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The $100 MBA Show
Are Online Courses Dying? How To Save Your Online Course Business
00:20:32
You’re not imagining it: online courses look like they’re “booming” everywhere you turn, but if you’ve got a course (or you’re thinking about building one), the numbers can feel painfully… not booming. You might be wondering if you missed the window, if your course is suddenly “too late,” or if you’re about to waste months on something the market already moved past.
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If you ever thought about building an online course, or you already have one, you probably asked yourself some version of this question, Is it still worth it? Because from the outside, the signals make no sense. The online course market is heading towards $400 billion globally. More people are buying online education than any other point in human history. And all the course creators I speak to, and I know them personally, I spoke to about a dozen of them recently, they all say the same thing. They've been in the game for five, six, seven years and they all are reporting the worst numbers since they've started their business. So which is it? Is there an opportunity? Is there money to be made? Or is it all dried up? Is online education over? Here's the answer. The opportunity is actually bigger than ever. But the model that most people are using to chase that opportunity is absolutely dead. They're going after it the wrong way. And today I'm going to show you what to do instead. How to do it the right way. Because the market has shifted and if you don't shift with it, you're asking for trouble. Welcome Back to the $100 MBA Show. I'm your host Omar Zenholm, where I deliver practical business lessons three times a week, Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, to help you start, grow and scale your business. If this show has helped in any way, it would be amazing if you could drop us a quick review on whatever app you're using to listen to this podcast right now it helps me and my team bring new episodes every week. And more importantly, more entrepreneurs will be able to discover our podcast. So you can help someone else start their journey. Thanks so much. Before I give you any context, I want to give you the most important insight of this episode. Because if you get this one thing, everything else makes sense. This. Most people are selling online courses, are selling information. You need to stop doing that. You need to start selling transformation. And there's a difference. And let me tell you what it looks like. Information looks like this. I got 12 modules, I got 46 lessons on this topic. Everything you need to know about this topic, I'm going to teach you. Sounds reasonable, right? Problem is that nobody's buying that anymore. Transformation on the hand sounds like this. Here's a specific result you will have at the end of this program. Here's the exact plan we're going to go through. You're going to lose 10 pounds in the next six weeks. That's an example. People will buy, scratch it. They're going to run frantically if there's an opportunity to get an outcome. People are tired of learning. And by the way, information is available, plentiful. People are not buying information. Here is an example. Let me give you two examples. Number one is this podcast. Okay, I've been running this podcast for 11, almost 12 years. Are you paying anything right now? No, it's free. I understand that information is supposed to be free. It should be free. People should be able to educate themselves and then implement the way they feel now if they want more beyond information, if they want implementation, if they want things to get done for them. In other words, a service, that's a different price, that's a different thing. I don't offer that, but you could buy that somewhere. Here's a second example. I saw this guy selling an online course on a strategy to. To win bigger pots in poker. I pay poker recreationally. I play in some tournaments. I have a lot of fun with it. I love it. Now, I'm not going to name this person or their course or their strategy to protect their identity, but, you know, it seemed like a pretty solid course and a lot of information was going to be provided. And I was about to buy the course because I was curious about the strategy. He was going to provide some information about a different way to approach certain positions, certain situations in poker. He's not gonna promise me an outcome. He's not gonna increase my win rate or increase my bankroll through, you know, winnings in poker. None of that. It was just Gonna provide me information. Now, I was about to buy the course, but before I did, I went to my buddy Claude. You know, I went to AI and I asked Claude, hey, this strategy is called so and so. And I'm thinking about buying this course. Here's a URL. Should I buy this course? Is there something that you could teach me from this course or something that you can show me this strategy or explain the strategy to me, or is buying the course required? And Claude just told me, hey, you don't need to buy the course. The strategy is actually these five pillars. Let me explain what they are. 1, 2, 3, 4. And he gave me a summary. And then say, do you want me to go into depth? I can teach you each part of those modules, each five of those things, step by step, so that when you play poker the next time you can try it out. Now, it doesn't mean this course is a scam, this person is a scammer. No, but it just means that I could get the information somewhere else. And that is just clear proof that information is just not enough as your product when you're selling education. So what's actually happening here? Online courses are not dying, but the old model of online courses is dying. Okay? And there's a massive difference. You could get a piece of the pie of this $400 billion industry in 2026. It's going to hit over trillion dollars in 2032. So this means it's not a dying industry. The trend is going upwards. It's just a maturing industry. Things are changing. Now, creators who understand this, they're going to adapt, and their best years are to come. But creators who are still running the old 2016, 2017 playbook of selling courses are going to go out of business. So what killed the old model? Well, three things. And all three things happened at the same time, like the perfect storm. First, information became free, AI, like I mentioned, YouTube, Google, anything a standard online course teaches you from a pure information standpoint can be found in a few seconds. You are not competing with other course creators anymore. You are competing with ChatGPT, with Claude, with Gemini. And those models, the paid versions, not even the free versions. But the paid versions don't cost 9.97. They cost 20 bucks a month. By the way, this is the biggest bargain in town. If you're not paying for Claude, for example, of 20 bucks a month, you're nuts. This is an incredible opportunity to utilize and leverage this technology in ways you can't imagine. So selling knowledge alone in 2026 is like selling bottled water next to a waterfall right from a spring. Right? The water is fine. The water that you're selling is fine. The pricing is the problem. Why would I buy your bottled water when there's fresh spring water right next to you? The second thing that happened is the market got burned. The pandemic created a land rush when it came to online courses. Everyone launched a course which meant quality collapsed and buyers paid good money and never finished those courses and never implemented and got burnt out. So what happened is that consumers really started to become skeptical of online courses. There's no more excitement anymore. There's no more curiosity. And now trust is becoming a very rare commodity in online education. A lot of people don't trust these online courses anymore when before they're kind of like, hey, this is cool. I'll learn this. I'll pay this much money. And the third thing is it became common that completion rates of these courses have become embarrassing. Okay, the industry never wanted to talk about this, but the average online course completion rate is under 15%, and that's for paid courses. It gets worse when it's free. Which means for every hundred people who bought an online course, fewer than 15 finish it. That's just pathetic. The old model doesn't work now. Why is this a problem? Course completion. Because if they don't complete the course, it's going to be very hard for them to implement what they learn. And. And therefore they're not going to get the results that you want them to have. So that you can get some testimonials to prove that what you're selling actually works. You want completion rates sky high so that you can get incredible testimonials and just proof of concept. Prove it to yourself that what you're actually teaching and what you're providing is helping other people in getting results. Learning a new language is one of those skills that truly stays with you. It's incredibly rewarding once you start hearing yourself understand and speak it naturally. I've been learning Italian. My wife Nicole's background is Italian. 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That's unlimited access to 25 language courses for life. Visit RosettaStone.com MBA to get started and claim your 50% off today. Go to RosettaStone.com MBA and start learning today. Whether you're selling lattes, cutting hair, detailing cars, or running a design studio, Square helps you run your business without running yourself into the ground. Take payments at a kiosk, counter, website, or with your phone, all synced in real time. With Square, you can track sales, manage inventory, and access reports, whether you're in your shop on the go or running things solo. Plus, Square supports every major payment method, including tap to pay, and offers instant access to your earnings through Square Checking. Running a business involves a lot of moving parts, and Square helps simplify that. The hardware looks polished and fits right into your space without feeling intrusive. And the software is incredibly straightforward and intuitive. With Square, you get all the tools to run your business with none of the contracts or complexity. And why wait? Right now you can get up to $200 off square hardware at square.com go mba that's sq u a r e.com go/mba. Run your business smarter with Square. Get started today. So what actually works? What should you do as we move forward? Well, there's three models I want to share with you that you could choose from that have huge upsides. Model number one is what I call the implementation system. Stop calling it a course. Stop thinking it as a course. Okay, thinking of it as a course. I should say a course delivers content. As soon as you call it a course, you're thinking that I'm just giving content. An implementation system delivers a result. The difference is how you build this, how you put this together. An implementation system starts with an outcome and works backwards. That means whatever you're going to be offering has an outcome, meaning that what are they going to be able to do by the end? What are they going to get at the end? Then I have to work backwards. How am I going to get them there? So what is the specific result that the student needs in this program? And then what are the exact steps between where they are now and the result? What do I build that bridge to get them to that destination? What are the tools? What are the templates? What are the resources that I need to give them to remove all the obstacles that are in their way to make this so easy for them to get that result? What does accountability look like from inside the program? How do I make sure that if they're having an off day, a lazy day, that they do what they need to do to get to the result? The content, the videos, the lessons is not the product. It's just one of the tools you're going to use to get them the result. What you're selling is the transformation. They are something right now. They want to become something else. They are somewhere and they want to go somewhere else. So for example, we have a program called the $100 MBA. I'm sure you're aware of it. And we have three tracks, start, growth, scale. And each track has, has a result, has an outcome. Start is exactly what it sounds like. It gets people to their first sale, their first dollar if they made $0. We're going to make sure you're not at zero anymore. You're going to be at least at $1. The growth track gets them to $300,000 in annual revenue and the scale track gets them to a million dollars in annual revenue. That's the outcome. Yes, we have super high quality video lessons, but we have those lessons because it helps them with the outcome, not because that's what they bought. I'm not selling lessons. I know that the lessons alone don't work. They need implementation. That's why we have like an interactive workbook where they actually do the work to build their business alongside with the lessons. And we actually tell them, don't move on until you actually do the homework. Like for example, build your website for your business is one of the homeworks and one of the modules before you move on. Because you won't be able to do much if you don't have a website. Yes, we give the recommendations and the tools and all that kind of stuff. But the point here is, is that you need step by step milestones. We give them templates, like a one page business plan, like P and L sheets, like finance templates. We give them AI tools so that they could write better emails, they could validate their ideas, it could create better offers and price their products. Why? Why do we give these things? Again, I'm trying to remove all the roadblocks, all the excuses all the things are going to stop them from getting to the result. Model number two, course plus coaching. This is a hybrid model. If you have a course right now and it's underperforming, this is the fastest way to save it. And almost nobody's doing it, okay? They just think that this is a course, and I'm just going to hope that everybody buys it. If you just add one weekly group coaching call for one hour with your group, that's going to add tremendous value. That one addition will fundamentally change what you are selling. Here's why it works so well. Your course solves the what and the how, shows them what they're they don't know. The information shows them how to do it. Now, the coaching call solves the why it's not working for them specifically because if we're going to be honest, no matter what you are helping people with, every situation is different. And in order for you to get people unstuck, you're going to have to understand their specific situation. That gap between generic information and personal application is exactly where most people fall off or students fall off. You want to make sure that they have no excuses and they get out of their own way. They watch the lessons, they understand the concepts, and they hit a specific situation where they're like, oh, I'm stuck. I don't know how to move forward. Let's say you're in the fitness industry and you're getting people fit and they have a specific regimen or diet and workout, but the holidays are coming up. What am I not going to have, you know, food and dessert with my family? There's not a lot of time to go to the gym when it's all hectic and the kids are home from school, they're stuck. You're going to give them a plan specific to that. In a course with coaching, stuck means bring it to the call on Tuesday and we're going to solve it. We're going to get you unstuck. This is also an incredible retention tool. It gets people to want to come back week after week and continue to renew their membership with you. It's also a lot easier to get testimonials when you're coaching live and doing breakthroughs live. And you can grab their testimonials right after or even on the call. You can also charge more for this type of program. Not because you're adding more content. It's not about the content, but you're adding accountability. You're adding a chance for people to say, there is no way I can fail. There's no more excuses. You get real time feedback. You get unstuck when you need to. You get to ask questions. You know for sure that it's going to work for you because you're going to get tailored coaching. You don't need to rebuild your whole program. All you have to do is add a weekly group coaching call. That's all you got to do. And it's going to add an incredible amount of value. Model number three, the cohort launch. This one is actually very interesting because people don't understand how powerful it is. This model really addresses the accountability problem at the structural level. When you have a cohort launch, that means you have a group of people starting all at the same time. You're going to have a cohort that starts, let's say, the second week in January. Everybody's starting and they're going to do a six week program. And when that cohort is finished, there'll be a next program. Or you can have another court start the week after. But the point is that everybody's starting and ending at the same time. There's live sessions, there's a shared start date, there's a shared end date. So students are going through the program together now. There's a real accountability piece, not just between you and the students, but with each other, students with students. The magic of cohorts is that the community that's being built is not a feature, it is the product. It's the reason why people love these programs. And the numbers don't lie. Cohort completion rates run from 85 to 90%. That's incredible. Compare that to the 15% of online courses. Oof. That's way better. And the funny thing is that there's no really difference in the quality of the information. I've been part of a lot of cohort programs, coaching programs that were in a cohort fashion. And there's something about learning alongside 30 other people who are having the same experience as you, and you're all having the same shifts in psychology and you're all kind of getting better together. Another interesting thing is that you don't want to be the one that gets left behind. You don't want to miss a live session. You want to make sure you show up every single time. There's a real social pressure there. And it's a really healthy social pressure. There's also this urgency that self paced, evergreen programs just don't really create. You know, this idea of like, consume it whenever you want, wherever you want. That doesn't really work. People need a start day. I'm starting my transformation today. I will get to my outcome on this day. It's exciting. And because this whole group is kind of pushing each other, it creates this positive energy where everybody pushes each other to get results, which generates incredible social proof. And again, lots of testimonials. Is this episode giving you some clarity? Is it getting you pumped? Is it getting you excited? If so, I'm happy. But I do think you should subscribe to the show because I have an upcoming episode that I'm working on that you're going to absolutely love. It's something that I really enjoyed creating and it's all about. Are successful people just getting lucky? How much does luck influence success in the first place? I dive deeply into this and really address this topic head on. So if you want to hear about it, make sure you subscribe so you don't miss it. I also think it's time for me to address the elephant in the room. I kind of touched on it earlier, but every course creator I talk to right now have some version of the same fear. AI is going to replace me. Why would anyone pay me or pay for my course when ChatGPT or Claude can answer their questions for free? And here's my honest sake, they're right. If you are insisting on selling information, you are no match for AI. Okay, AI is going to be you every day of the week and twice on Sunday. But here, what AI can do, at least not for now, okay, it can't sit on a group coaching call and build a relationship with your students, diagnose a specific person's specific business problem that's not working and solve it. It can't build a community of people that are going through the same thing at the same time, creating an accountability system and a connection that changes whether somebody quits or not. You know, if somebody leaves the group, they're just not going to just go unnoticed. There's some feeling of like, hey, I should just not abandon these people. I should continue to go on my story. My personal experience, building two businesses, running them simultaneously for 10 years, selling one, then growing the other. That is my emote. That is my lived experience. This is what I could offer people through this podcast and everything else we do that ChatGPT just can't, because it doesn't have the same judgment, it doesn't have the same wisdom, it doesn't have the same nuance. It doesn't have have the understanding and the context of what I been through. All right, so three moves that you can take on this week to take action. Enough strategy. Here's what you actually do. Move one audio sales page of your course right now. Read every sentence. Count how many times you describe what the course, the modules, the lessons, the content is now. Count how many times you describe the student's life and what it looks like after they take the course. What's the outcome? If the ratio is not heavily towards the after picture, rewrite that sales page. Make sure it's all about the outcome and about the experience they're going to go through, the transformation they're going to go through. Nobody buys modules, right? If I can just download the information in your brain and you don't have to watch any videos, wouldn't that be better? That would be best. Just like the Matrix. So it's not really about how many videos, it's about what you could do for me, what is the outcome after this is all said and done? The second thing you could do is add one live touchpoint. If your course has no live element, this is going to be a priority. It doesn't need to be weekly. It could be a monthly Q and A call. It doesn't even have to be a structured lesson. It could be just open Q and A. Heck, it doesn't even need to be a live video call. You could make it a WhatsApp call and move 3. Try one cohort. Do not rebuild anything. Just do a launch and build this one core and have a start date, have an end date and, and tell people, hey, we're going to take in a live cohort of, let's say 30 people. And once we hit 30 people, that's it, then we're going to close the doors, cap enrollment, open it to your list and see what happens. See what kind of energy you get. And then when you go through the cohort, see what happens with completion rates, with testimonials, with the outcomes that you achieve for your students. So to wrap up, online courses are not dying, but the lazy version of online courses is dying. This version where you, you know, record the content once, set up the funnel, wait for the money to come in, that version's over. That gravy train has made its last stop. It's over. But what it's replacing is actually better. More accountability, more community, more genuine transformation. More skin in the game from the creator. You. More results for the student, more loyalty, more retention, more referrals, more business. That sounds all good. The market is bigger than ever and it's growing. The only question is, are you going to be building a product that was good for the 10 years ago or today in the future. If this episode has helped you, I highly encourage you to check out a previous episode that we recently published called the Beginner's Blueprint for Building a Digital Product that Actually Sells. This is a whole A to Z of how to build a digital product in 2026. We recently published it so it's easy to find in whatever app you're using right now to consume the podcast. If you found today's episode helpful and you want more practical business lessons to help you start, grow and scale your business, the best thing you could do is subscribe to to this podcast, hit subscribe or follow on your favorite podcast app, the one that you're using right now. Whether it's Apple or Spotify or wherever you listen to podcasts. By hitting subscribe, you get our next episode automatically and it's the best way to support the show. It's absolutely free and it's a way for you to commit to growing your business. And now that you subscribed, I'll check you in the next episode.
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