How Jason Murray hit $75k in 6 months on Teachable

Jason Murray has been making YouTube videos for 16 years. For most of that time, it was a hobby.

During the day, he was an art director and creative director working at agencies like BBDO, Huge, and Amazon's Brand Innovation Lab, leading campaigns for Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, Lululemon, and Adobe. The YouTube channel ran in parallel, always in the background, always just for fun.

A year before the podcast interview below, he quit his job.

He went independent, launched a newsletter and brand called Modern Art Direction, and started teaching the conceptual skills that agency life had given him. Eight months after announcing the idea publicly, he had run three live bootcamp sessions, enrolled over 120 students, and raised his price from $300 per person to over $800.

"I only needed week one ready, and I had a map. I kind of already had a blueprint because from my experience, I knew they need to understand insights, they need to understand big ideas, then they need to craft their campaign. So we'll just follow that roadmap." —Jason Murray, Founder of Modern Art Direction & NEXT Art Director

Jason's Teachable story at a glance

The turning point

The mentorship problem in advertising had been building for years before Jason decided to do something about it.

Remote work removed the informal learning that happened in offices. Junior creatives no longer watched senior art directors work. Nobody looked over shoulders at slide decks and wondered why theirs looked different. The unspoken knowledge that passed between people in the same room stopped passing.

Jason had benefited from that kind of proximity early in his career. He was, by his own admission, not a very good art director at first. What saved him was being surrounded by people who were. He noticed things. He absorbed how they worked without being formally taught.

"I was lucky to not be a very good art director, but I was surrounded by great art directors. So I could look over their shoulders. And now with remote work, people aren't getting the mentorship. That professional experience is still so valuable. So that's what I'm trying to bring to social media." —Jason Murray, Founder of Modern Art Direction & NEXT Art Director

He also noticed something happening with AI. The tools that could generate and execute creative work were multiplying fast. What they could not do was think conceptually. Identifying the human insight behind an idea, the specific revelation that reframes a problem, remained something no model had figured out. Jason had spent eight years doing exactly that for some of the largest brands in the world.

When he quit his agency job in 2024, he did not build a course library or a self-paced curriculum. He announced a live class. Four weeks, one concept per week, 90 minutes every Tuesday. Students would leave with a portfolio-ready spec campaign project. Teachable was the obvious choice: payment processing, course delivery, and enough room to grow into more complex features when he needed them.

"For me, Teachable was like the obvious choice because it was just like, okay, this is simple to start, but there's features that I can move into when I need it." —Jason Murray, Founder of Modern Art Direction & NEXT Art Director

Jason's strategies for building a live creative education business

Jason built NEXT Art Director without a course library, without a complex launch funnel, and without finishing the material before the first student enrolled. His approach was deliberate, and most of the decisions he made ran against the standard advice for online course creators.

Strategy 1: Start live, not recorded

Most course creators record their entire catalog before launching. Jason flipped this. He committed to a live class format, which meant he only needed week one ready before enrollment opened. The rest got built while students were in the class.

"How do you start a course? What platform do I go with? For me it was just like, okay, if I want to start a class. All I need is a way to accept payments and a place to put the information. That's where I can start." —Jason Murray, Founder of Modern Art Direction & NEXT Art Director

The live format solved two problems at once. It removed the pressure of finishing before launching, since students were watching and participating in real time. It also removed the anonymity that kills completion rates in self-paced courses. When 30 to 40 people show up on Zoom every Tuesday, they know each other by face. They share work in a Slack channel. They feel accountable to the group, not just to a progress bar.

By the third cohort, 60 to 80 percent of enrolled students attended live each week. One student in Australia woke up at 4 or 5 AM for the Friday office hour sessions because she did not want to miss the live element.

Take action

• If your course topic involves skill development, consider launching as a live cohort before building a self-paced version. You only need the first session fully ready. The live format forces you to finish the rest on a schedule students are already committed to.
• Set up a Teachable community or connect a Slack channel from day one. The channel is where the real learning happens between sessions, and it is one of the clearest differentiators from any self-paced alternative.

Strategy 2: One concept per week, no exceptions

NEXT Art Director runs for four weeks. Four 90-minute classes. Four office hour sessions. One concept per week, with one specific assignment that drills that concept before the class moves on.

Week one covers insights. Week two covers the big idea. Week three moves into execution. Week four is polish and portfolio presentation. Students do not touch execution in week one. They do not worry about their final project in week two. Jason holds the line.

"One of the things that I changed from the January session to this session was I actually took out a huge half of the first class. I moved it to an on-demand video. So when people sign up, there's a video you can watch — it's 40 minutes long — to give you an introduction to art direction. Originally I was doing that within the first class and it just took 40 minutes out of a 90 minute class. And it's just really hard to get to the most important part, which was they need to learn this single principle: insights." —Jason Murray, Founder of Modern Art Direction & NEXT Art Director

The format forces students to slow down in ways that resist their instincts. Creatives want to start designing. They want to jump to execution. Jason does not let them. His first week assignment is straightforward: come up with 20 to 30 insights on a brand and share your five best with the group. No designs. No campaigns. Just insights.

The constraint is the point. Creatives who spend years executing other people's ideas often have no language for the conceptual layer of the work. Week one gives them that language, and for many of them it is the first time they have heard an explanation that actually explains something.

Take action

• For any live course, move your introductory and contextual content into a pre-work on-demand video. Reserve your live time for the material that requires interaction, feedback, and discussion. Students will pay more attention when the live session gets to what matters faster.
• Identify the single most valuable concept in your course and build week one around mastering only that. Resist adding anything else to that session, regardless of how relevant it feels.

Strategy 3: Charge for investment, cap for quality

Jason started his first cohort at $300 per person. The price reflected what he felt was fair for an unproven program. He was asking students to trust him before he had any track record as an educator.

After the first session delivered, he raised the price to $800 for the January cohort. Enrollment came in at 42 students. For the March cohort, he raised it again and capped enrollment deliberately.

"I want to keep the class small and make sure everyone's super invested, but we still had 35 students for that class. I want it to be at a price point that I feel like is an investment that I'm hopefully gonna get serious students, and it keeps the class small. And that's why it's also worth the price." —Jason Murray, Founder of Modern Art Direction & NEXT Art Director

The logic connects in both directions. A higher price means students arrive with more skin in the game. They show up to class. They do their homework. They are not passive observers hoping something will stick. A smaller class means Jason can give real feedback on real work, which is exactly what draws students who cannot get that quality of critique anywhere else.

He also noticed the enrollment pattern. In the March cohort, 25 of the 35 students signed up in the final weekend before the deadline. Urgency, not early-bird discounts, drove the last push. He now announces a short enrollment window and closes it.

Take action

• If your course delivers live feedback and direct access to you, price it to reflect that. Per-hour tutoring rates in professional creative fields run well over $100. A month of weekly sessions with feedback is worth pricing accordingly.
• Set a hard cap on cohort size and publish it. A cap creates genuine scarcity. Combined with a short enrollment window, it removes the passive 'I'll think about it' response from potential students.

Strategy 4: Use your existing distribution, then close the window

Jason did not run paid ads for his first three cohorts. His launch strategy was almost entirely social.

He had been building a following for 16 years, first through YouTube and then more recently through Instagram, where his content about art direction and creative careers had grown an audience of over 160,000 followers. He used that audience through stories, a broadcast channel, and the newsletter, communicating about the bootcamp in the places where his most engaged followers spent time.

"The strategy really is there's only a small window to enroll. I let people know that next month the enrollments will open on X date, and there'll be only three weeks to enroll. And during that time window, I usually release a couple videos that just kind of spark people. Those will always be automated DMs that point people to the landing page." —Jason Murray, Founder of Modern Art Direction & NEXT Art Director

Creatives researching how to become art directors do not buy because of an ad. They buy because they have followed someone for months, watched their work, and already trust their teaching. Ads cannot replicate that. The social content builds it continuously.

Take action

• Before you spend on paid advertising, map your existing organic reach. If your content regularly reaches thousands of people in your target audience, your first launch should come from that channel, not a cold ad budget.
• Set up a ManyChat or similar automation that sends interested followers directly to your landing page when they comment on or engage with a specific post. This turns organic content reach into measurable traffic without manual follow-up.

Strategy 5: Build in public accountability for yourself, not just your students

Jason launched his first cohort while under contract for a two-month freelance project. He was simultaneously running 40-hour client weeks and building a curriculum from scratch. He did not sleep much.

What made it work was the same thing that makes the bootcamp work for students: a public commitment with real consequences for missing it.

"I only needed week one ready. The live aspect made it so I could just focus on week one and then I was committed. It's like we've got everyone signed up. I better get week two ready. And so the first session was just a really heavy month for me. But knowing it was live, I didn't have to deliver the whole thing in week one." —Jason Murray, Founder of Modern Art Direction & NEXT Art Director

By the second cohort, the heavy lifting was done. By the third, he was focused almost entirely on being a better teacher rather than building materials. The upfront investment, made under real pressure, produced an asset that kept improving with each session.

Take action

• Launch your first cohort before your curriculum is finished. Announce session one publicly, take enrollments, and use the public commitment to complete the rest. The accountability works the same way for you that it works for your students.
• After each live session, spend 30 minutes writing down what confused students, what generated the most discussion, and what you would change. Use those notes to refine the next session. Three cohorts of that process produces a course that no self-paced product can match on quality.

How Jason thinks about creative education

Jason's teaching is built around one observation: most creatives who struggle with conceptual work do not lack intelligence. They lack vocabulary.

The advertising industry has specific language for specific ideas. An insight is not just an observation. A big idea is not just a concept. These words mean precise things in the rooms where campaigns get approved, and people who have never worked in those rooms do not know the definitions. They do great execution work and cannot articulate why it works or what it is trying to do.

"A lot of young creatives entering the industry — they don't know what they don't know. I can help ungate keep some of the vocabulary that advertisers like to hold onto. Because for a lot of young creatives, it's just little things that they just don't know." —Jason Murray, Founder of Modern Art Direction & NEXT Art Director

He also has a clear position on where AI fits in the creative process, and where it does not. For generating mockups and visualizing early concepts, AI tools are useful. For finding actual insights — the human truths that reframe how you see a problem — he tells students to put AI away.

"In the insights territory, I usually recommend don't use any AI for that aspect because it's just so bad at finding an insight, an actual revelation that changes the way you see the world. It's usually obvious stuff. That's what you would gather if you're a machine learning model that's consuming stuff that's already been done." —Jason Murray, Founder of Modern Art Direction & NEXT Art Director

This position shapes what NEXT Art Director is selling. The course does not teach students to make things. It teaches them to think upstream from the making, in the part of the creative process where AI is least helpful and human judgment is most valuable.

What students take away

By the end of NEXT Art Director, students have a portfolio-ready spec campaign project. For some of them, it is the only piece they need to reposition themselves as an art director.

Jason got a message shortly before the podcast recording from a student who had just landed a job at a social agency in London. The course content had been the deciding factor in the transition.

"Just last week got a message from one of my students who was just like, man, I just got a new job, and just wanted to thank me because of the class. He got a new job at a social agency in London." —Jason Murray, Founder of Modern Art Direction & NEXT Art Director

Student reviews from the published course page describe similar shifts. One student pivoted her career entirely after the first cohort. Another, a UI/UX designer with no advertising background, found that the art direction principles transferred directly into how she positioned her app in the App Store. A product line manager with no art direction experience finished with a complete portfolio project.

The pattern across the reviews is consistent. Students arrived knowing how to make things and left knowing how to think about what they were making. That shift opened doors that pure technical skill had not.

Looking ahead

Jason runs NEXT Art Director once a month with a one-month break between sessions. The cadence is deliberate and personal. He has a family, a second child on the way at the time of the interview, and a creator business that includes brand deals alongside the education work.

The 30-day format works for his schedule because it also works for his students. Creatives who work full-time cannot commit to a six-month program. They can commit to one focused month. The deadline lights a fire that longer programs rarely sustain.

"I like being done with it for a month and then taking a one month break to focus on how can I make it better, how can I promote it. But also I find creatives thrive with deadlines and with a little bit of pressure." —Jason Murray, Founder of Modern Art Direction & NEXT Art Director

The near-term plan is to add a self-paced on-demand course alongside the live bootcamp, creating a more accessible entry point for students who cannot afford the flagship program or whose time zones make live attendance impractical. Guest speakers will continue to be a paid part of each session.

The longer arc points toward something he calls the School of Modern Art Direction, with the acronym MAD, which he notes with some satisfaction is exactly what the work requires.

What to do next

Explore NEXT Art Director:

Visit modernartdirection.com to join the waitlist for the next NEXT Art Director cohort. The bootcamp opens enrollment for a short window every month. Follow @jasonmurray across Instagram and YouTube for weekly content on art direction, creative careers, and building a creator business.

Connect with Jason on Instagram / YouTube / TikTok: @jason_swet

Try Teachable today:

Jason built his first cohort while juggling a full client contract and running on less sleep than he recommends. Teachable handled payments, enrollment, and course delivery so he could focus on being in the room with his students. Start your free Teachable now.