people selling get-rich-quick courses to each other.