One of the biggest questions I hear from aspiring course creators is: “Will my online course actually sell?” So let’s talk about how to validate your course idea.
How do you know whether your course idea is profitable? How can you tell if people will actually pay for the information you want to teach? And is there a way to validate your course idea before spending weeks or months creating it?
There are several things you can look at before creating your online course that will give you valuable information about your audience, your offer, and your chances of making sales.
Listen to the full episode here:
First things first: there are no guarantees
Let’s get this out of the way first: nobody can guarantee that your course will sell.
It doesn’t matter whether you have 500 followers or 50,000. It doesn’t matter whether you’ve created other successful products. And it doesn’t matter whether someone else has already made millions teaching a similar topic.
Your specific course, audience, positioning, messaging, and marketing strategy will all affect your results.
That’s why I don’t love the idea of looking for some magic formula that tells you:
“Yes, this course idea will definitely make money.”
It doesn’t exist.
What you can do is reduce the guesswork.
You can look at your existing audience, test your messaging, experiment with different marketing strategies, and create smaller offers that help you understand whether there is genuine interest in your topic.
Most importantly, you need to understand that course creation is a process.
You don’t create a course, put it online, and automatically start making sales.
You create the course, learn how to market it, test your messaging, understand your audience, make adjustments, launch again, and gradually figure out what works.
Your audience matters more than your follower count
If you already have an audience, you’re starting from a stronger position.
That audience could come from:
- An email list
- YouTube
- A podcast
- A private community
- A website or blog
- Another social media platform
- An existing client base
But here’s the important part:
The size of your audience isn’t necessarily what matters most.
Imagine you have two email lists.
One has 100 people who regularly open your emails, respond to your content, trust you, and are interested in the problem your course solves.
The other has 500 people who signed up for a completely unrelated freebie six months ago and haven’t heard from you since.
Which list is more likely to buy your course? Probably the smaller one.
That’s why having 5,000 Instagram followers doesn’t automatically mean you’re ready for a successful course launch.
If those followers don’t know what you do, don’t understand what you sell, and aren’t interested in the problem your course solves, they’re not necessarily an audience for your course.
An engaged audience is more valuable than a large audience
When you’re thinking about whether your course idea will sell, don’t just ask:
“How many followers do I have?”
Ask:
“How well does my audience know me?”
- Are you consistently showing up?
- Are you talking about the problem your course solves?
- Are people asking you questions about the topic?
- Are people already coming to you for advice?
- Are they engaging with your content?
- Have you sold other products or services to them?
- Do they trust your expertise?
These are much more useful indicators of potential course sales than a follower count.
For example, someone with 5,000 engaged followers who has been actively selling products for several years may be in a completely different position from someone with 5,000 followers who barely posts and has never made an offer.
The numbers look identical.
The businesses aren’t.
You don’t need a huge audience to sell an online course
Another misconception I want to get rid of is the idea that you need thousands of followers before you can create or sell a course.
You don’t.
You can sell to a very small audience.
You might have 100 people on your email list and make sales. You might have 50 followers and make your first course sale. You might have no social media presence at all and build an audience through other channels.
There isn’t a minimum follower count required to create a profitable online course.
What you do need is a group of people who have a problem you can help solve and a way to reach them.
If you don’t have that audience yet, that’s okay.
Building an audience can happen alongside creating your course.
Your first course launch may take time
This is where many new course creators get frustrated.
They expect the process to look something like this:
- Come up with an idea.
- Create the course.
- Put it online.
- Make sales.
Unfortunately, that’s not usually how it works.
You may need to spend time:
- Growing your email list
- Building relationships with your audience
- Testing your messaging
- Learning how to market your offer
- Experimenting with launch strategies
- Creating content
- Improving your sales page
- Learning email marketing
- Understanding your customer’s objections
- Refining your course offer
If you already have an engaged audience and experience selling, you may move through this process much faster.
If you’re starting from scratch, it may take longer.
Neither situation is wrong.
It’s simply a different starting point.
How to validate your course idea before you create it
If you’re nervous about spending months creating a course that nobody buys, you don’t necessarily have to start with the entire course.
One of the best ways to validate your course idea is through a paid masterclass.
Let’s say you want to create an online course called “How to Create Your First Online Course.”
Instead of immediately spending weeks recording six modules, you could create a focused paid masterclass around the topic.
For example:
“Create your first online course: 6 steps to turn your idea into a sellable course.”
You could charge something like $30 for the masterclass. Then promote it to your audience just as you would promote your future course. This gives you the opportunity to learn a lot.
What a paid masterclass can tell you
A paid masterclass can help you test:
- Whether your audience is interested in the topic
- Whether your messaging attracts attention
- Whether people are willing to pay for the information
- What questions your audience has
- What objections they have
- Which parts of the topic generate the most interest
- Whether you have an audience that is aligned with the course you’re planning
It can also give you valuable experience with selling. You’re not sitting around wondering whether your sales page will work. You’re actually putting an offer in front of real people.
That’s incredibly useful information.
But a masterclass isn’t perfect proof of concept
There is one important caveat.
I wouldn’t use the results of a paid masterclass as the only proof that your course idea will work.
Why? Because buying a one-hour masterclass is different from buying a complete course.
Someone might love your topic but not want a quick masterclass. They might prefer a deeper learning experience.
Someone else might happily buy a $30 masterclass but have no interest in spending $300 on a course.
So don’t interpret a masterclass that doesn’t sell as definitive proof that your course idea is bad. Instead, use it as one piece of information. You’re learning about your audience, your marketing, your positioning, and your ability to sell.
Use your masterclass to build momentum
There is another benefit to creating a paid masterclass before your course.
It can help fund the course creation process.
If you sell a $30 masterclass to 20 people, that’s $600.
That money could help pay for:
- Your course platform
- Advertising
- Software
- Design
- Equipment
- Other tools you need to create your course
More importantly, you’ve already started building a group of people who have demonstrated interest in your topic.
You can then use what you learn from the masterclass to make your eventual course better.
Your marketing strategy matters
Having a good course idea isn’t enough. You also need to learn how to sell it.
This is one of the biggest things new course creators underestimate. They spend 90% of their time creating the course and then think: “Okay, it’s finished. Where are the sales?”
But creating the course is only one part of the business.
You also need to think about:
- Content marketing
- Email marketing
- Social media
- Sales pages
- Launches
- Webinars
- Masterclasses
- Paid advertising
- Evergreen funnels
- Partnerships
- Affiliates
- SEO
- Audience building
You don’t have to use every marketing strategy.
In fact, please don’t try. But you do need to find the marketing channels and strategies that work for your business and your audience.
There is no single perfect course launch strategy
This is another reason why it’s impossible to guarantee that a course will sell.
What works beautifully for one creator might completely flop for another.
One person might build their course business through Instagram. Another might rely almost entirely on email marketing.
Someone else might use Pinterest and SEO. Another creator might run paid ads.
Someone might launch live several times a year. Another might build an evergreen funnel that generates sales continuously.
There are many ways to sell an online course. Your job isn’t to find the universally “correct” strategy. Your job is to find your strategy.
Related read: How to launch an online offer
Don’t wait for certainty before creating your course
At some point, you have to make a decision.
You can research your audience forever, run surveys, analyze competitors, create free content…
All of these things can help. But eventually, you need to actually sell something. Because you won’t truly know what works until you put an offer in front of real people.
That’s the part many course creators want to skip. They want certainty before taking action. Unfortunately, certainty usually comes after the action.
Final thoughts: will your course sell?
So, will your online course sell?
There is no way for me – or anyone else – to promise you that it will.
But if you love the idea, understand the problem you’re solving, know there are people who need the information, and are willing to learn how to market and sell the offer, you have plenty of reasons to explore it.
Don’t expect your first course to magically generate consistent sales just because you created something valuable.
- Treat course creation as a process.
- Build your audience.
- Test your ideas.
- Experiment with marketing.
- Talk to potential customers.
- Launch.
- Learn.
- Improve.
- Launch again.
Over time, you can build an audience, create better offers, develop reliable marketing systems, and eventually even generate consistent or evergreen course sales.
You don’t need to know exactly how you’ll make it work before you start.
You just need to be willing to find your way there.
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