The Art of Selling Online Courses

Send us Fan MailStruggling with low conversions? Grab our FREE checklist of 15 must-have elements to optimize your sales pages! 👉🏼 https://datadrivenmarketing.co/elementsAmanda Quinn built Canada's largest women's-only fitness company from a single bootcamp in a park in 2008. Then, a decade in, she and her co-founder Laura closed it down and started over, teaching other women to become certified health and nutrition coaches instead.That decision turned into FitChicks Academy. In this episode, John sits down with Amanda to talk through how they actually built that, because the business model is more layered than it looks from the outside.They get into her bonus strategy, which she thinks about in a way most course creators don't. Her paid and free workshops are converting at around 30% when people show up, and the bonuses are a big part of why. She also talks through a new $49 challenge funnel she's testing right now, built on the logic that getting someone to go from free to $49 is a very different ask than free to $3,000.There's a good stretch on evergreen versus live funnels too. Amanda tried evergreen, found it was actually more work, and largely went back to live. But she has one certification that runs on a fixed monthly cycle and has converted consistently for two years, and she's not touching it.She's also got bigger plans in motion: a self-coaching membership, a physical food product line, and a 1,000-person live event in 2027. It's a fun conversation with someone who's clearly been building for a long time and knows where she's going next.Hope you enjoy it.Check out Amanda's work:🌐 https://fitchicksacademy.com/📸 https://www.instagram.com/fitchicksacademy/

Send us Fan MailGet your tripwire product ideas here: 👉🏼 https://datadrivenmarketing.co/tripwireMelissa Mae Dillon left her teaching job in 2022, shaved her head, got a pink and yellow mohawk, and started filming insurance exam prep videos on YouTube with zero editing. No fancy setup. No plan. One take, every time.Her first year she made $126,000. Her courses now bring in $130,000 to $150,000 a month.I sat down with Melissa to talk about how she built Insurance Exam Queen from nothing, but what I didn't expect was how little of the conversation would actually be about tactics. Melissa is clear that the most important thing she did to build her business was internal work, not funnels, not email sequences, not better lighting. She talks about hiring from guilt, creating offers from desperation and watching them attract desperate clients, and how she eventually figured out that the energy you're in when you build something leaves an imprint on everything that comes from it.We did get into the practical side too. Her YouTube channel sits at 103,000 subscribers and drives almost all her top-of-funnel traffic. Her Facebook study group has 22,000 members who actively sell her course for her without being paid. She has 3,400 five-star reviews. And we walked through an eight-email welcome sequence together and worked out how it would fit her audience.Melissa is one of those guests who makes you think differently about what the work actually is. I think you'll enjoy this one.Check out Melissa's work:🌐 https://melissamaedillon.com/📸 https://www.facebook.com/melicious.pixie▶️ https://www.youtube.com/@insuranceexamqueen

Send us Fan MailGrow your course revenue up to 30% in 7 days - no paid ads, no sales calls 📈https://datadrivenmarketing.co/roadmapAzhelle Wade spent years inside the toy industry, earning three patents, managing six brands at Toys R Us, and eventually reaching VP level. Then she walked away and started teaching complete strangers how to do what she used to do for a living.Dominik sat down with Azhelle, known as The Toy Coach, to talk about how she built her audience from 20 podcast downloads per episode, how a chance meeting at an industry networking event sparked the whole thing, and what actually happened when TV appearances on NBC sent a flood of leads her way with no real funnel to catch them.They get into the real business decisions too. How she used AI to role-play as her own ideal customer and audit her sales page, discovering she was trying to speak to too many different people at once. How she restructured Toy Creators Academy from a cohort model into a self-study program with a separate one-on-one offer. And how raising her price 2.5x turned around a period where she could not understand why nobody was buying.There is also a student story in here that genuinely stopped me when I heard it. One of Azhelle's students, Samantha, came close to quitting after her factory fell through. Azhelle talked her back in. Samantha ended up on Dragon's Den and disclosed $465,000 in revenue last year, then told Azhelle the number was already higher.It is a good one. I think you will enjoy it.Check out Azhelle's work:🌐 https://www.thetoycoach.com/📸 https://www.instagram.com/thetoycoach▶️ https://www.youtube.com/thetoycoach

Send us Fan MailLooking for predictable revenue growth? Access our FREE 7-day roadmap to increase your income without paid ads or sales calls! 👉🏼 https://datadrivenmarketing.co/roadmapNick Pezzopane spent 15 years doing motion graphics and animation for clients like Blizzard Entertainment and the History Channel. Then AI showed up, and instead of feeling threatened, he went deep. He taught himself to install and run open-source AI locally on his own machine, built custom setups for paying clients, and turned that knowledge into a course business called Pixel Pandorium Academy.John sat down with Nick to dig into how he's building this from scratch, without a social following, using Meta ads as his primary traffic source. Nick's running one ad, spending around $1,000 to $1,500 a week, and has managed to break even on the front end while seeing roughly a 40% conversion rate on his $97 upsell. He's honest about what he got wrong with the ads early on and what he's still figuring out.What made this conversation interesting was how clearly Nick thinks about the value he's delivering. His argument for running AI locally, cutting out subscription costs, removing censorship restrictions, and getting more raw processing power, is simple and compelling. You can feel how much he wants his students to actually succeed with this.There's also a genuinely good moment near the end where Nick talks about waking up and realizing he's running a real business for the first time. It's the kind of thing that's easy to rush past, but worth sitting with.I think you'll enjoy this one.Check out Nick's work:🌐 https://pixelpandorium.com📸 https://www.instagram.com/pixel_pandorium/

Send us Fan MailAdd 30% to your revenue with order bumps in 3 simple steps 🏅 https://datadrivenmarketing.co/order-bumpsSimone, known as The Bearded Guitarist, spent over 15 years teaching private guitar lessons before he started posting on YouTube in 2020. He now has half a million followers across platforms. And until about a year ago, he had almost no idea how to actually sell anything.That's the honest thing he said early in our conversation, and it set the tone for everything that followed. Simone has clearly put in the work since then. He's built out a sales page with a VSL, testimonials, bonuses, multiple guarantees, an order bump, and a post-checkout upsell. He launched a coaching program structured more like personal training than traditional lessons. He's grown his email list from around 1,200 to just over 4,000 in twelve months.We went through his funnel together on screen, called out what he's doing well, and got into the specific things worth fixing: where to place the pain-agitation-solution section, why an eyebrow headline matters, and what's missing from his checkout page that's probably costing him sales.The bigger conversation was about email. Simone is getting around 300 new subscribers a month right now. John thinks he can get that to 1,000 or more, and explains exactly how monthly email promotions, done the right way, become the engine that makes everything else work.Simone is the kind of guest I really enjoy talking to. He's far enough along to have made real decisions and learned from them, and honest enough to say where he got it wrong. I think you'll enjoy this one.Check out Simone's work:🌐 http://thebeardedguitaristcourses.com📸 https://www.instagram.com/its_thebeardedguitarist▶️ https://www.youtube.com/@TheBeardedGuitarist

Send us Fan MailJessica Lackey has a Harvard MBA, worked at McKinsey, and spent years inside Nike watching the company chase scale until it broke. Now she runs a multi-six-figure business on a list of 2,000 people, more than one in ten of whom buys from her every year. And she built it that way on purpose.Dominik sat down with Jessica to find out how that actually works. What came out of it was one of the more honest conversations we've had on this show about what the online course industry gets wrong and what it costs people who follow the standard playbook without questioning it.Jessica talks about how she spent four years doing free monthly workshops without selling anything, how she personally emails everyone on her waitlist before a launch, and why she keeps her prices low on purpose so she never has to sell hard. She also gets into the moment she realized that most marketing advice isn't bad, it's just built for a different kind of business than the one most people are actually running.There's a section about the pull she still feels toward bigger numbers and higher prices, and why she chooses not to go there even when she could. That part stuck with me. It's rare for someone to admit that so clearly.She also shares two sharp pieces of advice: one for people who haven't launched yet, and one for people who've plateaued after two years. Both are worth hearing.Check out Jessica's work:🌐 https://www.deeperfoundations.com/📸 https://www.linkedin.com/in/jessica-lackey/

Send us Fan MailStruggling with low conversions? Grab our FREE checklist of 15 must-have elements to optimize your sales pages! 👉🏼 https://datadrivenmarketing.co/elementsLeo Coelho trained as a doctor, worked in medicine for about a year, quit to become a digital nomad, tried translating, tried dropshipping, became a tour guide in Lisbon, and then the pandemic shut everything down overnight.So he started making YouTube videos about the Portuguese language. Fifteen months later he had 100,000 subscribers. Today Portuguese with Leo is the biggest channel for learning European Portuguese as a foreign language, with 290,000 subscribers, 22 million views, and a course business doing low six figures a year at around 70% margins.John sat down with Leo to talk through how he built all of this, and what he's working on next. They got into why Leo thinks YouTube consistency is overrated, how he keeps pulling in 1,500 new email subscribers a month without posting a video for nearly three months, and how his evergreen content does the lead generation work for him. Then the conversation shifted into something closer to a live strategy session, covering order bumps versus upsells, checkout page conversion, warm-up email sequences, and how to run promotions more often without burning out your audience.Leo's got a clear north star, living and travelling on his own terms, and every business decision he makes runs through that filter first. That shapes everything about how he operates, and honestly it makes for a really interesting conversation.Hope you enjoy it as much as I did.Check out Leo's work:🌐 https://www.portuguesewithleo.com▶️ https://www.youtube.com/@PortugueseWithLeo

Send us Fan Mail15 sales page elements you can't afford to miss - free checklist 📝 https://datadrivenmarketing.co/elementsLindsay Müller built a Facebook group of 30,000 ukulele beginners without spending a single dollar on ads. She did it by showing up every day for five months, posting chord sheets, tutorials, and tips on a simple rotating schedule she made up herself. Then one day in January 2024, it just took off.Dominik sat down with Lindsay to talk through exactly how she built that, and what she did with the audience once she had it. She walks through her posting system, how she turns free chord sheets into email signups, and why she deliberately teaches so much for free inside the group rather than gating it behind a paywall. Her logic is simple and it works.There's also a really honest stretch of conversation about high-ticket offers. Lindsay is pretty much the only guest we've had who's looked at that whole world and said, that's just not for me, and then made a clear case for why it doesn't have to be. She's been at this for two and a half years, she's found something that works, and she's not pretending to have it all figured out.Oh, and her children's song Grateful Heart just crossed a million streams on Spotify. She wrote it for a challenge and almost didn't record it. That story is worth hearing too.I think you'll enjoy this one.Check out Lindsay's work:🌐 http://LindsayMuller.com/Ukulele📸 http://instagram.com/ukelindsay▶️ http://youtube.com/LindsayMuller

Send us Fan MailWant to 2-10x your email list size quickly? Download our FREE Double Your Email List Guide 👉🏼 https://datadrivenmarketing.co/guideShelley and CJ Hitz have run the same low-ticket membership for over eleven years. That alone is worth paying attention to.They built Christian Book Academy for Christian writers, people who want to finish and publish their books but keep getting stuck. The membership costs $49 a month. They have over 300 members. And they have had to figure out, the hard way, what actually keeps people paying month after month.Dominik sat down with both of them to dig into the mechanics. They talked about how they get 20 to 25 new paying members from a virtual conference twice a year, with no ads, just speakers emailing their lists. They talked about progress pods, small accountability groups inside the membership that have become so valued that one member's pod literally paid her subscription so she could stay. They talked about why removing the countdown timer on their conference offer tanked sales. And they were honest about the moments they almost walked away.There was also a moment I did not expect. They turned down a spot in a book that hit the USA Today bestseller list because the topic did not fit their brand. No hesitation. They would do it again.If you run a membership, or you are thinking about starting one, this conversation gets into the real economics in a way most people do not talk about publicly. I think you will get a lot from it.Check out Shelley and CJ's work:🌐 https://www.trainingauthors.com/📸 https://www.facebook.com/kingdomwriterspage/▶️ https://www.youtube.com/@kingdomwriterstv/

Send us Fan Mail2-10x your email list size in just 3 steps 📩 https://datadrivenmarketing.co/guideAlain Picard spent years saying no to teaching. He believed, genuinely believed, that those who can't do, teach. It took a recession, a pregnant wife, no commissions, and his German wife looking him in the eye and saying "you're burying your gifts in the ground" to change his mind.That one conversation set off a chain of small yeses that eventually led to a membership community called Cultivate, three instructional art books, a YouTube channel, about 25,000 people on his email list, and a business built entirely around helping pastel artists transform.Dominik sat down with Alain to pull apart how all of it actually happened. They talked about why "if you build it, they will come" is a lie for artists, how free YouTube content around simple questions like "what pastels should I buy" became his most powerful list-building tool, and how he structures Cultivate so that students enter through a signature course and stay for the community.There was also a really good thread about what Alain calls the tyranny of the urgent, the idea that if you only ever respond to the small fires, you never build anything that matters. He's lived that tension for thirty years, and the way he describes it is worth your time.If you're a course creator who feels like your identity is tangled up in your results, or you're stuck at a revenue plateau and not sure what to try next, this one is for you.Check out Alain's work:🌐 https://www.picardstudio.com/📸 https://www.instagram.com/alainpicard/▶️ https://www.youtube.com/channel/@UCWyF5CvAv8c0oP4M5gWBaFA

Send us Fan MailGrow your course revenue up to 30% in 7 days - no paid ads, no sales calls 📈https://datadrivenmarketing.co/roadmapBilly Seol built his coaching business from Reddit. Not ads, not a big launch, not a personal brand with a large following. He started by showing up where people were already suffering and saying something useful. That's the whole philosophy in miniature.Dominik sat down with Billy, a Buddhist life coach and former software engineer, to pull apart some ideas that don't get much airtime in the online course world. Billy's central argument is that most people who say they want success actually don't, not because they're lazy, but because success is a black box. They've never defined what their inner experience of it would actually feel like. And so, unconsciously, they steer away from it. It's the same reason a smoker keeps saying they want to quit.What stuck with Dominik in this one was the confrontation piece. Billy deliberately activates his clients emotionally during sessions, and then asks them to look at themselves in that state. His reasoning: the person who shows up when you're stressed, defensive, or triggered is the person running your business. If you never see that person clearly, your business keeps replicating their behavior.They also got into resonance direction, Billy's way of thinking about marketing funnels as one continuous emotional throughline rather than disconnected pieces, and his practical advice for anyone who's plateaued: are you selling to the list you already have, or just watching it grow?I think you'll get a lot out of this one.Check out Billy's work:🌐 http://julylifecoach.com📸 https://instagram.com/july_lifecoach▶️ https://www.youtube.com/@Julylifecoach

Send us Fan Mail2-10x your email list size in just 3 steps 📩 https://datadrivenmarketing.co/guideIwona Podlasińska picked up a camera in 2014 to photograph her own kids. Ten years later, she's run workshops in 17 countries, was named the most followed photographer on Flickr in 2017, and has thousands of students learning her distinctive dreamy, light-filled portrait style. John sat down with her to hear how that actually happened, and what running that kind of business really looks like day to day.What came through most clearly was how honest Iwona is about the gaps. She knows she has a large, loyal audience across Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube. She knows she has products people want, from in-person workshops priced up to $1,000 a ticket to courses, presets, and overlays. But the bit in the middle, converting that audience into consistent revenue, is the part she's still working out. Her email marketing hasn't been performing and she's not entirely sure why. Her organic social reach, which has always driven workshop bookings, is starting to get harder. And she's thinking seriously about what she offers after someone has already done a workshop.She also talked about something that doesn't come up enough in these conversations: the value of cooperation. Partnering with hosts, organizations, and other platforms has consistently widened her audience, even when it meant sharing the income. That's a trade-off she's made deliberately, and it's worked.This one's a little different from our usual episodes. Iwona isn't sitting on a polished system. She's a world-class photographer figuring out the business side in real time, and that makes it a genuinely interesting conversation. I think you'll enjoy it.Check out Iwona's work:🌐 https://iwonapodlasinska.com📸 https://www.instagram.com/iwonapodlasinska▶️ https://www.youtube.com/@iwonapodlasinska

Send us Fan MailGet your tripwire product ideas here: 👉🏼 https://datadrivenmarketing.co/tripwireRosalie E'Silva spent years at CNN, NBC, Al Jazeera, and Bloomberg telling other people's stories. The whole time, she was keeping a secret: she'd been having out-of-body experiences since childhood and had never told anyone.In 2024, she left broadcast journalism to teach Yoga Nidra for astral projection. She now has over 150,000 YouTube subscribers, more than 20 million views, and a course community whose students are so engaged they meet on Zoom and Discord without her, multiple times a week, just because they want to.I sat down with Rosalie to talk about how she built this from scratch, starting with a video she almost deleted. They got into what astral projection actually is, why people seek it out, and what it does to someone who experiences it firsthand. Rosalie has a real gift for making something that sounds wildly esoteric feel completely accessible.They also got practical. Rosalie's YouTube channel is bringing in around 207,000 views a month, but her email list sits at just over 1,500 people. I walked through exactly what I'd change, from where to place the lead magnet in meditation videos, to using her existing tracks as a tripwire offer, to what a simple value ladder could look like for her business.It's a genuinely unusual conversation, part business strategy, part window into a world most people have never heard of. I think you'll enjoy it.Check out Rosalie's work:🌐 http://rosalieesilva.com▶️ http://www.youtube.com/@RosalieYoga

Send us Fan MailJim Cockrum has been doing this for 24 years, and he still texted three coaching students personally this week just to check in.That detail tells you a lot about how Jim runs his business. He's the founder of Proven Amazon Course, host of Silent Sales Machine Radio, and the author of a book that's been read by over a million people. His funnel starts at $7 and goes to $7,000, he's coached more than 7,000 students, and his Facebook community has 80,000 members. But the thing that struck me most in this conversation wasn't the scale. It was how much of his success comes down to a philosophy most people resist: give everything away for free.We talked through his entire funnel, from how he spends $50–$90 to acquire a $7 customer and recoups it within 30–90 days, to why he says there's nothing behind his paywall except time and relationship. He told me about a real estate client who fired him for suggesting free, then called back months later when the paid version flopped. And he shared the Death Wish Coffee story, where a single email blast outperformed a Super Bowl commercial in sales.We also got into email list hygiene, why he maintains 40% open rates by scrubbing non-clickers, and why he thinks getting people onto a screen is the most underrated move in any funnel.Jim is sharp, generous with what he knows, and genuinely fun to talk to. I think you'll enjoy this one.Check out Jim's work:🌐 https://www.silentjim.com/📸 https://www.instagram.com/jimcockrum/?hl=en▶️ https://www.youtube.com/c/silentjimdotcom

Send us Fan MailLooking for predictable revenue growth? Access our FREE 7-day roadmap to increase your income without paid ads or sales calls! 👉🏼 https://datadrivenmarketing.co/roadmapElsa runs Peace of French, a YouTube channel with hundreds of thousands of subscribers, and she built the whole thing again in Hebrew. Every day, companies email her offering money to promote their language apps. She says no almost every time.Dominik sat down with Elsa to find out why, and what he got was a really clear-eyed conversation about what it actually means to run a course business rather than an influencer operation. Elsa started teaching French to her partner, found YouTube, and built from there, filming on a bad phone with no microphone until she hit 100,000 subscribers.What I found most interesting was her thinking on trust in the age of AI. She isn't panicking. She thinks the creators who've built real relationships with their audiences have something AI can't replicate, and she's been quietly building that kind of connection by sharing her everyday life alongside her lessons.She also talked through her quiz funnel, why she's cautious about over-discounting, how she deliberately prunes her email list, and what happened when she closed her membership and repackaged it as a one-time product. That last part is worth listening to if you have an offer that's plateaued.She's honest about what's hard too, including the real cost of running two businesses at once and waiting two full years before starting her email list.Check out Elsa's work:🌐 https://www.pieceoffrench.com/▶️ https://www.youtube.com/@UCVzyfpNuFF4ENY8zNTIW7ug

Send us Fan MailVictor Damasio grew up selling newspapers on the Rio subway and working pub crawls to pay his way through law school. Today he has 729,000 Instagram followers in Brazil, nearly a quarter of a million YouTube subscribers, and a mastermind he charges $20,000 to join. This conversation is about what he figured out in between.I sat down with Victor to talk about one specific idea: why course creators who already have an audience and existing clients are leaving serious money on the table by not having a high-ticket offer. Victor's argument is simple and hard to argue with. If someone in your audience would pay ten times more to get closer access to you, and you never give them the chance to do that, you're treating all your clients the same when they're not.Victor walks through his four-question application process, what he calls the Spartan method, which flips the usual sales dynamic. Instead of you pitching someone, they apply to work with you. He explains exactly what to ask, what good answers look like, how to run a 20-minute vetting call, and why saying no to the wrong clients is something they'll actually thank you for.There's also a genuinely useful analogy involving Qatar Airways business class that I haven't been able to stop thinking about since we recorded this.Victor is just starting to build his English-language audience, so if you want to reach him while he's still responding personally to messages, now's the time.Hope you enjoy this one as much as I did.Check out Victor's work:🌐 https://www.victordamasio.com/eng-us📸 https://www.instagram.com/victordamasio/▶️ https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCEF03nN_kI6RKznPRw9x7MQ

Send us Fan MailWant to 2-10x your email list size quickly? Download our FREE Lead Magnet Guide and increase your email list size by 2-10x, simply by following our proven step-by-step guide 👉🏼 https://datadrivenmarketing.co/lead-magnetMark Wales has had a career that is genuinely hard to believe. Sixteen years in the Australian Army, four tours of Afghanistan with the SAS, an MBA from Wharton, a stint at McKinsey, and then he won Australian Survivor. Now he is building an online course business around leadership and resilience, and he emailed John to say he had been studying the podcast and was ready to build his funnel.What made this conversation so good is that Mark is right in the middle of it. The course is built, the YouTube channel has 1.8 million lifetime views, and the goal is $5,000 AUD a month in revenue. But the email list is at 1,300. So John walks through exactly what needs to change, from where to place lead magnet CTAs in videos, to the 1% opt-in benchmark Mark should be hitting, to how many offers he needs to make consistent monthly revenue.There is also a genuinely fun stretch where they figure out how to turn Mark's keynote speaking appearances into a lead generation machine, including an idea involving shipping his new book to every attendee who signs up that Mark reckons could hit a ninety percent conversion rate.Mark saw the potential of online courses back in 2017 when he was project managing course builds at McKinsey. It took him a few more years to put all the pieces together. You can feel in this conversation that the pieces are finally there.I think you'll enjoy this one.Check out Mark's work:📖 Mark's New Book, Mission Ready: https://www.panmacmillan.com.au/9781761902796/🌐 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mark-wales/📸 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/mark.a.wales/?hl=en▶️ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@mark-wales

Send us Fan MailAlicia Katz Pollock built something most course creators never think to build. She took QuickBooks training, a topic most people assume is dry and functional, and turned it into a tiered membership with over 50 courses, live community calls, a coaching program, five books, a podcast, and CPE accreditation that accounting firms actually require their staff to complete.Dominik sat down with Alicia to trace how that happened. She started with a single beginner bootcamp, then kept adding courses every time a client asked about something new. Banking feeds, reconciliation, payroll, sales tax. Eventually she had enough that selling them one at a time felt expensive for the buyer, so she built a membership instead.One thing Alicia said that stuck with Dominik: she fully expected members to stay one year and then leave once they'd worked through the curriculum. That didn't happen. People have been in the community for years, and when she asked why, the answer wasn't the 50 courses. It was the twice-monthly round-robin calls where members bring their real client problems and work through them together.There's also a fascinating section on the four years she spent earning NASBA accreditation for CPE credits, what it took, and how it eventually opened the door to selling seats directly to accounting firms.Alicia is honest, specific, and genuinely fun to listen to. I think you'll enjoy this one.Check out Alicia's work:🌐 https://royalwise.com/

Send us Fan MailMilo Andreo built one of the biggest piano teaching businesses on the internet in Portuguese. Over a million subscribers, 26,000 students, a full course platform with a community, a music library, the works. Then he decided to do it all again, in English, from scratch.Two years in, his English channel Easy Fast Piano is already past 170,000 subscribers and 10,000 students. And he's running both at the same time, producing videos in two languages every single week.I had a great conversation with Milo about what that actually looks like. We got into his lead magnet system, where he creates a free PDF for every single video he publishes, which is now bringing in around 10,000 new email subscribers every month. We also talked about the difference between translating a business and actually adapting it, because Milo learned the hard way that the Brazilian market and the English-speaking market are not the same thing, even if the teaching content is identical.Milo also shared how he's using AI across pretty much every part of his business and personal life right now. His answer when I asked where he'd found it helpful was just, "Everything. You name it, I'm using."We also got into survey strategy, segmenting email lists by musical goals, and why long-form YouTube content converts to course buyers in a way that nothing else really matches.I think you'll enjoy this one.Check out Milo's work:🌐 http://www.miloandreo.com📸 http://instagram.com/@miloandreo▶️ http://youtube.com/@miloandreo

Send us Fan MailLauren Bateman has 650,000 YouTube subscribers, nearly 900 videos, and over 58 million views teaching guitar to older beginners. She also survived cancer at 16, quit a pharmaceutical job in her twenties, opened a brick-and-mortar music school, and now runs the online side of her business with a small team of VAs and an editor. There is a lot going on.What I loved about this conversation was how clearly Lauren has thought about the trade-offs in her business. She knows exactly why she will not do high-ticket coaching, exactly what kind of life she is trying to protect, and exactly what kind of teaching lights her up. Not many course creators at her level are this honest about what they want and what they are willing to give up to get it.We also got into some real tactical detail. Lauren has two different sales pages with different headlines for different traffic sources, and she has the A/B testing data to explain why. I walked through what I think she could do to significantly increase revenue from her YouTube traffic, and she was genuinely open to testing it. The back-and-forth on email list strategy, lead magnets, and conversion rates was one of the more practical exchanges we have had on the show in a while.And then there is the personal side, which surprised me a bit. Lauren said she has spent 20 years working toward a specific goal, and she has reached it. Now she is working with a coach to figure out what comes next. That part of the conversation stuck with me.I think you will enjoy this one.Check out Lauren's work:🌐 https://www.laurenbateman.com/📸 https://www.instagram.com/thelaurenbateman/▶️ https://www.youtube.com/LaurenBateman

Send us Fan MailGabriel lost his job. While applying for new ones and getting rejected, he started teaching Spanish online and writing short stories for his students. The feedback was so good he thought, why not share this with the world?Eighteen months later, his site Fluent with Stories is pulling in 250,000 visitors a month through SEO, adding close to 2,000 new email subscribers every month, and his debut A1 Spanish course launched to testimonials most creators would genuinely envy. And he's been taking it seriously for all of five months.I sat down with Gabriel to talk through how he built all of this, what's driving the SEO traffic, how Amazon KDP became an unexpected lead generation engine, and where the gaps still are in his funnel. We also got into the tripwire conversation, single vs double opt-in, and why his sales page is missing the one section that could make a real difference to conversions.Gabriel is one of those guests where you're just rooting for him the whole way through. He's humble, he listens to his audience, he builds what they ask for, and he has a genuinely different product in a very crowded niche. The bit where he talks about his readers begging to support him before the course even existed, that one stuck with me.If you're early in building your course business and wondering whether the fundamentals actually work, this one is for you. I think you'll really enjoy it.Check out Gabriel's work:🌐 http://www.fluentwithstories.com

Send us Fan MailJeff Alipio had 170 followers when he launched his first course. Most of them were friends and family. He sold to nearly 500 students anyway, almost all of them complete strangers.Dominik sat down with Jeff, a Philippines-based video editor and course creator with over 15 years in the industry, to talk about how he pulled that off, and why he thinks the obsession with follower count is one of the biggest traps course creators fall into.What came through clearly in this conversation is how simply Jeff thinks about audience quality versus audience size. He makes the point that a million followers who came to you for prank videos are not going to buy your video editing course, and he built his entire growth strategy around that idea. Facebook ads, targeted tightly, finding the specific people who actually wanted what he was selling.Jeff also talked through what he teaches inside Video Made Easy, his course for Filipino freelancers starting from zero. It goes well beyond editing basics. There are modules on storytelling, personal branding, profile optimization, and a freelancer mindset section about building a career that AI cannot easily displace.The end of the conversation got practical. Jeff's advice for anyone who has the skills but hasn't launched yet: stop waiting for the perfect course and start with what you already know. The overthinking is the thing that's actually slowing you down.Check out Jeff's work:🌐 https://jefalipio.com/📸 https://www.instagram.com/jef_alipio/▶️ https://www.youtube.com/@jeffreyfernandoalipio7209

Send us Fan MailI sat down with Dan Lee, a self-taught wooden boat builder based in the Cotswolds, who turned a lifelong obsession into a full-time business, funded almost entirely by online courses he runs from a farm workshop. It's a genuinely great story.Dan started building model boats at eight and full-size ones at seventeen. When COVID hit and his previous business, making tree-shaped bookcases, looked like it was going to collapse overnight, he decided to go all in on something he'd always wanted to do. He built a website, started modernising old wooden boat plans using CAD and CNC technology, created his first online course on varnishing, and never really looked back.What I found fascinating talking to Dan is how clearly he's thought about why online teaching actually works better than in-person for hands-on crafts. The camera angles, the controlled lighting, the ability to overlay animations showing wet edges drying in real time. It's not a compromise on the in-person experience, it's genuinely better for teaching the foundations.We also got pretty honest about where Dan's business has room to grow. He's doing well with Facebook ads and his courses are covering his workshop overheads, but his email list is sitting mostly untouched. We talked through what that could mean if he actually started using it properly, and the numbers are exciting.If you're building a course business around a physical craft or a niche skill, I think you'll get a lot from this one.Check out Dan's work:🌐 http://www.danleeboatbuilding.co.uk📸 https://www.instagram.com/danleeboatbuilding▶️ https://www.instagram.com/danleeboatbuilding

Send us Fan MailLooking for predictable revenue growth? Access our FREE 7-day roadmap to increase your income without paid ads or sales calls! 👉🏼 https://datadrivenmarketing.co/roadmapBrad Yates has 425,000 YouTube subscribers and 60 million views, built over nearly two decades. He has never once sat down to plan a content strategy.I had a genuinely fun conversation with Brad for this episode. He started out as an actor, trained as a hypnotherapist when his first child was on the way, stumbled into EFT tapping through a workshop, and then one day thought it would be cool to put a guided tapping video on YouTube. He uploaded it, figured he was done, and came back six months later with another idea. That's basically how the whole channel was built.What struck me most was how clearly Brad has thought about what he actually wants from his life and business, and how little he's willing to compromise on that. He talked about limiting the number of emails his marketing team sends, refusing to redo popular videos just because they performed well, and turning down tactics he knows would probably make him more money because they don't feel right. He quoted Bowie on why the mid-80s were the worst period of his career. It all hung together in a way that felt unusually honest for a business conversation.We also got into his product lineup, his two memberships, his evergreen programs, and a new platinum lifetime membership he recently launched. If you're curious how someone builds a real business almost entirely on free content and genuine purpose, Brad is a great example.I think you'll enjoy this one.Check out Brad's work:🌐 https:///www.tapwithbrad.com▶️ https://www.youtube.com/@UCiHZMZejDS4RIxDdBwoie9A

Send us Fan MailNeed better results from your email campaigns? Get our FREE templates and see the difference with two proven email strategies! 👉🏼 https://datadrivenmarketing.co/templatesDr. Andrea Furlan is one of Canada's top pain physicians, a full professor at the University of Toronto, and a senior scientist at the country's largest hospital. She's also a YouTuber with over 830,000 subscribers and 78 million views, which her colleagues definitely did not see coming.When Andrea started her channel in 2019, she wasn't chasing subscribers. She just didn't have enough time in appointments to teach her patients everything they needed to know. So she started recording it. Her colleagues thought it was a strange move for a serious physician. She did it anyway.In this conversation, John sits down with Andrea to talk about how she built that audience, what she's learned about YouTube after 240 long-form videos, and where her business is headed. One shoulder exercise video she filmed in her home during the pandemic, hair a mess by the end of a full day of recording, has now crossed ten million views and generated over $60,000 in ad revenue on its own.They also get into the practical side of things: how Andrea runs two separate email lists for patients and healthcare professionals, how she uses AI to help develop scripts and thumbnail ideas, and the funnel advice John shares live on camera for growing her healthcare professional list faster.Andrea is thoughtful, generous with what she's learned, and genuinely funny. If you're a course creator who came from a professional background and wondered whether your credentials could translate into an audience, this one is worth your time.Hope you enjoy it as much as I did.Check out Andrea's work:🌐 https://www.doctorandreafurlan.com/📸 https://www.instagram.com/dr.andrea.furlan▶️ https://www.youtube.com/@DrAndreaFurlan

Send us Fan MailTimotej Bonifer grew up in Slovenia, never studied English formally, and now coaches entrepreneurs around the world to sound like native speakers. His secret? Twelve years on a microphone playing video games. The same habit that probably worried his parents turned out to be the thing that built his entire career.Dominik sat down with Timotej to talk about how he built Flip English, what it actually takes to turn an obsession into a business, and why he genuinely believes non-native speakers make better English teachers than the natives do. That last one tends to annoy people. Timotej makes a pretty good case for it.They also get into the real stuff, the Facebook ads that do the heavy lifting, a Black Friday email disaster that tanked his deliverability for a year, why his School community experiments mostly flopped, how he went from doing every sales call himself to building a team of ten coaches, and the moment he raised his price to seven and a half thousand euros and a client just said yes without blinking.There's a lot of honesty in this one. Timotej doesn't sugarcoat what went wrong, and his advice to his younger self, the kid with the headset on streaming to a few hundred people on Twitch, is just two words: sell earlier.If you're building a course or coaching business and thinking about where to focus your energy, I think you'll find something useful here.Check out Timotej's work:🌐 https://timotejbonifer.com/📸 https://www.instagram.com/timotejbonifer/▶️ https://www.youtube.com/@timotejbonifer

Send us Fan Mail📨 Get your lead magnet ideas here: https://funnels.datadrivenmarketing.co/8-highest-converting-lead-magnets-aMost people who build a 122,000-subscriber YouTube channel and help over 20,000 students learn an instrument have figured out marketing. Beth Blackerby hasn't. And somehow it still worked.Beth is the founder of Violin Lab, one of the very first structured online violin curricula on the internet, launched before "online course" was even a phrase people used. She started in 2007 because she noticed that adults learn the violin completely differently from children, and almost nobody was teaching to them. So she built something from scratch with no playbook, no subscription model to copy, and no real marketing strategy.In this conversation with John, they talk through how her tiered membership works, from $35 a month for full curriculum access to $95 a month for weekly personal video feedback. They get into why she built loyalty pricing that dropped members down to $10 a month over time, what made her vibrato video the one that changed everything, and why she hid a marketing trick inside one of her most popular videos that had people emailing her every single day.John also walks Beth through what an email funnel could look like built on top of everything she's already created, and it's one of those conversations where you can hear someone seeing a whole new layer of possibility for the first time.Beth also talks about the in-person workshops she's been running since 2012, including one at a music retreat outside London, and why playing together in a room is something no online forum can replace.She's warm, honest, and genuinely funny. I think you'll enjoy this one.Check out Beth's work:🌐 https://violinlab.com/▶️ https://www.youtube.com/@violinlab

Send us Fan MailScott Gardiner does around $100K a month and has never taken a single sales call. No closers, no discovery Zooms, no objection handling. Every offer is evergreen, bought at whatever hour suits the buyer, while Scott is somewhere else entirely.He helps men whose marriages are falling apart, guys whose partners have already said they're done. And he got into it the hard way. Six years ago his own wife told him she was done.Dominik sat down with Scott to hear the full story, from being made redundant during COVID, spending $15,000 on a mentor he could barely afford, grinding through a fitness offer with four offshore setters and $2,000 a week in ads, to the moment his wife said she couldn't do it anymore, and how that sent him in a completely different direction.They got into a lot of the practical stuff too. Why Scott thinks sales calls are only necessary if your offer is unconvincing. How he uses a $7 sprint course to feed his weekly subscription. The difference between problem-aware and solution-aware buyers, and why so many creators are building audiences full of the wrong one. What his email strategy actually looks like, three to five times a week, workshops, loom videos, and a document with payment at the end of a survey. And his kitchen table test for anyone thinking about launching something new.Scott is one of those guests who has clearly thought hard about all of this, and is honest about the mistakes along the way. I think you'll get a lot out of this one.Check out Scott's work:🌐 https://elevatedman.com.au/q📸 https://www.instagram.com/iamscottgardiner/

Send us Fan MailMost productivity coaches tell you to do more. Carl Pullein built a business teaching people to do less, and better. And it's working to the tune of around $300,000 a year.I sat down with Carl recently and really enjoyed this one. He's a British productivity coach based in Seoul, South Korea, with over 150,000 YouTube subscribers, 17 million views, and an email list of 25,000 to 30,000 people. He built all of it over ten years, one video a week, around two proprietary frameworks he developed himself.We talked about who he's actually helping, how his business breaks down between courses and coaching, and what's driven his growth. But honestly the most interesting part of the conversation was watching Carl work through some things in real time. He knew he was leaving money on the table with his YouTube promotions and his email list growth, and we got into the specifics of what he could change and why it would make such a difference.He's also thinking bigger. He wants $500,000 this year and $10 million by 2030, and he's got a clear idea of how corporate training fits into that picture.Carl's a thoughtful guy who's built something real, and he's genuinely honest about where he's been too relaxed and what he's going to do about it. That combination makes for a great conversation.Hope you enjoy it as much as I did.Check out Carl's work:🌐  http://www.carlpullein.com▶️ https://www.youtube.com/@Carl_Pullein

Send us Fan MailAlex Dunitz has built one of the top Italian language learning channels on YouTube. 266,000 subscribers, nearly 30 million views, a custom app with gamification, private lessons, group courses, books, webinars, trips to Italy. The whole thing.And yet, when I sat down with him, the first thing that struck me was how much opportunity he was sitting on without fully realising it.Alex is brilliant at what he does. His co-host Marta Cappellini spends around eight hours preparing a single ten-minute video. They have a genuine teaching philosophy, a real community, students who argue with them about lost points on the app. The product is genuinely good. But like so many course creators I talk to, the gap between what they've built and what they're earning is bigger than it needs to be.We talk about how Passione Italiana grew from a local adult college side hustle into a global brand, why Marta was such a turning point for the channel, and what Alex calls the "euro drop" moment, his version of the penny dropping when a student finally gets it. We also get into the gamification system he's built on his website, including a points and ranking structure where students can rise from peasant all the way to emperor using Roman coins called Sesterzi. Genuinely fun stuff.Then I put on my consultant hat for a bit and we have an honest conversation about funnels, email lists, and why pointing YouTube viewers at every product at once might be the thing holding the revenue back. Alex takes it well. Better than well, actually.I think you'll enjoy this one.Check out Alex's work:🌐 https://www.passione-italiana.com/📸 https://www.instagram.com/passioneitaliana.official/▶️ https://www.youtube.com/@UC8gGkW17A_kbDCVNGvzGMrw

Send us Fan MailGet your tripwire product ideas here: 👉🏼 https://datadrivenmarketing.co/tripwireDerek Callan has been coaching business English for over 22 years, has clocked more than 10,000 hours of in-company training, and has built a YouTube channel with 250,000 subscribers and nearly 10 million views. He is, by any measure, someone who knows his stuff. So what I really wanted to get into with him was the messier side of the journey, figuring out who your real customer is, what they actually want to buy, and how to build a funnel that lines up from first click to paid client.Derek recently launched a high-ticket one-to-one coaching programme targeting professionals who freeze under pressure, presentations, meetings, the calls that matter. He sold out his founding five spots from a small segment of his email list. We talked through where to go from there, how to price it, and a specific idea around selling a paid assessment as a tripwire that leads cleanly into the main programme.We also got into what he learned from our Instant Course Sales programme, why mindset is the biggest barrier in language learning, and what it actually looks like to try to align your YouTube content, your lead magnets, and your offers when you have several courses running at once.Derek is genuinely great to talk to. Warm, thoughtful, honest about what is and isn't working. And the bit near the end about asking his wife to summarise the podcast for him... I will say no more. You will enjoy that part.Check out Derek's work:🌐  https://www.derekcallan.com/▶️ https://www.youtube.com/@derekcallan-englishforpros

Send us Fan MailWant to 2-10x your email list size quickly? Download our FREE Double Your Email List Guide 👉🏼 https://datadrivenmarketing.co/guideThere's a guitar teacher in Colombia who has nearly 600,000 YouTube subscribers, has taught over 70,000 students, and is personally answering WhatsApp messages from every new student himself. And that last part is completely intentional.I sat down with Miguel Martinez, founder of ClasesDeGuitarra.com.co, to talk about what's actually happening to online course businesses right now, especially in the education space. Miguel has been doing this since 2012 and he's seen a lot change, but nothing like the last 12 months. YouTube reach for his channel has dropped to around 500 views in the first 48 hours of posting. The same video on Facebook? 20,000 to 30,000 views. So he adapted.What I found really refreshing about Miguel is his philosophy around AI. Instead of trying to automate everything, he's doing the opposite. Weekly live classes, personal WhatsApp replies, a lean email list he cleans every three months so only engaged readers stay on it. He genuinely believes the answer to AI is to be more human, and he's building his entire business around that idea.We also got into TikTok, which is working for him in ways most course creators never figure out, including a smart insight about why you won't see TikTok showing up in your referral analytics even when it's driving real traffic.Miguel's market is Latin America, his courses top out at $79, and he's making this work on his own terms. It's a really different perspective from most guests we have on, and I think that's exactly why it's worth your time.Hope you enjoy it.Check out Miguel's work:🌐 https://clasesdeguitarra.com.co/📸 https://www.instagram.com/clasesdeguitarracomco/▶️ https://www.youtube.com/clasesdeguitarracomco

Send us Fan MailGet your tripwire product ideas here: 👉🏼 https://datadrivenmarketing.co/tripwireNatalia Rethmeyer had 80,000 YouTube subscribers and not a single person on her email list. No tripwire, no funnel, no strategy. Just videos going out every week into what felt like a void.That's where Dominik sat down with her for this one, and what came out of it was one of the more honest conversations we've had on the show about what it actually takes to build something that lasts.Natalia moved to Germany from Ukraine 12 years ago, couldn't speak the language despite three years of studying it, worked as a waitress while trying to get her masters, and eventually built Learn German Fast into a proper online course business with a team, a feedback system, and a list that grows by around 4,000 subscribers every month.She doesn't chase trends. She hasn't launched a new product in years. And her revenue keeps growing anyway.They get into how her email promotions actually work, why she sends around 20 emails in a two-week window and why it works, where her funnel has real gaps (Dominik is pretty direct about that), how she built a course with live teacher feedback that nobody else in her space was doing, and what she'd go back and tell herself if she could.Her answer to that last one is not what you'd expect.Dominik also pushes her on surveys, tripwires, order bumps, and the stuff most course creators avoid thinking about. She takes all of it in good spirit and it makes for a genuinely useful conversation.I think you'll like this one.Check out Natalia's work:🌐  https://learngermanfast.de/📸  https://www.instagram.com/learn.german.fast/▶️  https://www.youtube.com/c/LearnGermanFast

Send us Fan Mail2-10x your email list size in just 3 steps 📩 https://datadrivenmarketing.co/guideAbbie Emmons built a YouTube channel closing in on 600,000 subscribers, 7,000 students across her courses, a Patreon membership she 10x'd in six months, and a traditionally published book on the way. And she teaches people how to write novels. In this episode, I sit down with Abbie to pull apart how she actually built and runs her business. We get into the move from Patreon to her own membership site, why she prices and sells courses both inside and outside the membership, and how she turned $3 templates into a surprisingly meaningful revenue stream by simply deciding to stop giving them away for free.One moment that really stood out was Abbie describing how a single quiz video brought in around a THOUSAND new email subscribers. We also get honest about something a lot of creators struggle with. Abbie openly says her courses "kind of sit dormant" when she isn't actively promoting them, and the two of them dig into why that happens and what to do about it. I walk through the problem-agitation-solution email framework we use to give creators a real reason to talk about their courses, not just when something new launches.If you're building a creator-led course business and you've ever felt weird about promoting what you've made, this one's for you.Check out Abbie's work:🌐 http://www.abbieemmonsauthor.com📸 http://www.instagram.com/makeyourstorymatter▶️ http://www.youtube.com/abbieemmons

Send us Fan MailGrow your course revenue up to 30% in 7 days - no paid ads, no sales calls 📈https://datadrivenmarketing.co/roadmapRoss Rosenberg has 38 million YouTube views, over 200,000 books sold in 12 languages, and a podcast in the top 2% globally. Ross is one of the world's leading voices on codependency and narcissistic abuse. He founded the Self-Love Recovery Institute back in 2013 and has been building his audience online ever since, mostly by figuring things out as he went, which is both the charm and the challenge of his story.We talked about how a throwaway tip at a dinner party got him onto YouTube before almost anyone else in his field. We got into why the shift from long-form to short-form content nearly crushed his business model, and what he's doing differently now to rebuild. He was refreshingly candid about a marketing company he hired that sent him clickbait scripts he flatly refused to follow, why his curated 10,000-person email list carries a 30 to 40 percent open rate, and what he's trying to get in place before he steps back at 67.Ross isn't your typical "here's the funnel that made me a million dollars" guest. He's someone who built something genuinely significant, navigated a slowdown with honesty, and is still pushing forward on his own terms. I found his perspective really refreshing.Hope you enjoy it as much as I did.Check out Ross's work:🌐 https://www.selfloverecovery.com📸 https://www.instagram.com/rossrosenberg_slri/▶️  https://www.youtube.com/rossrosenberg

Send us Fan MailEddie van Dongen spent years doing what most musicians dream of. Touring Europe, playing 200-show theater runs, recording, performing. And then COVID hit, and overnight there was nothing. No gigs, no income, no plan.That moment forced him to ask a question he'd never had to ask before: what would it look like to actually build a business, not just be a freelancer hoping the phone rings?Eddie is a professional drummer from Rotterdam, endorsed by major brands and featured on Dutch national TV. But what makes his story genuinely interesting is how he got from that COVID wake-up call to running Eddie's Drum Academy, an online platform built around a completely different way of teaching drums. Not fill packs, not lick libraries, but a creative framework that teaches drummers how to think.In this conversation, Eddie and I got into a lot. His burnout at music college and how studying meditation changed not just his playing but his whole approach to business. Why he believes you have to be okay with being ignored if you're building something real. His Meta ads funnel selling a 37-euro ebook with a 2.5 to 3.5 ROAS. How his order bumps are converting around 40%. And what he's working toward next.He's honest, thoughtful, and clearly someone who built this from scratch with no marketing background. I think you'll really enjoy this one.Check out Eddie's work:🌐 https://eddiesdrumacademy.com/📸  https://www.instagram.com/eddievandongendrums/▶️ https://www.youtube.com/ ⁨@eddievandongendrums⁩  

Send us Fan MailGillian Perkins runs a multi-six-figure online business, has over 700,000 YouTube subscribers, and works fewer than 20 hours a week. She's also a homeschool mum of six. If you've ever wondered whether that kind of setup is actually possible, this episode is a pretty good answer.John sat down with Gillian to talk through how she structures her courses and cohorts, why she's stopped running tripwire funnels with her organic audience, and why she actually leads with her most expensive product first. That last one goes against most funnel advice you'll hear, and her reasoning for it is worth listening to carefully.They also get into webinars, which Gillian is pretty blunt about. She says 10% conversion is her standard, and anything under that feels like a flop to her. She breaks down exactly which price points make sense for webinars and which ones don't, which is genuinely useful if you're trying to figure out where they fit in your own business.There's also a great section on how she found and hired her integrator, how she thinks about building a small team without losing her lifestyle, and why shrinking her team actually made the business more enjoyable and sometimes more profitable.Gillian has been making videos about online business since 2017 and has clearly thought carefully about how to build something sustainable. A lot of what she shares here is quietly counterintuitive. I think you'll get a lot out of this one.Check out Gillian's work:🌐 https://gillianperkins.com🌐 https://creatorfasttrack.com🌐 https://startupsociety.com 📸 https://instagram.com/gillianperkinsonline/▶️ https://youtube.com/gillianperkinsonline/

Send us Fan MailKim Foster spent 20 years as a family doctor before walking away to build a global platform around identity transformation. She now has over 250,000 YouTube subscribers, a TEDx talk under her belt, and a book coming out in 2026. But what made this conversation really interesting wasn't the credentials — it was how honest she was about what's working, what isn't, and where she's still figuring things out.We got into her YouTube content strategy, specifically this idea of bringing people in with what they think they want, but giving them what they actually need. She talked about how she found her real niche through trial and error, not planning, and what the analytics told her that she never would have guessed on her own.Then things got practical. John pulled up Kim's funnel live on screen and they walked through her opt-in rates, her confirmation page, her tripwire offers, and where the gaps are. It's a rare moment where you get to watch a real funnel audit happen in real time, with someone who's genuinely open about where she's leaving money on the table.They also talked about her push into in-person speaking, the challenge of getting booked when you're known as a YouTuber, and why she's on the hunt for an integrator to help rein in her visionary side.Warm, specific, and genuinely useful. I think you'll enjoy this one.Check out Kim's work:🌐 https://drkimfoster.com/📸 https://www.instagram.com/drkimfoster/▶️ https://www.youtube.com/KimFosterMD

Send us Fan MailGrow your course revenue up to 30% in 7 days - no paid ads, no sales calls 📈https://datadrivenmarketing.co/roadmapMost course creators build a course, put it online, and hope people stick around. Adam Morgan did something completely different.Adam is a UK-based architect with over a decade of real practice experience, and the founder of Arcademia, a platform that's grown to over 4,500 members globally. Dominik sat down with him to find out how he got there, and honestly, the story is not what you'd expect.It started with a small set of screen-recorded training videos made for new staff at his architecture practice. No grand plan, just a way to stop repeating himself. Then Brexit hit, the practice started struggling, and Adam picked the project back up with a lot more intention. He renamed it, rebranded it, and started building something much bigger.When a provider quoted him £120,000 to build a custom platform, he learned Claude Code and built it himself over three to four months. What he ended up with is not just a course library. It's got gamification, a leaderboard, AI-generated contracts, portfolio hosting, CV builders, project trackers, and an AI assistant. All built by an architect who had never coded before.He also talks about why his most valuable members never cancel, how he grew to over 150,000 Instagram followers starting with £10–15 boosts per post, and what he tells course creators whose revenue has flatlined.Adam is a genuinely straight-talking guy and this one had a lot of good stuff in it. Check out Adam's work:🌐 https://www.archademia.com📸 https://www.instagram.com/archademia_/▶️ https://www.youtube.com/c/archademia

Send us Fan MailWant to 2-10x your email list size quickly? Download our FREE Lead Magnet Guide and increase your email list size by 2-10x, simply by following our proven step-by-step guide 👉🏼 https://funnels.datadrivenmarketing.co/the-complete-lead-magnet-guide David Duffy is an Irish musician and bassist who co-founded Secrets of Solo, the biggest online school for solo swing dancing, with his wife Ksenia, a dance artist with over 200 million views online. One of their videos alone has 14 million views on YouTube. And yet, when those viral moments happen, the sales spike they expect... doesn't really come.That's where this conversation gets really interesting.John sat down with David to dig into the gap between attention and revenue, something a lot of creators feel but rarely talk about this honestly. David runs the marketing and business side of the school while Ksenia teaches, and he's refreshingly open about what's working, what isn't, and where they've been getting in their own way.They get into the tension between being an artist and running a business, why Ksenia only wants one sale a year and what that's costing them, the €12 choreography challenge that brought in 70 new members at Christmas, and how to use analytics to figure out which part of your funnel actually needs fixing.John also walks David through how to think about conversion benchmarks, monthly promotions, and why urgency works even when it doesn't feel like "you."If you've ever felt like you're creating great content but not seeing it turn into consistent revenue, this one will resonate.Hope you enjoy it as much as I did.Check out David's work:🌐 https://kseniaparkhatskaya.com/🌐 https://secretsofsolo.com/📸 https://www.instagram.com/ksenia_parkhatskaya/▶️ https://www.youtube.com/ ⁨@secretsofsolo⁩  

Send us Fan MailJayne Havens never planned to build a business. She just wanted to help her kids sleep.But after one year of running a sleep consulting practice and feeling maxed out, she made a decision that changed everything. She stopped taking more clients and started teaching other people to do what she did. That was 2019. Today, roughly 75% of her income comes from a single $2,700 certification course, and she's still running it all from her kitchen table.Dominik sat down with Jayne to dig into exactly how she built this, and honestly, it's one of the more refreshing conversations we've had on the show. No complicated funnels, no big ad spend, no content machine. Just Jayne showing up in Facebook groups, having real conversations, and being, as she puts it, the most helpful person in the room.She also talks about how she uses her podcast not to attract new leads, but to close them. How she keeps a personal list of warm prospects on her phone. Why her affiliate partners outperform paid ads by a wide margin. And why she thinks copying someone else's funnel is a trap most course creators fall into.If you're building something in a specific niche and wondering whether you really need ads or a massive audience to make it work, Jayne's answer is pretty clear.I think you'll find this one genuinely useful.Check out Jayne's work:🌐 https://thecpsm.com/📸 https://www.instagram.com/snoozefestbyjaynehavens/▶️ https://www.youtube.com/@Becomingasleepconsultant

Send us Fan Mail2-10x your email list size in just 3 steps 📩 https://datadrivenmarketing.co/guideBethany McBride started her business because she needed to make a thousand dollars to cover some bills. That was it. No grand plan, no marketing strategy, just a Facebook group and a love for teaching worship music. A few months later, she and her husband had replaced his income entirely.This week I sat down with Bethany, the creator behind Simplified Piano, an online piano education community helping beginners, mostly people in their 60s and beyond, learn to play worship songs using a simple chord-based method. She built the whole thing around four chords: C, F, G, and A minor. That's genuinely it.What I loved about this conversation is how much of Bethany's business was shaped by constraints. Health challenges that made a 9-to-5 impossible. A toxic mold situation that forced her family into her parents' basement. Five kids. And yet she and her husband built something with 450,000 monthly YouTube views, around 160,000 email subscribers, and a model that's mostly evergreen and automated.We talked about how she gets 4,300 new email subscribers a month from a lead magnet so simple it's almost obvious in hindsight, why she switched a one-time offer to a recurring membership almost overnight and barely noticed a dip, and what she wishes she'd known earlier about getting in front of real students and listening to them properly.Bethany is warm, honest, and genuinely funny. I think you'll like this one.Check out Bethany's work:🌐 https://www.simplifiedpiano.com▶️  https://www.youtube.com/c/simplifiedpiano

Send us Fan MailNeed better results from your email campaigns? Get our FREE templates and see the difference with two proven email strategies! 👉🏼 https://datadrivenmarketing.co/templatesNicole Hullihen runs a full-time VP role in pharmaceuticals, leads a family, and still finds 25 hours a week to build a course business on the side. I honestly wasn't sure how that was possible, but listening to her talk about it, it starts to make sense.Nicole is the founder of Execute The Vision, where she teaches Excel and business operations skills through courses, done-for-you templates, and a work management software she built herself from scratch after deciding to learn to code a couple of years ago. She's got around 365,000 followers on TikTok and has sold to roughly 800 course customers in just over a year, all while keeping her prices deliberately low because, as she puts it, she just wants to get the information out there.We talked about how she drives traffic from TikTok and YouTube to her site, the frustrations of linking off social platforms, why templates have actually outsold her courses, what shifted in organic reach after the TikTok ban situation in the US, and her thinking on content format and hooks for educational video.There's something refreshing about someone who isn't trying to squeeze every dollar out of their audience and is just genuinely passionate about helping people work smarter. She's got a clear point of view and a lot of hard-won experience to back it up.Hope you enjoy this one.Check out Nicole's work:🌐 https://xecutethevision.com/home📸 https://www.instagram.com/xecutethevision/▶️ https://www.youtube.com/@XecuteTheVision

Send us Fan MailLeah Bolden built a YouTube channel with over a million subscribers and nearly 200 million views by teaching one thing really well: how to fix your home. And she did it by speaking to people exactly like a friend would, not like a tradesperson trying to impress anyone.Dominik sat down with Leah to talk about how See Jane Drill went from a classroom suggestion to a full course business, and the conversation ended up being one of the more grounded and honest ones we've had on this show.Leah talks about how a video on tape measures quietly racked up 18 million views and got Good Morning America calling. She explains why her audience turned out to be 78% men when she expected mostly women. And she gets into the real engine behind her course sales, which is soft mentions in YouTube videos and a newsletter, not complicated funnels or big launches.What really stood out was her take on community. She meets with her course students once a month on Zoom, takes their questions, and says that single hour is probably the most valuable thing she offers. She also gets honest about what she would do differently if she started over, and her answer on the membership model is worth the listen on its own.There is a book coming, some thoughts on AI that she is genuinely uncertain about, and a clear through-line across the whole conversation: authority and trust come before anything else.I think you'll enjoy this one.Check out Leah's work:🌐  https://seejanedrill.com▶️ https://www.youtube.com/@UCraGaDLfWec67xl9FEPndtw

Send us Fan MailPete Matthew runs one of the UK's most trusted personal finance brands, a podcast with over 8 million downloads, a YouTube channel approaching 150,000 subscribers, and an online academy that did £140,000 in a single Black Friday weekend. And he still considers it a side project.I sat down with Pete to talk about how Meaningful Money actually works as a business, the honest gaps he knows exist, and the philosophy that's kept him going for 15 years without burning the trust of his audience.We got into the structure of his three-course academy, how a software reseller deal quietly generates £50–60K a year in near-passive recurring revenue, and why his email list of 18,500 people opens his weekly digest at 60% but almost never gets asked to buy anything. Pete knows he's leaving money on the table. He's remarkably candid about it.And Pete built all of this without a plan to monetise at all. He picked up a video camera in 2009, started answering basic finance questions in the Cornish countryside, and after 150 videos got his first client completely out of nowhere. That foundation of just genuinely trying to help people is, I think, a big part of why his audience defends him when anyone questions his sales emails.Pete is thoughtful, funny, and completely honest about the gaps between where his business is and where it could be. I think you'll enjoy this one.Check out Pete's work:🌐 meaningfulmoney.tv🌐 meaningfulacademy.com🌐 jacksons.life📸 https://www.instagram.com/meaningfulmoney.tv▶️ https://youtube.com/@UC39PLqUmy-AKK5HGYYfwFYw

Send us Fan MailArnel Nisbet has 1.3 million YouTube subscribers, 700,000 monthly views, and runs her entire business completely on her own, no team, no editor, no outsourcing. She's also a full-time mother of three. And when Dominik sat down with her for this episode, she openly admitted her biggest blind spot: "My email list is my weakness."That kind of honesty is rare, and it's what makes this conversation so good.Arnel started her channel out of pure necessity. She had three tiny kids at home, limited work options locally, and thought if she could earn enough to buy herself one cup of coffee a month from YouTube, that would be a win. Now she's built Gravotion, a growing international learning platform, and she's thinking about where it'll be in ten years, not ten months.Dominik walks her through exactly what a funnel could look like for her business, lead magnets, welcome email sequences, repeat buyer strategy, all of it. Arnel is taking notes in real time. It's one of those episodes where the guest gets genuine value on air, not just in theory.They also get into why passive income is mostly a myth, why you don't need to outsource to build something real, and why "you are your own niche" is actually useful advice and not just a cliché.Dominik hosted this one, and it's a really warm, honest conversation.Check out Arnel's work:🌐 https://arnelseverydayenglish.com/📸 https://www.instagram.com/arnelseverydayenglish/▶️ https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC_XZoWueXyWuwVG4B_AEmmg?view_as=subscriber

Send us Fan MailLooking for predictable revenue growth? Access our FREE 7-day roadmap to increase your income without paid ads or sales calls! 👉🏼 https://datadrivenmarketing.co/roadmapWhat happens when a digital artist with 1.1 million YouTube subscribers decides she wants to work less, not more? That's exactly where this conversation went.I sat down with Flo Visser, the founder of Art with Flo, one of the most popular Procreate tutorial channels on YouTube. Flo started the whole thing almost by accident, after a friendly Instagram competition with her boyfriend spiralled into a viral post, a Patreon membership, and eventually a full creative business built around teaching people to draw.We talked about how she structures her Patreon, why she's been on the platform for seven years and still has a love-hate relationship with it, and how she's built a library of over 250 tutorials across multiple subscription tiers. But honestly, some of the most interesting parts of our chat were about everything else.Flo is training to become a yoga teacher, planning creativity retreats that combine drawing, improv, yoga, and real human connection, and she recently became the only person in her voice acting class invited to continue to the next level. She's also figured out that her elbow is her early warning sign for burnout, which I thought was brilliant.This one was different from most episodes. Less funnel talk, more about what it actually looks like to build a business around the life you want rather than the other way around. Flo's got a clarity about what she enjoys and what she's moving toward that I found genuinely refreshing.Hope you enjoy it as much as I did.Check out Flo's work:🌐 http://artwithflo.com📸 http://instagram.com/@floortjesart▶️ http://youtube.com/artwithflo

Send us Fan MailGet your tripwire product ideas here: 👉🏼 https://datadrivenmarketing.co/tripwireMark Smith has been teaching bass guitar online since 2013. He has 450,000 YouTube subscribers, 150,000 people on his free membership, and a back catalogue of courses that includes one with 25 hours of video content. By any measure, he has built something real.And yet, sitting down for this conversation, Mark is the first to say he's left an enormous amount of money on the table. No tripwire funnel. Email campaigns with one email at the start and one at the end. About three minutes spent writing each one. Mark talks about the first two or three years when the business made nothing and his wife's gigs kept them afloat. He talks about sitting in the bath hearing PayPal pings for the very first time after launching an ebook, and thinking, we're making money. He talks about watching his friend Scott Devine pull ahead and knowing exactly why. We also get into why retirement-age students dominate music course audiences, why being relatable on YouTube matters more than projecting authority, and how Mark scripts his videos using a teleprompter while going off script the moment he picks up the bass.He's currently working through a funnel audit with our team, and it was great to have him on before that process really gets going.I think you'll enjoy this one.Check out Mark's work:🌐 https://www.talkingbass.net/📸 https://www.instagram.com/talkingbasslessons/▶️ https://www.youtube.com/ ⁨@talkingbasslessons⁩  

Send us Fan MailJason 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

Send us Fan Mail15 sales page elements you can't afford to miss - Get our free checklist 📝 https://datadrivenmarketing.co/elementsThe 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