You've answered the same question so many times you could start the sentence in your sleep. Somebody asks it on the way out, or in an email at half past nine at night, and you give the answer you have given two hundred times, and it's still a good answer. That is your subject. Not the one you think would sell, and not the one everybody in your field is posting about this month.
Most advice about choosing a course topic starts from what the market wants. I want to start somewhere duller and more useful, which is what you can still be bothered to explain in the ninth month.
Four things you can do with what you know
A recorded course is one option. It isn't automatically the right one, and pretending otherwise would be the fastest way to lose you.
See more people. The most reliable of the four, and the one nobody writes articles about. You know how to do it, you get paid this month rather than next quarter, and the ceiling is the number of hours you're willing to work. If you're not near that ceiling yet, this is honestly the first thing to try.
Write it down. A book, a long guide, a workbook you sell as a PDF. Cheap to make, easy to hand over, and it travels further than you expect. What it can't do is tell you whether anybody read past page four.
Teach it live, to a group. A four-week evening course on a video call. You keep the room, the questions and the atmosphere, and you find out very fast which bits of your explanation don't land. The cost is that it happens once, at a fixed hour, and half your people are asleep in another hemisphere.
Record it once. The lessons sit there, people work through them at eleven at night, and you answer the questions instead of repeating the material. This is the one this page is about. It's the slowest to start and the only one still working while you're with a client.
Most practitioners I've watched end up doing two of the four. The live group teaches you what the recorded course should say.
The subject picks itself, and it is not the exciting one
Here is the argument, and it is the whole reason this page exists. The topic that repays the evenings is the one you already know cold and still like talking about.
Three reasons, and none of them is inspirational. The first is that you will finish it. A subject you half-know takes roughly four times as long to write, because every third paragraph sends you off to check something, and the checking is where the project quietly dies in a folder. The second is what happens after it is built: people ask questions, and if you can't answer them from where you are standing, the course becomes work you dread. The third is that depth is audible. A student can hear the difference between somebody explaining a thing they have done a thousand times and somebody explaining a thing they read about, and they can't always say which it is, but they stop watching either way.
There is a version of this that goes wrong, so it is worth saying. Loving a subject is not the same as being able to teach it, and the tell is whether you can explain it to the person who came in knowing nothing. If your explanation only works for people who already agree with you, that is a talk, not a course.
An aside that sells nothing: I have a theory that the best course titles are stolen from the student, word for word. "Why does my back hurt when I do this?" is a better lesson name than "Alignment fundamentals", and I have never once persuaded anybody of it.
One sentence, then a fortnight's worth of typing you skipped
So you've got the subject. Now the part that stops people, which is the blank screen with an empty course open on it.
Describe what you teach in a sentence, say how many sections and how many lessons, say who it is for, and the AI builder writes the first draft. Sections, lesson titles, the text inside them. It takes about ninety seconds.
What comes back is a skeleton in somebody else's voice. That is what it is for. Rewriting a draft into your own words is an evening's work, and you'll cut half of it, and the cutting is easy because you know the subject better than the draft does. Facing an empty course with a cursor blinking is what people mean when they say they've been meaning to do this for two years.
The evening you rewrite it
Every lesson opens in an editor and you change whatever you like. Bold, headings, lists, links, images. You can throw a whole section out and write your own. The AI assistant sits in the same screen while you work, which is 1,500 messages a month on the plan, and it's most useful for the small jobs, like turning six rambling paragraphs into four clear ones.
Lessons don't have to be text. Video, audio, a PDF, a quiz, an assignment you mark by hand. A short recording of you explaining the thing is usually better than a page of prose, and it takes less time to make.
If the words "AI builder" and "editor" made you tense rather than hopeful, that fear is its own article and it's worth ten minutes.
Give it to one person before you give it to anybody
The fastest way to know whether a course works is to hand it to one person you already teach. Add them as a client, tick what they should have, and they get an email with a login. What they see is your brand, your colours and your name, and no sign of us anywhere.
Then watch. You can see which lessons they finished and which one they stopped at, and if three people in a row stop at lesson four, lesson four is the problem and you now know that for certain rather than suspecting it.
Four times this is the wrong move
- You are still learning the subject yourself. Wait. Teach it live to a small group first, where you can adjust in the moment, and record it when the explanation has settled.
- The thing you teach only works with hands on and eyes in the room. A course can carry the parts around the session, the preparation and the practice between visits. It cannot carry the session.
- You want it to find its own students. It will not. A built course sits there until somebody sends people to it, and that job is a separate one with its own weeks in it.
- You want somebody else to write it. The draft arrives in ninety seconds and it is a draft. If nobody puts your voice into it, it will sound like nobody wrote it, because nobody did.
What $47 a month covers
One flat price, $47 a month. Unlimited courses and products, 1,000 active students, hosted video with 1TB of bandwidth a month, the AI course builder, the AI assistant, communities, chat, a sales page, coupons, graded assignments, a certificate on completion. There are no tiers to read and nothing to decode. Switch on what you want in your menu and hide the rest.
We take 0% of what you sell. You connect your own Stripe account and keep everything except Stripe's own 2.9% plus 30 cents, which is charged everywhere by everyone.
The trial is 30 days and it does not ask for a card. Build the course you have been describing to people for years, give it to one client, and see what they do with it.