First students in the course business
The first-ten method here is a guest list, not a follower count: forty to eighty names of people who would recognize you in their inbox. The engine is one free live workshop, 45 to 60 minutes, teaching the single most common failure fixed live, with the offer stated once in the last five minutes. Twenty to forty attendees from an eighty-name list is a strong result, and the replay carries the same seven-day founding window. The outreach script the course gives you:
Hi Sam. I am running a free working session on taming month-end reporting, the exact mess you inherited from the Denver books last year. It is live on Thursday at noon, forty-five minutes, one worksheet, nothing sold before the last five minutes. Want the link? If the time is wrong I will send you the replay.
Underneath it, the manual-first seed: do the thing as a service for three to five paying clients, and their notes become your modules. The presale gate: ten or more founding members means build; zero to two means refund every dollar with a warm note.
Pricing in the course business
The pricing method prices the transformation, not your hours. The alternatives test sets the ceiling: what the buyer pays to outsource the outcome, what the problem costs to ignore. The bands: under 50 dollars is almost never right, 50 to 200 fits a first course and presales, 200 to 600 is the workhorse (industry guidance commonly lands at 199 and up), 600-plus needs proof and real access to you. The course's running architecture: 149-dollar founding price, 249 at public launch, 499 for a tier with live sessions, with tier two at roughly two and a half to three times base. Payment plans of three installments on anything over about 200. Real deadlines only; fake urgency is the industry's signature move and buyers smell it.
Rules in the course business
The setup method maps here as the boring layer. Sole proprietor for the presale, single-member LLC once revenue is consistent. Sales tax on digital courses is state by state, but nexus saves you in year one: your home state's rule applies from your first sale, and the standard threshold elsewhere is 100,000 dollars of sales in that state. The FTC touches three rules: no unsubstantiated earnings claims, the 2024 testimonials rule (real students, disclosed freebies, no invented reviews), and affiliate disclosure. CAN-SPAM is mechanical: honest subject lines, a physical postal address, opt-outs honored within ten business days.
Money in the course business
The money system for a knowledge product: the presale is the deposit structure, paid before the product exists. Card processing runs 2.9 percent plus 30 cents, about 4.65 dollars on a 150-dollar sale, and the shelf decides the rest: Gumroad keeps 10 percent plus 50 cents all-in (you keep 134.50), Thinkific Basic at 54 dollars a month keeps nothing per sale, and Udemy's marketplace pays 37 percent on organic sales, caps prices at 199.99, and commonly sells courses at 12 to 20 dollars in promotions. The crossover rule: at roughly ten to fifteen sales a month, zero-fee platforms beat percentage checkouts, so presale on a lightweight checkout and graduate later. Set aside a quarter to a third of profit, keep refunds under 5 percent by delivering, and treat the exportable email list as the only asset no platform can reprice.
First hire in the course business
The course has no first-hire content: its growth forks are a second course, a cohort version, and relaunches to the same list. For the hiring decision itself, the first-hire method owns it.
The scripts, platform table, and 30-day launch plan live in the full course.