Strategic guidance to help you build your education business

In March 2026, my team ran a survey to find out more about Teachable students: how they’re finding courses, what drives them to buy courses, what they value the most in their learning experience, and more.

One finding especially stuck out to me. When we asked people what makes them actually finish a course, the top answer wasn’t better videos or interactive elements. It was clear milestones and progress tracking. Sixty-six percent of students named it the #1 factor.

That tells us that the biggest opportunity for online educators isn’t necessarily in making better courses. It’s in better structure.

That’s where Learning Paths come in. Brand new to Teachable, Learning Paths allow you to turn your existing courses into structured, multi-course programs.

The standalone course problem

There’s undeniable value in a great standalone course: students learn real skills, get real value, and walk away better than they came in. But a single course can only take a student so far. There’s a ceiling on the transformation one course can deliver, no matter how good the content.

For the student, an isolated course can lack the depth and a defined arc they need to make a meaningful transformation. And that can cost you down the line. A student who doesn’t feel like they got results doesn’t come back for the next thing, doesn’t refer their friends, and doesn’t become the kind of long-term customer your business needs for sustainable growth.

Learning Paths can help raise that ceiling. Instead of selling a single course and hoping it carries a student all the way to a meaningful outcome, you’re delivering a program with a clear beginning, a defined progression, and an end state student can actually point to.

The courses you’ve already built do more, because they’re working together.

Students want more advanced coursework

Here are two more numbers from the same survey:

93% of students said they're likely to buy from the same creator or school again.
59% said advanced or related coursework is what would bring them back.

Repeat purchase intent is high, and most students aren’t asking for a community or a workbook or a cheaper option. Instead, they want the next level of the thing they just finished.

Learning Paths essentially let you give that to your students from the start. If repeat purchase intent is high, we can also assume that students’ willingness to buy a higher ticket product—one that includes the advanced coursework they’re after—is there too. So your work is less about convincing them and more about actually building the thing.

What changes when you sell a program

It’s safe to assume a higher price tag for a Learning Path than a course because it includes, well, multiple courses. It’s simple math. But let’s dig deeper: it’s more of a positioning shift than a product shift.

A course says: here’s a topic I’ll teach you.

A program says: here’s a transformation, and these are the stages you move through to get there.

That reframe alone justifies more premium pricing. It’s the difference between “I bought a yoga course” and “I enrolled in a 200-hour teacher training.”

You’re selling your same expertise, just packaged differently. The way you market your learning should be less about content and more about outcomes.

Best of all, you can build a Learning Path from your existing course catalog. The work is in deciding what comes after what, defining the outcome the full sequence delivers, and pricing it like a program rather than the sum of its parts.

The growth lever isn’t a new audience

Many course creators assume their next jump in revenue has to come from a bigger audience. Sometimes it does. More often, it comes from giving the audience you already have the more advanced options they want.

That’s what Learning Paths are built for: turning the courses you already sell into a structured program students can buy as one thing, complete in the right order, and finish with a real sense of accomplishment.

Note: Learning Paths are currently available in beta. To request to join the beta group, complete this form.

Introducing Teachable AI Academy: Live workshops with AI experts

Open any feed right now and you'll find a thousand people explaining AI. Most of them are explaining the same five tips. Very few are showing you what it looks like to actually use these tools to run a business.

That's the gap we built Teachable AI Academy to close.

It's a live workshop series. We bring in creators and experts who use AI every day, and we put them in front of you to teach the exact systems and workflows behind their work. The first sessions kicks off on June 15, 2026, and the full lineup carries into August 2026.

Every session is free to attend. Each one is hosted live, and we record all of them, so the replay is waiting on Teachable whenever you want it.

What is the Teachable AI Academy?

AI Academy is a run of live, online workshops. More than 20 AI creators and experts are on the schedule, and each one picks a topic straight from their own work.

They teach it live, in real time, and they leave room for your questions at the end.

The people teaching have built audiences in the millions and run real businesses with these tools. So the advice you get is grounded in what they actually do day to day.

We host every session, and we keep the replay up afterward. That means the library grows every week as new workshops go live.

Why did we build the Teachable AI Academy?

Here's how we see this moment. AI made information instant, and that made the hunger for real skill sharper than it has ever been.

People want to build things. They want to change careers and pick up abilities that have nothing to do with what they trained in. We call this the Learning Renaissance, and we think it's the most exciting thing happening in education right now.

The hard part is knowing where to start. When everyone is posting at once, it's tough to know whose advice you can trust.

AI Academy is our answer. We put practitioners you can trust on a set schedule, each teaching one concrete thing you can use.

This is showing up in the data, too. In its 2025 Workplace Learning Report, LinkedIn found that 71% of learning and development professionals are already exploring, experimenting with, or integrating AI into their work.

That number is worth sitting with for a second. The people whose entire job is teaching skills are moving on AI right now, and AI Academy is built for everyone trying to keep pace with them.

Once you learn something in a session, you can put it to work inside Teachable. Our own AI features sit right in the platform, so the courses and content you build benefit from the same tools.

The June 2026 Teachable AI Academy lineup

The first wave of workshops runs through June, and each session below is open for registration now.

Charlie Hills, June 15 at 1:00pm EST. The AI-powered content system for personal branding. Charlie Hills grew from zero to more than 200,000 LinkedIn followers using a repeatable, AI-assisted content system. He breaks down the tools and workflows he uses to generate ideas, speed up production, and turn attention into business, all while keeping his own voice in the output. If you want background reading first, Teachable has a guide on how to build a personal brand.

Katia Smith, June 17 at 1:00pm EST. Filling the AI gaps: from prototype to product launch. Katia Smith is a former Microsoft engineer and the founder of Second Life Software, where she turns rough, AI-built prototypes into products ready for real users. She walks through the five gaps AI coding tools tend to leave open, including security, error handling, and what a user sees when something fails, using real before-and-after examples from her agency work.

Sandra, June 22 at 1:00pm EST. Ship AI-built apps without shipping risk. Sandra is a cybersecurity educator with a following of more than 550,000 security and IT professionals. She shares the flaws that ride along with fast, AI-built apps, from exposed API keys to weak authentication, and gives you a seven-point checklist you can run on anything you build before it goes live.

Anna York, June 24 at 1:00pm EST. How to become the source AI recommends. Anna York is an AI Visibility Architect and the founder of Citation School, recognized as a LinkedIn Top 12 AI Voice in Europe. She studies how tools like ChatGPT and Perplexity decide what to recommend, and she walks through her keyword research process for AI search, showing how to turn one question into a full content plan.

Mariana Antaya, June 29, 2026 at 1:00pm EST. Your first machine learning model. In 40 minutes.. Mariana is a former AI Product Manager at Microsoft who now ships her own machine learning models and teaches a community of more than 700,000 people. In 40 minutes she takes raw, messy e-commerce data and builds a model that answers a real business question: will this customer buy again in the next 90 days. You'll walk away with the working model, the code behind it, and a process you can reuse on any dataset.

More sessions coming through the summer

June 2026 is only the opening stretch. New workshops drop every week through August 2026.

Names already on the schedule include Mariana Antaya, Sai Kumar, Sundas Khalid, Sadie St. Lawrence, Anjali Viramgama, Ale Thomas, Tina Huang, and Matt Wolfe.

The topics run wide: building your first machine learning model, learning data analytics with AI, building AI agents for everyday work, and using AI with more intention. We add new dates to the AI Academy page as each session locks, so it pays to check back.

One more thing worth knowing. A lot of the people teaching also sell what they know on Teachable, and any creator can do the same. Courses, coaching, memberships, and digital downloads all run on one platform, with payments handled through teachable:pay.

How to join

Registration is open for every session on the AI Academy page.

Pick the workshops that fit what you're building, save your seat, and add them to your calendar. If a date passes before you get to it, the replay will be waiting for you on Teachable.

Head to the AI Academy page to see the full schedule and register for the sessions you want.

How Amie Tollefsrud made $11M on Teachable the “lazy” way

Amie Tollefsrud calls herself a lazy person. She has generated over $11 million on Teachable saying so.

"I am a self-proclaimed, very lazy person." – Amie Tollefsrud, Founder of Rebelle Nutrition and Lazy Millionaire

Most creators treat that word as the enemy. Amie treats it as the whole strategy.

She runs an eight-figure course business from her bed or a beach club lounger, and she got there by doing less of the wrong work, not more of it. The lazy move, in her hands, keeps turning out to be the smart one.

Amie's Teachable story at a glance

The turning point: From nanny gigs to a scalable business

Before the eight figures, Amie worked a nannying job and felt certain it was not going to be her life. She trained as a nutritionist, started seeing clients one-on-one, and hit the ceiling every service provider eventually hits.

There are only so many hours in a day, and trading them for money never scales.

So she did the lazy thing, which also happened to be the smart thing. Amie took the advice she repeated to clients over and over and built it into an online course that could reach all of them at once.

"That's when I created my first online nutrition course to try and reach and help more people all at once. A little less effort from there." – Amie Tollefsrud, Founder of Rebelle Nutrition and Lazy Millionaire

She built that first course from a tiny hut in Maui, carrying five figures of debt and using an outdoor toilet. Amie had no business degree, no investors, and by her own account no tech skills. The slick tools creators reach for today did not exist for her, so she sold it without them. Then she ran her first launch.

"One of my first course launches ever, I think I had made like $5,000 in the span of an hour. And I just remember, like, jumping up and down. [It] was the most money I'd ever made at once in my entire life." – Amie Tollefsrud, Founder of Rebelle Nutrition and Lazy Millionaire

The nutrition courses worked, and as they kept working, her audience started asking her about something other than nutrition.

"All anybody ever wanted to ask me was, like, how I ran [and] how I built [my] business online, because it allowed me to travel the world and really do all the things that I dreamed about growing up." – Amie Tollefsrud, Founder of Rebelle Nutrition and Lazy Millionaire

That repeated question was its own market research. Her audience told her what they wanted before she ever built it, the exact validation signal she now teaches her students to watch for.

So she followed it. The nutritionist became the course-creation expert.

That pivot grew into Rebelle Nutrition's eight-figure education business: Online Course Academy, Passive Income Academy, and the program that ties them together, the Lazy Millionaire Method, which has helped more than 4,000 students across niches build profitable courses of their own.

Amie has been on Teachable since close to the platform's earliest days, running the same play on repeat for the better part of a decade: take lived experience, turn it into a course, sell the shift it creates, and let it run.

The throughline from that first nutrition course to the business today comes down to a handful of principles Amie applies every single time. Here are the ones doing the heaviest lifting.

Amie's strategies for building an 8-figure course business

Strategy 1: Sell the shift your student is buying

The biggest mistake Amie sees in first-time creators is selling the wrong thing. They list their modules, their PDFs, their hours of video, then wonder why nobody buys.

"When somebody buys a course, they're not just buying the number of lessons or modules or PDFs. They're buying a shift, a shift in how they feel, how they think, what they can do, or what their life is going to look like after the course is finished." – Amie Tollefsrud, Founder of Rebelle Nutrition and Lazy Millionaire

Amie points to her own dentist as the perfect salesperson.

Curious about Invisalign, she expected a pitch about process and timeline. Instead he showed her a photo of her teeth that day, next to a mockup of her teeth a year later. He simply sold her the result she actually wanted.

"Immediately, I was like, 'Take my money. I want that.'" – Amie Tollefsrud, Founder of Rebelle Nutrition and Lazy Millionaire

Amie has her students build what she calls a before-and-after blueprint. They write the student's exact frustration today in the student's own words, then the specific, tangible result waiting on the other side.

The result has to be concrete, never a fuzzy phrase like "feel empowered." It should be something a person could physically point to, like "I don't even need to wear foundation anymore because my skin is so clear," or "I got my 5K down by five minutes." The course becomes the bridge between those two points.

Take action

Write the shift in one sentence: "This course takes you from ______ to ______." Say it aloud to someone outside your industry. Hesitation on their end means it needs sharpening.
Replace every fuzzy outcome like "clarity" or "confidence" with something the buyer could point to in real life.

Strategy 2: Get specific enough to stop the scroll

Selling a shift only works when it gets specific enough that the right person cannot scroll past it.

"Vague doesn't sell. Specific sells. Specific is what makes people stop scrolling. Specific is what makes people pull out their wallets and buy." – Amie Tollefsrud, Founder of Rebelle Nutrition and Lazy Millionaire

Her litmus test sits in the gap between "Learn how to eat clean" and "A step-by-step guide to clear your hormonal acne in 30 days."

Identical expertise sits underneath both titles. The second one aims at one specific person with a real promise, and that version is the one that sells. Broad offers leave buyers quietly wondering whether the thing is really for them, and uncertainty kills the sale.

"When somebody is not sure, they do not buy. But when your offer is specific, it builds instant trust. It shows people that you know exactly what they're going through and exactly how to help them." – Amie Tollefsrud, Founder of Rebelle Nutrition and Lazy Millionaire

Amie pushes for a timeframe wherever it stays honest, such as "in 30 days" or "in 90 days," because a clear timeline makes the result feel achievable. She also insists on the buyer's actual language over insider jargon.

Take action

Rewrite your title to name a clear outcome, and add a realistic timeframe when you can stand behind it.
Read your title for jargon. Any word your ideal student would never say out loud in conversation has to go.

Strategy 3: Validate before you build a single lesson

Amie is blunt about why so many capable creators, even ones with big audiences, launch into silence. They guessed.

"You wouldn't want to open a French bakery without knowing if anyone in town likes croissants, right? So same thing here. Let's make sure you're baking what people are actually hungry for." – Amie Tollefsrud, Founder of Rebelle Nutrition and Lazy Millionaire

Her method skips surveys and spreadsheets.

Amie has creators hold three to five real conversations with people who feel like ideal students, through DMs, email, or a quick call.

The questions stay simple: their biggest frustration with the topic, what they have already tried and why it fell short, and whether a step-by-step course to the result would actually help. Then she listens for the line between polite interest and real urgency.

"We're not looking for perfection, we're just looking for proof. Proof that your idea has legs, and proof that people are already searching for this solution." – Amie Tollefsrud, Founder of Rebelle Nutrition and Lazy Millionaire

She also reframes the whole exercise so it never feels like begging for approval.

"Validation is not about asking for permission. You are the expert. You have the vision. This is just about making sure that your offer meets people where they are before you invest the time turning it into something amazing." – Amie Tollefsrud, Founder of Rebelle Nutrition and Lazy Millionaire

Take action

Before building anything, run three to five conversations with ideal students and capture their exact words. Those words become your sales page copy.
Track urgency over politeness. "That sounds interesting" carries far less signal than "when can I buy this."

Strategy 4: Launch imperfect, then get 1% better forever

For all the strategy, Amie credits one unglamorous habit above the rest. She ships before it is ready.

"That's also, I think, exactly why I have been successful, because I take action and I launch things actually before they're perfect." – Amie Tollefsrud, Founder of Rebelle Nutrition and Lazy Millionaire

Her first launch, by her own description, was scrappy and far from what she wanted. It still made $5,000 in an hour.

The creators who never break through are usually the ones tweaking and refining until the moment to launch quietly slips past.

"Launch quickly and fast and let it be imperfect. And also just always go back and iterate, like, there's always something you can make better, and then you can get, like, 1% better every time. And it really, over time, does make a difference." – Amie Tollefsrud, Founder of Rebelle Nutrition and Lazy Millionaire

That iteration habit also keeps students coming back. Asked what most reliably turns a one-time buyer into a repeat customer, Amie answered without hesitating.

"The results that they get the first time around. So if they feel like you went above and beyond the thing that they thought they were going to get, they're definitely going to come back in for a second time." – Amie Tollefsrud, Founder of Rebelle Nutrition and Lazy Millionaire

Take action

Set a launch date before the course feels finished, and treat version one as a starting point instead of a final product.
Build your first module to deliver a real, fast win. Early results earn you the student's next purchase.

Strategy 5: Build a passive funnel, then get more from every buyer

Amie's revenue does not come from chasing new customers all day. It runs on a system that works without her and pulls more value from every person who already decided to buy.

The top of her funnel is her audience on Instagram, TikTok, and now Substack. From there she offers something free and valuable, a fully automated hour-long masterclass, and sells her program at the end of that training.

Automated email sequences of five to seven messages follow up over the next week with anyone who did not buy right away, paired with a real reason to act now.

The lazy genius shows up in what she layers on top: order bumps and post-purchase upsells.

"Think about, like, when you're at the grocery store and there's all the candy right before you checkout, the people are buying things anyway. So at the last minute, it's a really good time to upsell them on similar items that they might also want." – Amie Tollefsrud, Founder of Rebelle Nutrition and Lazy Millionaire

Someone who just decided to spend money will spend a little more, so one buyer becomes worth far more without any extra traffic.

"It's just a really easy and lazy way, honestly, to generate more revenue with the same amount of effort. You [don't] have to be continuously, like, chasing down [a new] client. You can just make more off of the one-time purchase." – Amie Tollefsrud, Founder of Rebelle Nutrition and Lazy Millionaire

Take action

Replace one-off launches with an evergreen funnel: free value such as a masterclass leading to your paid offer, backed by an automated email sequence.
Add an order bump or post-purchase upsell at checkout. The buyer already said yes, which makes it the easiest revenue you will add all year.

Why Amie bets on being human in the age of AI

The obvious objection to any course in 2026 sounds simple. Plenty of people ask why they would pay for a course when AI hands over information free.

Amie does not dodge that objection. She agrees that good free information exists everywhere, then explains why it falls short of the real thing.

"[AI] can give you a lot of valuable information, but [it hasn't] actually done the thing in real life and achieved the results that you're looking for. Like a human can." – Amie Tollefsrud, Founder of Rebelle Nutrition and Lazy Millionaire

Her edge comes from having lived the outcome she teaches, start to finish.

"I actually have achieved the results that I'm teaching in real life. I'm somebody who literally started from zero. I didn't have any money to invest. I didn't even have tech skills... I went through years of, like, struggle and figuring it out and trying things that didn't work and failing. And that was years of experience in real life." – Amie Tollefsrud, Founder of Rebelle Nutrition and Lazy Millionaire

She sees the same change defining the whole industry. The creators who win next will skip the losing game of competing with a chatbot on facts.

"The next wave of successful course creators will be the ones who are thinking really innovatively about what they can offer and sell that is... offering people more than what they can just go to [AI] and find an answer to." – Amie Tollefsrud, Founder of Rebelle Nutrition and Lazy Millionaire

In practice, that means pairing the digital course with something only a person can give: community, group support, an occasional live touchpoint, whatever fits the creator's energy and style.

This reframe helps any creator worried that AI made their knowledge worthless. Amie's bet runs the other direction. The more information becomes free and instant, the more valuable a real guide who has walked the path becomes.

"People don't want a robot or a guru or a PhD professor. They want a real person who's relatable and a few steps ahead of them." – Amie Tollefsrud, Founder of Rebelle Nutrition and Lazy Millionaire

Looking ahead

These days, Amie is most excited about Substack, which she started in the past year.

It has become both a fresh revenue stream and a surprisingly strong top of funnel. Readers who find her there often go on to buy her courses, sometimes converting better than social media. Her approach to it stays pure Amie: every post gets treated like a tiny product.

"I look at every article I write almost like a 12-minute course." – Amie Tollefsrud, Founder of Rebelle Nutrition and Lazy Millionaire

For someone who has done eight figures, she stays remarkably clear that the path was never about being special.

"To be honest, I always imagined that this would be my life... I just had no clue, like, how [I was] actually going to do that." – Amie Tollefsrud, Founder of Rebelle Nutrition and Lazy Millionaire

The advice she would give the version of herself still working that nannying job is the same advice underneath everything she teaches today.

"Keep going. Let the things that you are excited about drive you. If you feel this excited about something, you're probably onto something. Keep going. Keep doing it, because it's just going to lead you to [the life] that you've always dreamed of." – Amie Tollefsrud, Founder of Rebelle Nutrition and Lazy Millionaire

What to do next

Get Amie's free playbook: Grab The Profitable Course Playbook on Teachable, where Amie walks through how to find the right course idea, validate it, and build something people actually pay for.

Watch the full interview: See Amie tell her complete story on YouTube.

Explore more from Amie: YouTube | Instagram | Teachable School | Website

Explore more creator stories: Read how other educators are winning on Teachable in our Success Stories collection.

Try Teachable yourself: Amie turned a scrappy first launch into an eight-figure business by selling the shift her students want, validating before building, and refusing to wait for perfect. Start your free Teachable trial and build the course your audience already keeps asking you for.

How Kelly McKenna crossed $1M in course revenue on Teachable

Kelly McKenna's grandmother was a therapist. Kelly always assumed she would be one too.

She earned a Master of Social Work and an MBA from Florida State University, then spent eight years running programs at a nonprofit, managing over $10 million in federal funding and overseeing housing services for veterans and LGBTQ youth. She was good at the work. She was also exhausted by it.

When she began seeing private therapy clients on the side, she did what she had always done: she worked in the open. She shared candidly about her own anxiety. She celebrated on Instagram when she left insurance panels, filled her caseload, and quit her full-time job.

The account grew because people across the country recognized something in her posts they had never quite seen before: a therapist being a real human.

By the end of her first full year in private practice, Kelly had earned $250,000. Within four years, her revenue across practice and digital products had crossed $1 million annually.

"Creating a private-pay practice didn't just transform my income, it transformed my life. I became a better therapist, a more present wife and mother, and built a business aligned with the life I actually wanted to live." — Kelly McKenna, LCSW, MBA, Founder of Business of Therapy

Kelly's Teachable story at a glance

From one-on-one to a course that reached 1,000 therapists

When Kelly's Instagram audience started growing, so did the demand for her time. She filled her caseload, and quickly other therapists started asking her for help.

Therapists booked coaching calls. They asked how she found clients, how she left insurance, how she thought about pricing. She answered the same questions over and over: how to write a bio, how to structure content, how to set up a scheduling system.

She was managing a full therapy caseload at the same time. The math on one-on-one coaching made no sense as a long-term model. The calls were useful, but there was a ceiling baked into the format.

"There was a clear moment when I realized something had to change. I was receiving more inquiries and coaching requests than I could realistically handle alongside my full therapy caseload. It became obvious that continuing to grow demand without changing my delivery model would lead to burnout." — Kelly McKenna, LCSW, MBA, Founder of Business of Therapy

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She had already built her first digital product: an anxiety course that mirrored the work she did in session, structured as psychoeducation followed by ten coping strategies with video lessons and downloadable handouts.

The signal that a course for therapists made sense: therapists kept DMing her asking her for help and booking 1-1 calls. The market had been asking for something before she had built it.

She moved the coaching content into a structured course, kept her therapy clients, and launched what would become the Private Practice Academy Bundle. Teachable was the platform she chose after testing several options. The interface was clean, the pricing was accessible, and the setup was direct enough that she could focus on the curriculum rather than the tech.

"I was drawn to Teachable's strong reputation, clean interface, ease of use, and low prices. After testing the free trial and experiencing how intuitive the setup was, it felt like the right platform to confidently build and scale my digital products." — Kelly McKenna, LCSW, MBA, Founder of Business of Therapy

Kelly's strategies for building a therapy education business

Kelly did not separate her identity as a therapist from her identity as a business owner. The clinical training she had spent years developing turned out to be directly relevant to every part of her marketing work. Her approach to building the business reflected that.

Strategy 1: Build your audience around radical transparency, not polished expertise

Kelly's Instagram accounts grew because she said things other therapists in her position were not saying. She talked about her rates. She talked about leaving insurance panels. She documented the process of building a caseload in real time, including the parts that were uncertain.

This was not a calculated content strategy at the start. It was how she naturally worked. Clinical training taught Kelly about rapport and authenticity. Kelly brought that same instinct to her posts.

"As I built my own business publicly, I shared the real-time process including the wins, the pivots, the fear, and that transparency became a core value of my brand." — Kelly McKenna, LCSW, MBA, Founder of Business of Therapy

The result was that both therapy seekers and therapists who found her account recognized themselves in what she was describing. Kelly eventually started a second Instagram page @businessoftherapy. The posts about money and burnout and how to price sessions landed because they named things the profession tends to avoid naming publicly. Her @businessoftherapy account grew from zero to over 50,000 followers since December 2022. And her therapy-focused account @sitwithkelly has grown to nearly 100,000.

Take action

Post about the process, not just the outcome. If you're building something, share where you are in it, including the parts that feel unresolved. Audiences build around people they trust to be honest, and trust comes from specificity, not polish.
Identify the things your industry tends to avoid talking about publicly and write about those directly. Those posts tend to perform best because they fill a gap the audience already knows exists.

Strategy 2: Treat marketing as a clinical skill therapists already have

One of the clearest ideas in Kelly's teaching is that therapists already know how to market themselves. They have just never been told to think of it that way.

"Marketing, at its core, is reflective listening — understanding someone's pain, naming it clearly, and mirroring that back to them. That's exactly what therapists do every single day. When therapists learn how to translate their clinical skills into client-centered messaging, marketing stops feeling salesy and starts feeling aligned." — Kelly McKenna, LCSW, MBA, Founder of Business of Therapy

This reframe is the engine behind everything she teaches. Therapists arrive at her course convinced they have no marketing ability. They leave understanding that the skill they have been practicing in session for years, hearing what someone says, reflecting it back clearly, identifying the underlying need, is exactly the skill that makes marketing work.

The practical effect is that her students do not have to become different people to grow their practices. They apply what they already know in a different context. For many of them, that shift alone changes their relationship to the whole idea of putting themselves out there.

Take action

Before writing any marketing copy, write down the specific problem your ideal client is experiencing in their own words. Then write a post that names that problem exactly as they would name it, before offering anything. That mirroring is what creates the recognition that drives inquiries.
Review your last five pieces of content and ask whether they reflect what clients are feeling or what you think they should know. The former performs; the latter educates without converting.

Strategy 3: Price the product to reflect what a caseload change is actually worth

Kelly's first digital product, the anxiety course, was priced as a low-ticket entry point. The Private Practice Academy Bundle went in the opposite direction.

The original presale price was $447. Then $597. When she rebuilt and rebranded the course and added substantial new content, the price moved to $1,397. She runs regular launch pricing at $997, which is still a meaningful investment for most buyers.

"I firmly believe therapists are naturally some of the best marketers but they just don't realize it. Every therapist deserves to make six figures." — Kelly McKenna, LCSW, MBA, Founder of Business of Therapy

The pricing reflects the outcome on offer. A therapist who fills her caseload with private-pay clients at $250 per session and sees 15 clients a week earns over $190,000 a year. A course priced at $997 that delivers that result is not expensive relative to the change it produces. Kelly's students grasp that math, and the student messages in her submitted materials show the results: first condos purchased, debt paid off, babies born without financial anxiety.

She has also been direct about one misunderstanding she pushes back on consistently: the idea that digital products are passive income. The Private Practice Academy Bundle has gone through two major curriculum overhauls and quarterly updates since launch. The 1,000 students it has served received a living product, not a recording that sat untouched.

"The most profitable digital products are the ones that actually get people results. And that requires work. You should constantly be evolving your digital products as you learn more and get feedback from customers. Not necessarily to add more material, but to simplify and speed up what folks need to do to get the desired result." — Kelly McKenna, LCSW, MBA, Founder of Business of Therapy

Take action

Price your course against the value of the outcome, not the hours of content inside it. A 4-module course that reliably produces a specific financial result is worth more than a 20-module course that covers everything without a clear transformation.
Schedule a curriculum review every quarter. The goal is not to add more material. The goal is to remove anything that slows a student down before they reach their first result.

Strategy 4: Add a subscription product to sit alongside the flagship course

The Private Practice Academy Bundle is a one-time purchase. The Reels Membership is a recurring subscription that gives therapists a steady stream of content ideas and templates for Instagram.

Kelly launched the membership in January 2021, generating over $413,000 with around 800 active members at any given time. The two products serve different needs without competing with each other. The course teaches the full system. The membership handles the ongoing execution problem that most therapists hit after they understand the strategy but struggle to maintain consistency.

"I'm constantly evolving the PPA Bundle. I see the course as a living resource that adapts alongside the therapists it serves." — Kelly McKenna, LCSW, MBA, Founder of Business of Therapy

Kelly’s ran two 4-day flash sales so far this year. The February 2026 PPA flash added 34 new therapists while the April 2026 Reels Membership flash sale added 51 new members. Running both products creates a flywheel: students who find the course often convert to the membership for ongoing support, and membership subscribers who want the full picture often upgrade to the course.

Take action

Identify the recurring execution problem your students face after completing your main course, then build a subscription product around solving that specific problem. The subscription should not duplicate the course. It should handle what students need to do every week after they have learned the core material.
On Teachable, you can run both a one-time course and a subscription membership under the same school. Map out the student journey: which product do they buy first, and what do they need next?

‍How Kelly thinks about scaling without losing the clinical foundation

Kelly holds two credentials that rarely appear together: a clinical social work license and an MBA. For most of her career, those two things lived in separate worlds. The clinical work was about presence and relationship. The business degree was about strategy and systems. Building her practice and then her education business forced her to understand that the division was artificial.

The same skills that make a therapist effective in session, hearing what is actually being said, identifying the real need underneath the presenting problem, creating a feeling of safety, are the skills that make marketing work. She did not just teach this as a concept. She built her own business by treating her Instagram audience the way she would treat a client: with honest attention to what they were actually struggling with.

"My background as a therapist has deeply shaped my teaching style. In clinical work, authenticity and relational safety are everything. People grow when they feel seen, not talked down to. I bring that same philosophy into my content and teachings." — Kelly McKenna, LCSW, MBA, Founder of Business of Therapy

She is also careful about what she promises. Students who move through the course quickly and implement consistently see results within weeks. Students who delay implementation see results that match their pace. She does not dress this up:

"The timeline depends less on the material itself and more on how quickly someone takes action. Those who implement consistently tend to see momentum build quickly." — Kelly McKenna, LCSW, MBA, Founder of Business of Therapy

What students take away

The student messages Kelly shared in her case study application are not about follower counts or viral posts. They are about what financial stability makes possible.

One student wrote: "Since starting my own private practice and having some private pay clients I have been able to buy my first condo and get myself out of credit card debt."

Another shared this: "PPA is the best business investment I've made. It has seriously changed my life and business. I've already doubled my income while remaining part-time so I can spend time with my kids."

A third described finishing her first year in practice: "I used to talk to friends about feeling afraid that as a therapist I'd never be able to afford to pay my student loans and have a baby. I've now had my first baby and was able to do all the home prep and prenatal yoga without being budget-anxious. Kelly's reels membership, PPA, and VIP have been crucial to navigating both the logistics and mindset pieces to make this possible for my first year in business."

"The feedback that has meant the most to me isn't about follower growth or even revenue, it's about how therapists have been able to change their lives. When a therapist tells me they've bought their first home, paid off debt, doubled their income while working part-time, or finally felt financially secure enough to start a family, that's what stays with me." — Kelly McKenna, LCSW, MBA, Founder of Business of Therapy

Looking ahead

Kelly lives in Miami with her husband Tom, their son Aidan, and their dog Jozi.

The Business of Therapy podcast launched in 2024 and added another channel for reaching therapists who prefer audio and longer-form content. She continues updating the Private Practice Academy Bundle on a quarterly basis at minimum, with major curriculum overhauls when the material needs it. The course is now on its second significant rebuild since the original launch.

Her stated goal is direct: every therapist deserves to make six figures. The financial sustainability she describes is not aspirational framing. It is the specific outcome she has built her entire curriculum to produce, starting from her own first year in private practice when she earned $250,000 without having built anything like this before.

What to do next

Explore Kelly's work:

Visit businessoftherapy.com to access the Private Practice Academy Bundle, the Reels Membership, and Kelly's free training on marketing a therapy practice on Instagram.

Connect with Kelly:

Try Teachable yourself:

Kelly moved from one-on-one coaching calls to a course that has served over 1,000 therapists. Start your Teachable trial and build the product your audience has been asking for.

Cross-Exam: Professional pilot and licensed engineer put each other to the test

Watch the full episode of Cross-Exam.

What separates a good teacher from a great one has less to do with what they know and more to do with how they make someone else understand it. Two of Teachable's most successful educators decided to find out the hard way.

Dan George (FAA Gold Seal CFI, founder of FlightInsight, and aviation instructor to 10,000+ students across 60+ countries) and Wasim Asghar (licensed Professional Engineer in the US and Canada, founder of Study For FE, and author of 8+ engineering exam prep books) sat down across from each other and agreed to teach a foundational concept from their own field to the other. Then they had to teach it back.

The result is the debut episode of Cross-Exam, a new Teachable series where two expert educators swap roles. What the teach-back reveals about learning, retention, and the gap between knowing and explaining is worth paying attention to.

Round 1: The physics behind flying airplanes

Dan opened with the lift equation: Lift = Coefficient of Lift x (1/2) x air density x velocity squared x wing surface area.

He walked through each variable, but kept coming back to velocity. Because it carries an exponent, small changes in airspeed affect lift far more than equivalent changes in any other factor.

Before getting into the equation though, Dan had to dismantle something first.

"If I slow the aircraft down, I can maintain my altitude by increasing angle of attack… I call this the Star Wars conception of how things fly. You point the ship in a certain direction and it just goes there at an angle." — Dan George, founder of FlightInsight

Naming the wrong model before replacing it is a teaching move that works better than most educators realize.

Once the flawed assumption is on the table, students will let go of it. Before it is named, they hold onto it quietly and build misunderstandings on top.

Round 2: The core formula behind electrical engineering

Wasim covered Ohm's Law: V = I x R, voltage equals current times resistance.

Rather than define the variables abstractly, he built the whole thing around a water pipe.

Voltage is the pressure difference between two ends. Current is the rate of flow. Resistance is whatever obstructs it.

"If there's dirt in here, if there are obstacles, rocks, pebbles, they're going to impede the flow of current." — Wasim Asghar, founder of Study For FE

From there, he went after the most persistent misconception in electrical safety: that voltage is what kills you.

It is actually current.

Roughly 40 milliamps through the body is a guaranteed fatality. A coffee maker draws about 1,000 milliamps. The lethal threshold is two to five percent of what runs through a kitchen appliance.

"It's not the voltage that is dangerous. It's really the current." — Wasim Asghar, founder of Study For FE

A bird sitting on a 1,000-volt transmission line survives because the voltage difference across its two feet is zero.

For anyone building a course on a technical subject: definitions without physical anchors give learners nothing to hold onto.

A concrete system they already understand gives the new concept traction.

What the best educators do differently

Both Dan and Wasim have taught their subjects hundreds of times. What this episode showed is how both of them have rebuilt their explanations around the most common misunderstandings rather than the most logical starting points.

Dan leads with the lift equation because it forces students to confront the variables that actually matter in the cockpit. Wasim leads with the water pipe because it replaces the assumption that voltage is dangerous with the fact that current is.

A 2008 study by Kornell and Bjork found that retrieval practice, having learners reconstruct material from memory rather than passively review it, produces significantly stronger retention than re-reading alone. Cross-Exam runs that experiment in real time.

Dan described what happens when he teaches the same material over and over.

"Every time I do it, it gets a little bit different. I can always rediscover some kind of a new insight or some new way of teaching." — Dan George, founder of FlightInsight

Dan built FlightInsight into a school with over 10,000 students by publishing twice a week, every week, for four years. His full creator case study gets into how that consistency turned into a real business.

Wasim built Study For FE on the same principle. His reframe that current determines electrical danger is the kind of correction that sticks because it runs counter to what most students walk in believing.

Watch the full episode

Dan and Wasim both teach on Teachable. Between them they have built course libraries that reach students in dozens of countries, in fields where getting the material wrong carries real consequences.

Both of them became better teachers by treating their explanations as working documents rather than finished products.

Want to know more about this episode’s guests?

Follow Dan George: YouTube | Website | Teachable School | Instagram | LinkedIn

Follow Wasim Asghar: YouTube | Website | LinkedIn

Teachable gives you courses, coaching, digital downloads, and memberships in one place. See plans and pricing.

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.

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.

Skills gap analysis: how to figure out what your team needs to learn

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"We need to figure out what skills we're missing." It gets said in a lot of leadership meetings, usually after a missed goal, a new initiative, or a round of exit interviews that all point to the same theme. Then it lands with someone in HR or L&D who has to figure out what to actually do with it.

According to Springboard for Business's State of the Workforce Skills Gap 2024, 70% of corporate leaders report a critical skills gap in their organization that is negatively affecting business performance. The gap is real. The question is how to identify specifically which gaps matter most and in what order to close them.

A skills gap analysis is the answer to that question. Executed well, it tells you where the distance between what your team can do today and what the business needs them to do is most significant. It also gives you the basis for prioritizing learning investments that will produce measurable results.

Executed poorly, it produces a sprawling list of capabilities that need improvement, with no guidance on where to start and no connection to what the business is actually trying to accomplish. Here is how to do it well.

What a skills gap analysis actually is

A skills gap analysis compares two things: the capabilities your organization needs to achieve its goals, and the capabilities your people actually have. The distance between those two things is what you are trying to understand and close.

The key word is "needs." A skills gap analysis is a focused exercise in identifying the capability gaps that most constrain the business. These are the gaps where closing them would most directly enable growth, reduce risk, or improve performance. An inventory of everything everyone could theoretically improve is a different exercise entirely, one that typically takes months and produces outputs nobody uses.

Given where we are trying to go, what do we need our people to be able to do that they cannot do well enough today? That question, asked honestly and with the right people in the room, is the starting point for a useful analysis.

That framing keeps the analysis grounded. Rather than assessing organizational capability in the abstract, you are answering a specific question tied to where the business is headed.

Step 1: Start with business goals, not job descriptions

The most common mistake in skills gap analyses is starting with job descriptions or competency models. These capture what roles are supposed to involve, not what capabilities the business specifically needs to hit its goals right now.

Start instead with the organization's most important priorities for the next twelve to eighteen months. For each one, ask: what do our people need to know or be able to do to execute this? What capabilities are most critical to success here?

Then ask the harder question: where are we most likely to fall short? What capabilities, if you are being direct about it, are you not confident you have at the level the plan requires?

That conversation, ideally with functional leaders and not only HR, surfaces the gaps that matter most rather than the ones that are easiest to measure. For organizations building this into a broader L&D planning process, this business-goals-first approach is the same principle that makes a training program worth funding.

Step 2: Gather data from multiple sources

A skills gap analysis based on a single data source is unreliable. The clearest picture comes from combining multiple inputs:

Manager assessments: Structured conversations with managers about where their teams are strongest, where they struggle, and what capabilities would most improve team performance. Managers are the closest proxy to on-the-job capability and often have specific insights that surveys miss entirely.
Performance data: Where are errors, delays, quality issues, or customer complaints most concentrated? These are often symptoms of capability gaps, specific knowledge or skill that people have not developed.
Employee self-assessment: Survey employees on where they feel most and least confident in their role. Self-assessments have well-known biases, but they surface perception gaps and areas where people feel undertrained — both of which are worth knowing about.
Exit interview themes: Recurring mentions of "I felt out of my depth" or "I was not given the support to succeed" often point to specific capability gaps in onboarding or ongoing development. See how those gaps map to your new hire training program design.
Direct work review: For roles where output is visible, reviewing actual work product is often more accurate than any survey. Sales calls, written deliverables, and customer interactions all tell you more about real capability than a self-reported confidence rating.

‍

The goal is a convergent picture. When multiple sources point to the same gap, you have high confidence it is real. When only one source flags something, treat it as a hypothesis to investigate before committing resources to it.

Step 3: Prioritize by business impact, not by size

The output of a skills gap analysis is almost always a longer list than any organization can act on at once. Most analyses stall at this stage because the prioritization question, which gaps to close first, gets answered by committee consensus rather than a clear decision process.

A two-dimension evaluation helps cut through this. For each identified gap, assess:

Business impact: How much would closing this gap affect a metric that matters? High-impact gaps are the ones where better capability would directly enable a goal, reduce a significant risk, or improve a key performance measure.
Feasibility: Is this gap addressable through training? Some capability gaps are learning problems. Others are hiring gaps, process failures, or resource constraints that training will not solve. Only invest in closing gaps that are genuinely training-addressable.

The gaps that score high on both dimensions are your first priorities. The rest can be sequenced or deprioritized based on available resources and timing. Once you know what to build, the post on how to create a training program covers the design decisions from there.

Step 4: Define what "closed" looks like before you build anything

Before designing any training intervention for a priority gap, define what closing it looks like. Completion of training is a participation metric, not a success metric. The right question is: what will be different in the organization when this gap is closed?

For a product knowledge gap, the answer might be rep confidence scores in calls or first-call conversion rate. For an onboarding gap, it might be time-to-first-independent-contribution for new hires. For a compliance gap, it might be audit pass rate.

Defining success upfront shapes the design of the training program toward the outcome rather than toward coverage of the topic. It also gives you the basis for evaluating whether the investment produced results. For more on how to set and measure those metrics, see how to measure training effectiveness.

How often to run a skills gap analysis

A full skills gap analysis is a substantial exercise. Most organizations benefit from running one annually, aligned with planning cycles, so that learning priorities get set in the same context as business priorities.

Between annual analyses, a lighter ongoing practice is more valuable than waiting a full year to update. Quarterly check-ins with functional leaders, tracking performance data on identified gaps, and periodic short pulse surveys can surface new gaps as they emerge. Organizations running asynchronous training programs have an advantage here: completion data and knowledge check results provide a near-real-time signal on where gaps are closing and where they are not.

Teachable gives L&D teams the delivery platform to act on skills gap findings, with completion tracking and progress data that tell you whether your highest-priority gaps are actually closing. See how it works at teachable.com/scalable-training.

From analysis to action

The value of a skills gap analysis is the decisions it enables, not the document it produces. The most useful analyses end with a small number of prioritized learning investments, a defined success measure for each, and an owner responsible for each intervention.

That output is what an L&D strategy looks like when it has organizational credibility: a clear set of priorities that leadership understands and will fund, tied to goals that employees recognize as worth learning toward. The analysis establishes the foundation. Building well on it is where the real work begins.

Teachable gives L&D teams the tools to act on skills gap findings — from building targeted content to tracking whether it's working.

Product knowledge training: how to make sure your team can sell what you build

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There is a particular kind of sales call that product and marketing teams dread. A rep is on with a qualified prospect, things are going well, and then they misstate a key capability, oversell a feature that has not shipped yet, or go blank on a question that should be standard. The deal goes cold and the loss goes into a report that will get reviewed at the end of the quarter.

According to research cited by Valuecore, 82% of B2B decision-makers say the sales reps they meet with are unprepared. Those are not bad reps. Those are undertrained ones. Product knowledge gaps are among the most consistent sources of avoidable deal losses, and the information to fix them almost always already exists inside the organization.

Here is how to build product knowledge training that produces genuine confidence and accuracy in the field.

Why product knowledge training often fails

Most product knowledge training programs share the same structural problem: they are built from the product's perspective rather than the seller's. A full walkthrough of every feature, organized by product area, tells reps everything that exists. What it does not tell them is what matters to a specific buyer type, when in a conversation to surface it, or how to talk about it in a way that actually lands.

The result is reps who know the product conceptually but struggle to deploy that knowledge in conversation. They freeze on objections, give generic answers to specific questions, or compensate by pulling a technical colleague into calls where they should be able to hold their own.

Good product knowledge training is built from the seller's perspective: organized by use case, buyer type, and objection — not by feature category. That single reframe changes the usefulness of almost everything in the program.

What product knowledge training actually needs to cover

Effective product knowledge training builds four types of knowledge:

1. Use case fluency

Which customers use which parts of the product, in what ways, to solve which problems. This is what lets a rep say "we work with a lot of companies like yours — here is how they typically approach this" instead of launching into a generic product walkthrough.

Use case knowledge is best taught through customer stories and recorded calls, not product documentation. The most useful product training libraries are organized by industry, company size, or buyer role, and drawn from real customer conversations. For organizations also running sales onboarding programs, this library is the same asset — build it once and it serves both programs.

2. Objection response

"Your product does not do X." "We already have Y." "How is this different from Z?" These objections appear in nearly every deal and are completely predictable. Reps who have practiced specific, accurate responses to them perform better than reps who improvise under pressure.

Documenting the ten to fifteen most common product objections and the effective responses to each — then making sure every rep has worked through them — is one of the highest-return investments in product training. The responses already exist in your best reps' heads. The work is getting them out and into a format the whole team can use.

3. Competitive positioning

How your product compares to the alternatives buyers are evaluating. This does not mean building a sprawling feature comparison matrix. It means knowing the two or three areas where you are genuinely stronger, the areas where alternatives have advantages, and the framing that helps buyers understand why the differences matter for their situation.

Reps who can acknowledge a competitor's strengths while explaining why your approach is better for the buyer's specific situation are more credible than reps who pretend no alternatives exist. Honest competitive fluency builds trust. See also the channel partner enablement guide for how competitive positioning works when reps are external partners rather than employees.

4. What's new

Products change. Features get added, pricing models evolve, positioning shifts. A rep who has been in the role for eighteen months may be selling based on a product picture that is significantly out of date. Keeping product knowledge current is an ongoing training challenge, not a one-time project.

The solution is a defined update cadence tied to product releases, not a hope that reps will find and absorb release notes on their own.

How to deliver product knowledge training that sticks

Research from Harvard Business Review and Sales Performance International finds that 87% of training content is forgotten within a month. The programs that overcome this share a common design: they build in practice, not just consumption.

Organize by role and buyer type, not product area. A rep selling to mid-market companies needs different emphasis than one selling to enterprise accounts. Build tracks that reflect how the product is actually sold, not how it was built.
Use recorded calls as curriculum. A library of annotated calls — "here is how our best rep handled this objection," "here is what good use case discovery looks like" — is more useful than any training module built from scratch. The best material already exists on your call recording platform.
Build in practice, not just consumption. Product knowledge assessed only through multiple-choice questions does not transfer to conversational fluency. Have reps practice responses to common objections in recorded format — even informal video submissions — to build the verbal fluency that matters in real calls. For a deeper look at how to measure training effectiveness beyond completion rates, that post covers the metrics that actually connect to field performance.
Create a just-in-time reference library. Reps who can quickly search for the right answer before a specific call are more confident and more accurate than reps who rely on memory alone. A searchable library of short, targeted content serves this purpose far better than long-form training modules that were built for initial onboarding.
Update content on a defined cadence. Every significant product release should trigger a training update review. Assign someone to own the question "is our product training still accurate?" and check it on a schedule, not only when a rep surfaces a gap.

Teachable gives sales enablement and product marketing teams a platform for product knowledge content with completion tracking, a searchable library, and the ability to push updates without IT involvement. See how organizations use it at teachable.com/scalable-training.

The signal that product knowledge training is working

Assessment scores and completion rates are easy to measure. They are not the best indicators that training is producing results. The clearest signal is what changes in the field: reps handle objections independently rather than escalating, demos stay accurate without product team oversight, and new reps reach conversational fluency faster than previous cohorts did.

Getting there requires building training from the seller's perspective, organized around how reps actually talk to buyers rather than how the product was built. That reframe is the most consequential change most product knowledge programs could make, and it costs nothing except the willingness to rebuild the library from scratch.

For organizations also looking at how product training connects to broader new hire training program design, the principles are the same: build from the job, not from the org chart.

Teachable gives your enablement team a structured library, completion tracking, and the ability to keep content current as your product evolves.

Continuing medical education online: what CME providers need to know

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Physicians have completed continuing medical education since long before the internet existed. In-person grand rounds, workshops, and conferences built the model that still defines many physicians’ mental picture of what CME looks like. The logistics of that model — gathering practitioners from across a region for a half-day session — have always created tension with the reality of clinical schedules.

Online CME resolves that tension directly. According to the ACCME 2023 Annual Data Report, physician learner interactions with enduring online materials grew 120% compared to 2019 figures. Organizations are using that growth to reach physicians across regions and specialties, deliver accredited education outside the constraints of live events, and track completion in ways that in-person delivery makes difficult.

Translating a well-run in-person CME program to an online format takes more than putting slides on a website. The accreditation requirements, the learner experience, and the delivery and tracking setup all look different online. Here is what CME providers need to get right.

What the accreditation requirements actually demand

ACCME-accredited providers operating online face the same core standards as in-person programs — educational independence, needs assessment, competence-based learning objectives, and outcome evaluation. The documentation and verification requirements, however, look different in an online context.

Several areas where online delivery creates specific requirements:

Activity verification: Online CME requires mechanisms to confirm that physicians engaged with the educational content, not simply that they accessed it. Completion requirements, minimum time-on-task, and post-test performance are the most common verification methods.
MOC point integration: Many physicians need CME activities that also satisfy Maintenance of Certification requirements. Online activities need to be designed and documented to meet the relevant specialty board’s MOC Part II criteria before MOC points can be offered.
Disclosure management: Conflict of interest disclosure requirements apply fully to online activities. The disclosure presentation, reviewer sign-off workflow, and supporting documentation all need systematic management, not ad hoc handling.
Outcome data collection: ACCME’s outcomes measurement model expects providers to collect and report data on whether CME activities changed physician competence, performance, or patient outcomes. Online programs make this easier to execute if you design for it from the start.

Working through your accreditor’s specific requirements for online activities before building your delivery and tracking setup costs far less than retrofitting compliance after launch. For a full guide to running accredited programs online, see how to run a continuing education program online.

The learner experience challenge specific to physician CME

Physicians are a demanding learner population. Their time is genuinely scarce, their tolerance for friction is low, and their expectations for educational quality are high. An online CME program that treats physicians like a generic learner audience will produce poor completion numbers and worse satisfaction scores.

Physicians need to know exactly how many AMA PRA Category 1 Credits they will earn, whether MOC points are available, and what completion requires — before they start. Ambiguity in this information drives drop-off before the first slide.

Several factors matter specifically for physician learners:

Mobile-first design: A significant percentage of CME is completed outside clinical hours — evenings, early mornings, between appointments. A poor phone experience closes those completion windows entirely.
Progress saving: A physician who starts a module and gets paged needs to resume exactly where they left off. Any platform that requires restarting interrupted sessions is the wrong tool for clinical learners.
Certificate access on demand: Physicians need to document CME for licensure, credentialing, and MOC submissions. Their certificates of completion need to be available whenever they need them, not emailed once and then inaccessible.
Credit clarity upfront: Before starting any activity, physicians need to know exactly how many AMA PRA Category 1 Credits they will earn, whether MOC points are available, and what completion requires. Ambiguity in this information drives drop-off.

Operational requirements for online CME programs

The operational complexity of running online CME programs is consistently underestimated. The accreditation, content development, and learner experience requirements are visible from the start. The tracking, reporting, and records management requirements become clear once programs launch and grow.

Credit tracking by activity type

CME programs commonly involve multiple activity types: enduring materials, internet point-of-care activities, journal-based CME, performance improvement activities. Each carries different credit values and completion requirements. Your platform needs to track credits by activity type separately, not just as aggregate totals.

Automated certificate generation

Manual certificate generation does not hold up at volume. An online CME program serving hundreds or thousands of physicians needs to issue certificates automatically on completion — with the physician’s name, the activity title, the credit amount, the date, and the provider accreditation information all populated correctly. A platform built for continuing education programs handles this without additional staff time per completion.

PARS reporting preparation

ACCME-accredited providers must submit data to PARS (Program and Activity Reporting System) annually. Having clean, exportable data from your online platform makes this process straightforward. When your platform produces data that does not map to PARS requirements, the result is manual data work that compounds across hundreds of activities and reporting cycles.

Learner record persistence

Physicians may need to document CME from years prior for licensing renewal, credentialing applications, or MOC submissions. Completion records need to be stored persistently and retrievable on request — not just visible to the physician at the moment of completion. For a broader look at what this requires in practice, see what to look for in an LMS for continuing education.

What to look for in a CME delivery platform

Generic LMS platforms were not designed for the operational requirements of accredited CME. The compliance tracking, the credit tracking by type, the certificate requirements, and the PARS reporting preparation are all gaps that most standard platforms address through workarounds rather than native capability.

What CME providers actually need from a platform:

Configurable completion requirements: Minimum pass scores, time-on-task tracking, required content sequencing — all adjustable per activity type without IT involvement.
Flat-fee pricing for large learner populations: Per-seat pricing becomes prohibitive for organizations reaching thousands of physicians annually. Flat-fee licensing changes the math entirely.
White-label presentation: CME programs carry the provider’s accreditation credibility. The platform should present as yours, not as a third-party tool.
Exportable completion data: Clean individual-level records that you own and can pull for PARS reporting, board reporting, or internal audits at any time.
Content updates without IT support: Your CME team should be able to update activity content, adjust completion requirements, and add new activities without opening a ticket. This matters more as your program grows.

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Teachable gives CME providers flat-fee pricing, configurable completion requirements, automated certificates, and exportable completion data. See how organizations use it for accredited programs at teachable.com/scalable-training. For organizations also running onboarding or compliance training alongside CME, see how the online education platform for professional associations use case maps to your needs.

The reach that online CME makes possible

The constraint that in-person CME imposes — geography, scheduling, physical capacity — disappears with a well-built online program. A hospital system, medical society, or specialty college that builds its online CME on the right platform can reach practitioners across a region or specialty at a cost per learner that in-person delivery cannot approach.

The organizations that get online CME right build for accreditation requirements and physician learner experience from the beginning, rather than retrofitting compliance onto a platform that was not designed for it. That upfront investment pays back in reach, in learner satisfaction, and in the organizational credibility that comes from running a program physicians trust and return to.

Teachable gives CME providers the completion tracking, automated certificate issuance, and flat-fee pricing that accredited programs require.

What is asynchronous training and why is it effective for L&D?

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Consider the last time you actually learned something useful at work. Chances are it happened on your own time — a quick video before a meeting, a written guide you found mid-task, a recorded walkthrough from a colleague. You found the resource when you needed it, on a timeline that worked for you.

That is asynchronous learning. The concept is straightforward: training that happens on the learner's schedule, not the trainer's. According to research from LinkedIn Learning, 58% of employees prefer to learn at their own pace. Most training programs are still built around the trainer's schedule. That gap is exactly where async delivery wins.

Organizations are increasingly building their training programs around async delivery — not only for remote teams, but for anyone whose work schedule does not allow for everyone-in-the-same-room learning. Here is what that means in practice, where it works, and where it falls short.

Asynchronous vs. synchronous training: the core difference

Synchronous training happens in real time: a classroom session, a live webinar, a facilitated workshop. Everyone is present simultaneously, the trainer delivers, and questions get answered in the moment.

Asynchronous training happens on demand: a recorded video, a self-paced module, a written course. Learners access content when it works for them, move through material at their own speed, and complete the learning without a facilitator present.

Most effective training programs use both formats. The question is what role each plays. For most organizations, the balance has shifted significantly toward async as the primary delivery mode — and that shift is structural, not temporary.

Why async has become the default for most training programs

Several factors have made asynchronous training the practical default across industries:

Distributed and remote workforces. Getting everyone on the same video call requires scheduling across time zones, varying work arrangements, and operational demands that often cannot be moved. Async training removes that coordination cost entirely.
Shift-based and frontline environments. For manufacturing, healthcare, retail, and similar settings, pulling an entire team off the floor for a training session creates real operational disruption. Async training can be completed between shifts, during slower periods, or on a personal device.
Learning retention research. A substantial body of research shows that shorter, more frequent learning sessions produce better retention than longer, less frequent ones. Async delivery makes it practical to break content into ten-to-fifteen-minute modules that people can complete and revisit when needed.
Delivery cost at volume. A synchronous training program requires a trainer's time every time a new cohort starts. An async program reaches any number of learners without additional delivery cost per session, which matters considerably when you are onboarding across multiple locations or training a large distributed team.

For organizations running remote employee training programs, async delivery is often the only operationally viable option. It is also what makes consistent training possible across locations that would never share the same calendar.

What asynchronous training does well

Async training excels in several specific learning contexts:

Knowledge transfer. Teaching concepts, explaining processes, conveying information people need to understand before they can apply it — this is the bulk of most training curricula and the clearest use case for async delivery.
Compliance and procedural training. Content requiring documented completion, consistent delivery across a large population, and proof that every employee received the same information. Async platforms handle this better than live sessions, and the certificate of completion tracking makes audit trails straightforward.
Onboarding fundamentals. The product knowledge, process orientation, and policy overview every new hire needs can be packaged once and delivered consistently to everyone. For organizations looking to build a stronger new hire training program, async modules are usually where that program starts.
Just-in-time reference learning. Content people access when they need it — before a specific meeting, when they encounter an unfamiliar situation, or when they need to refresh a skill. This kind of learning is inherently async and nearly impossible to replicate in a live format.

Where asynchronous training has real limitations

Async learning requires self-direction. For learners who are not intrinsically motivated to complete training, programs without clear deadlines and manager involvement tend to see lower completion rates.

Async training has genuine limitations that organizations sometimes try to address by adding more content. More modules do not fix the underlying gaps. Async is consistently less effective for:

Building relationships and organizational culture. The informal connection that happens when people learn together — the side conversations, the shared experience of a workshop, the sense of cohort belonging — does not transfer to async formats. Cohort-based programs benefit from synchronous moments specifically for this reason.
Complex judgment and application. Learning to handle ambiguous situations, practice difficult conversations, or apply judgment in high-stakes contexts usually requires real-time feedback and coaching. Async formats provide neither.
Learners who need external accountability. Async learning demands self-direction. Without clear deadlines, manager involvement, or visible completion requirements, programs tend to have lower completion rates than synchronous alternatives. This is an organizational design challenge, not a content problem.

Building an async training program that actually gets completed

The largest practical challenge with async training is completion. These are the factors that consistently make the difference:

Keep modules short. Ten to fifteen minutes is the practical ceiling for sustained engagement in solo video learning. When a topic requires more depth, sequence it into multiple shorter modules rather than extending a single one.
Build in interaction. Knowledge checks, scenario questions, and reflection prompts within modules increase engagement and retention compared to passive video. The learner should have to do something, not just watch.
Set explicit expectations. Employees complete async training when they know it is required, when the deadline is clear, and when there are visible consequences — including manager awareness — for not finishing.
Give managers completion visibility. Async programs with manager dashboards have significantly higher completion rates than programs where only the learner can see their own progress. Visibility changes behavior at the organizational level, not just the individual level.
Design for mobile from the start. A large proportion of async learning happens on phones, particularly for frontline, shift-based, and field workers. A poor mobile experience means those learners will not finish. This is especially important for safety training programs where completion is a compliance requirement.

Teachable is built for async delivery across distributed teams — with self-paced modules, completion tracking, manager dashboards, and a mobile experience designed for learners wherever they work. See what that looks like at teachable.com/scalable-training.

The combination that produces the best outcomes

The most effective training programs use async and synchronous learning in combination — async for information delivery and self-paced skill building, synchronous for application practice, team connection, and the kind of judgment development that requires real-time interaction.

Getting the balance right starts with clarity about what you are trying to achieve with each part of the program. Async training handles a specific and substantial set of learning jobs. When organizations design it specifically for those jobs — short modules, clear expectations, completion visibility — the results hold up well across a wide range of audiences and industries. The organizations that see the weakest results are the ones that use async as a default without designing for the format.

For a deeper look at how to build corporate training software and delivery infrastructure that supports both formats, see how organizations currently use Teachable across distributed workforces.

Teachable gives you the delivery platform, completion tracking, and mobile experience async training requires — for teams of any size, anywhere.

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Skills gap analysis: how to figure out what your team needs to learn

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May 20, 2026

What a skills gap analysis actually is

That framing keeps the analysis grounded. Rather than assessing organizational capability in the abstract, you are answering a specific question tied to where the business is headed.

Step 1: Start with business goals, not job descriptions

Then ask the harder question: where are we most likely to fall short? What capabilities, if you are being direct about it, are you not confident you have at the level the plan requires?

Step 2: Gather data from multiple sources

A skills gap analysis based on a single data source is unreliable. The clearest picture comes from combining multiple inputs:

Manager assessments: Structured conversations with managers about where their teams are strongest, where they struggle, and what capabilities would most improve team performance. Managers are the closest proxy to on-the-job capability and often have specific insights that surveys miss entirely.
Performance data: Where are errors, delays, quality issues, or customer complaints most concentrated? These are often symptoms of capability gaps, specific knowledge or skill that people have not developed.
Employee self-assessment: Survey employees on where they feel most and least confident in their role. Self-assessments have well-known biases, but they surface perception gaps and areas where people feel undertrained — both of which are worth knowing about.
Exit interview themes: Recurring mentions of "I felt out of my depth" or "I was not given the support to succeed" often point to specific capability gaps in onboarding or ongoing development. See how those gaps map to your new hire training program design.
Direct work review: For roles where output is visible, reviewing actual work product is often more accurate than any survey. Sales calls, written deliverables, and customer interactions all tell you more about real capability than a self-reported confidence rating.

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Step 3: Prioritize by business impact, not by size

A two-dimension evaluation helps cut through this. For each identified gap, assess:

Business impact: How much would closing this gap affect a metric that matters? High-impact gaps are the ones where better capability would directly enable a goal, reduce a significant risk, or improve a key performance measure.
Feasibility: Is this gap addressable through training? Some capability gaps are learning problems. Others are hiring gaps, process failures, or resource constraints that training will not solve. Only invest in closing gaps that are genuinely training-addressable.

Step 4: Define what "closed" looks like before you build anything

How often to run a skills gap analysis

From analysis to action

Teachable gives L&D teams the tools to act on skills gap findings — from building targeted content to tracking whether it's working.

Product knowledge training: how to make sure your team can sell what you build

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Here is how to build product knowledge training that produces genuine confidence and accuracy in the field.

Why product knowledge training often fails

What product knowledge training actually needs to cover

Effective product knowledge training builds four types of knowledge:

1. Use case fluency

2. Objection response

3. Competitive positioning

4. What's new

The solution is a defined update cadence tied to product releases, not a hope that reps will find and absorb release notes on their own.

How to deliver product knowledge training that sticks

Organize by role and buyer type, not product area. A rep selling to mid-market companies needs different emphasis than one selling to enterprise accounts. Build tracks that reflect how the product is actually sold, not how it was built.
Use recorded calls as curriculum. A library of annotated calls — "here is how our best rep handled this objection," "here is what good use case discovery looks like" — is more useful than any training module built from scratch. The best material already exists on your call recording platform.
Build in practice, not just consumption. Product knowledge assessed only through multiple-choice questions does not transfer to conversational fluency. Have reps practice responses to common objections in recorded format — even informal video submissions — to build the verbal fluency that matters in real calls. For a deeper look at how to measure training effectiveness beyond completion rates, that post covers the metrics that actually connect to field performance.
Create a just-in-time reference library. Reps who can quickly search for the right answer before a specific call are more confident and more accurate than reps who rely on memory alone. A searchable library of short, targeted content serves this purpose far better than long-form training modules that were built for initial onboarding.
Update content on a defined cadence. Every significant product release should trigger a training update review. Assign someone to own the question "is our product training still accurate?" and check it on a schedule, not only when a rep surfaces a gap.

The signal that product knowledge training is working

For organizations also looking at how product training connects to broader new hire training program design, the principles are the same: build from the job, not from the org chart.

Teachable gives your enablement team a structured library, completion tracking, and the ability to keep content current as your product evolves.

How to build a sales onboarding program that ramps reps faster

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The cost of a slow sales ramp is one of the most consistently underestimated numbers in revenue organizations. When a new rep takes six months to reach full productivity instead of three, you are not just waiting longer. You are carrying the cost of their salary and benefits while they generate a fraction of their quota. Multiply that across a team that is growing and the number becomes significant fast.

According to research cited by WorkRamp, the average ramp time for a new sales rep is 3.2 months, based on Bridge Group benchmarks. Many organizations are taking considerably longer than that. The gap is almost always the onboarding program.

Sales onboarding tends to be a mix of ride-alongs, product demos, shadowing calls, and the assumption that the new hire will absorb the rest through observation. The reps who succeed often do so in spite of the onboarding program. Here is how to build one that actually helps.

What "ramped" actually means, and why the definition matters

Before designing an onboarding program, get clear on what ramped means for your organization. "Fully productive" is too vague to design toward. A more useful definition has specific, measurable components:

Pipeline generation: The rep can independently build pipeline at the rate the role requires, without significant coaching on prospecting fundamentals.
Product and positioning fluency: The rep can run a discovery call, handle common objections, and position the product accurately without relying on a senior rep.
Process execution: The rep is updating the CRM accurately, following the sales process, and forecasting with reasonable accuracy.
Independent deal progression: The rep can move a deal from qualified to closed without needing a manager on every call.

Defining these milestones before you start building lets you design onboarding content and activities that specifically address each one. It also gives you a way to evaluate whether the program is working.

The four knowledge areas every sales rep needs

Effective sales onboarding covers four distinct knowledge areas. Each one requires different content and different learning approaches.

1. Product knowledge

What you sell, how it works, what problems it solves, and who it is for. This is the easiest area to teach and the most commonly over-emphasized in onboarding. Most reps can learn product fundamentals from structured self-paced content. They do not need a live session to understand the feature set.

What takes longer to develop is the ability to connect product capabilities to specific customer problems in real-time conversation. That requires practice, not just knowledge.

2. Market and buyer knowledge

Who your buyers are, what they care about, what triggers them to look for a solution like yours, and what objections come up most often. This knowledge tends to live in the heads of your best performers rather than in any written document.

The most valuable onboarding content in this category is usually recorded calls with experienced reps, broken down by stage and scenario. Hearing how a skilled rep handles a specific objection is more instructive than any training module on objection handling.

3. Process and tools

Your sales process, your CRM, your outreach cadences, your pricing model, your approval workflows. This is operational knowledge that needs to be accurate and is often poorly documented. New reps who learn the wrong process or who develop bad CRM habits can take months to correct.

This category is well-suited to short, structured online content with clear step-by-step guidance, especially for tools and processes that do not require live facilitation. A well-built new hire training program covers this ground with completion tracking so managers can see exactly where gaps remain.

4. Company and competitive context

Why your company exists, how you position against competitors, what makes your approach distinctive, and how to handle the "why you over X?" question. This is often covered in initial orientation and then never reinforced. Competitive positioning fluency takes repetition to develop, and a single session at the start of onboarding will not build it.

The ramp accelerators most programs leave out

Reps who have to demonstrate knowledge before advancing retain more and enter live selling situations with considerably more confidence.

Beyond the four knowledge areas, a few practices consistently cut ramp time for sales organizations that use them:

Milestone-based manager check-ins rather than calendar-based ones. Ramps happen at different speeds for different reps. A program that advances reps when they demonstrate readiness, rather than on a fixed schedule, moves faster overall.
Early deal involvement with support in place. Reps learn by doing. Getting new hires into real deals early, with a senior rep or manager available, builds practical skill faster than any amount of role-playing. Keep the deals low-stakes at first.
A call library from your best performers. Recorded call libraries, annotated win/loss reviews, and documented deal examples at each stage give new hires access to institutional knowledge in a searchable format. This is the kind of resource that pays for the time it takes to build within the first few hires who go through it.
Certification checkpoints before live selling. Reps who complete a recorded pitch, a scored product quiz, or a simulated discovery call review before going live retain more of what they have learned. Many organizations skip this step. The ones that include it see fewer early mistakes and lower early attrition.

For organizations running safety training programs for employees alongside sales onboarding, the same certification logic applies: documented completion protects the organization and gives new hires a clear finish line to aim for.

How to build it without starting from scratch

The fastest path to a better sales onboarding program is capturing what already works. Your top performers have already figured out what new hires need to know. They are the source material.

A practical starting approach:

Interview your top three or four performers. Ask them what they wish they had known in their first 90 days, what they see new reps get wrong most often, and what resources they would build if they were designing onboarding from the start.
Build content from their answers, not from a product spec. The onboarding program that reflects your best reps’ actual experience is more credible to new hires than one built from marketing materials.
Pilot with a small group before rolling out broadly. Run three or four new hires through the first version, measure their ramp time against your baseline, and adjust before expanding.

The same principle applies to channel partner enablement programs, where the equivalent of a new sales rep is an external partner who needs to get credible with your product quickly. The structure is identical: four knowledge areas, clear milestones, documented completion.

The payoff of getting sales onboarding right

A sales onboarding program that cuts ramp time by four to six weeks per rep compounds across a full hiring cycle. It also reduces early attrition. Reps who feel prepared succeed faster, and reps who succeed faster tend to stay longer.

The investment in building a structured sales onboarding program is almost always recovered within the first cohort that goes through it. The difficult part is doing the work deliberately rather than assuming new hires will figure it out.

Teachable gives sales enablement and revenue operations teams a platform for onboarding content that includes completion tracking, certification, and a searchable library new reps can access before any call. See how organizations use it at teachable.com/scalable-training.

Teachable gives your enablement team the structure to deliver consistent onboarding to every new rep, with the tracking to prove it is working.

How to create an employee development plan that gets executed

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Employee development plans have a participation problem. Most organizations have a process: managers sit down with employees, development goals get documented, and the plan goes into the HR system. Then the next review cycle arrives and most of those goals have not moved.

The documentation exists. The follow-through rarely does. According to Gallup's 2023 State of the Global Workplace report, only 33% of employees strongly agree that their manager helps them set performance and development goals they can get excited about. The gap between a filed plan and a followed one comes down to how the plans are built and whether the organization actually makes development possible once the paperwork is signed off.

This guide covers how to build an employee development planning process that produces real growth, not just records.

Why most employee development plans fail

Before redesigning the process, it helps to be honest about why the current one stalls. The patterns are consistent across organizations of most sizes:

Goals are vague. "Improve leadership skills" is not an actionable development goal. It gives the employee no signal about what to do differently or how they will know they have succeeded.
Plans are disconnected from daily work. Development goals that require carving out time outside of normal responsibilities rarely happen. Development embedded in how people do their jobs does.
Managers are left to document, not support. Writing a development plan in a review cycle and then leaving the employee to execute it alone produces paperwork, not progress.
Resources are hard to access. When an employee identifies a learning goal but there is no clear path to the training, coaching, or experience required, the goal stalls immediately.

A development planning process that addresses these issues looks very different from a standard annual review add-on. The guide to building a learning and development strategy covers how to create the organizational conditions that make individual plans actually executable.

What goes into a useful employee development plan

A practical employee development plan answers four questions.

1. What does this person want to develop?

The strongest development goals come from the employee rather than the manager. People develop faster and more durably when they are working toward something they want to be better at, whether that is a technical skill, a leadership capability, or readiness for a new role.

The manager's role at this stage is to help the employee identify goals that are both personally meaningful and relevant to their current work, not to hand down a list of things to improve.

2. What does this person need to develop?

This is the manager's input: based on current performance and where the employee is headed, what capabilities would most accelerate their growth or make them more effective in the role? This layer ensures development stays connected to real performance and career progression rather than becoming purely aspirational.

3. How will the development happen?

Most plans are weakest here. "Complete relevant training" is not a development action. A useful development plan specifies:

The specific learning resources, named rather than described in general terms: a course, a book, a shadowing opportunity, a stretch assignment
The timeline: when will this be completed, and what are the interim check-in points?
How learning will be applied: what will the employee do differently on the job, or what specific project will put the development into practice?

Gallup's 2023 State of the Global Workplace report found that only 33% of employees strongly agree their manager helps them set development goals they can get excited about. The problem is less about motivation and more about the quality of the goal-setting conversation itself.

4. How will progress be reviewed?

Development goals without a check-in cadence disappear into the next quarter. A lightweight review rhythm, a monthly fifteen-minute development conversation or a standing item in weekly one-on-ones, keeps goals visible and gives employees a regular opportunity to raise blockers before they derail progress entirely.

Making development planning work across an organization

Individual development plans work best when the organization creates the conditions that make them possible. A few things that matter at the organizational level:

Learning resources need to be accessible without process overhead. When accessing a course requires manager approval, a budget request, and an IT ticket, most development will never start. A self-serve library of learning content that employees can access directly removes the most common friction point. See how Teachable's scalable training tools support this kind of self-serve access across organizations of different sizes.
Managers need support to facilitate development conversations, not only document them. Organizations that invest in training managers on how to run a good development conversation see considerably better follow-through on individual plans than those that focus on form completion. The new hire training program guide covers how the same conversation structure applies to onboarding-stage development.
Development needs protected time. Learning that has to compete with a full workload will always lose. Organizations that make development visible and explicitly protected, even two hours a month per person, see measurably higher engagement with development plans. Teachable's training ROI calculator can help model the cost of unprotected development time against retention and performance data.
Career paths need to be clear enough to make development feel worthwhile. Employees invest in development when they can see how it connects to where they want to go. Opaque progression makes development goals harder to motivate. For the measurement layer that keeps plans accountable, the guide to measuring training effectiveness covers how to track whether development investments are producing the outcomes they were designed for.

A simple template that works

A development plan does not require a complex form. Six fields, answered well, are sufficient:

Development focus: what skill or capability is being worked on?
Why it matters: how does this connect to current performance or future goals?
Actions: what specifically will the employee do to develop this capability? Named resources, specific activities.
Timeline: when will each action happen, and what is the target completion date?
Application: how will the employee use what they have learned on the job?
Review date: when will progress be checked?

One focused development goal per quarter, executed well, produces more growth than five goals that never move. For organizations building a full development catalog to support these plans, the guide to creating a training program from scratch covers how to build content that maps directly to role-specific development goals.

How learning technology supports development planning

A well-structured development plan is more achievable when employees can access learning resources directly and managers can see who is engaging with development. A platform that gives employees a self-serve content library, tracks completion, and lets managers view progress removes the operational friction that causes most development plans to stall.

The technology supports the plan. It does not replace the manager conversation, the goal-setting discipline, or the protected time that make development real. For teams evaluating whether their current platform is set up to support individual development tracking, the corporate training software overview covers what to look for in reporting depth, content organization, and completion records. Teachable's certificates of completion also give employees a visible, shareable record of completed development, which helps maintain motivation across longer-form programs.

The sign that your development planning is working

The clearest indicator that employee development planning is working has nothing to do with completion rates on forms. It shows up when employees bring development goals into conversations unprompted, when they ask about stretch opportunities, reference the skills they are building, and connect their day-to-day work to their longer-term growth.

That level of engagement is built by making development real rather than just documented. A good plan is the starting point. The manager relationship, the accessible resources, and the protected time are what give it traction.

Teachable gives your team a self-serve learning platform so development plans do not stall waiting for resources.

How to build a learning and development strategy your organization will use

See Teachable for enterprise training | Book an enterprise demo | Try the training ROI calculator

Most organizations have a learning and development strategy on paper. Very few have one that anyone uses as a decision-making tool.

The document exists. It sits in a shared drive referencing some learning principles and a vague commitment to ongoing development. The actual training decisions, what to build, who to prioritize, and what to buy, get made based on whoever submits the loudest request that quarter. According to LinkedIn Learning's 2024 Workplace Learning Report, only 37% of L&D professionals say their programs are closely aligned to specific business goals. The strategy problem is widespread, and it is fixable.

A real L&D strategy functions as a practical tool, not a filing exercise. This guide covers how to build one that operates that way.

What a learning and development strategy actually is

An L&D strategy answers three questions: what capabilities does the organization need to be successful, where are the gaps between those capabilities and what people can do today, and how will the organization close those gaps through learning?

Everything else, the platforms, the content, the delivery methods, the metrics, flows from those three answers. If the current L&D strategy lacks clear, specific answers to all three, it is a statement of intent rather than a working plan.

The reason this matters is practical. Without clarity on what capabilities the business needs and where the gaps are, every learning investment is equally justifiable and none of them are genuinely prioritized. Organizations end up doing a little of everything for everyone, with no way to evaluate whether any of it is working. The guide to measuring training effectiveness covers how to build the measurement layer that makes an L&D strategy accountable.

Step 1: Anchor to business goals, not L&D goals

The most common mistake in L&D strategy is starting from the learning side: what training to offer, what skills are worth developing, what programs could be built. That approach produces a training catalog disconnected from what the business actually needs.

Starting from the business side produces better results. What are the organization's most important goals for the next twelve to eighteen months? What capabilities would most accelerate those goals? What is the most significant skill or knowledge gap currently getting in the way?

The answers to these questions, ideally gathered through direct conversations with functional leaders rather than a survey, define where L&D should concentrate. A company expanding into new markets has different learning priorities than one working to reduce operational errors. A plan built for one will not serve the other.

LinkedIn Learning's 2024 Workplace Learning Report found that only 37% of L&D professionals say their programs are closely aligned to specific business goals. Anchoring to business priorities from the start is the single biggest lever for closing that gap.

Step 2: Map current capability against what is needed

Once the required capabilities are defined, an honest picture of where things stand today is needed. This is the skills gap analysis: what can people actually do versus what they need to be able to do?

This analysis does not require an elaborate assessment program. A few practical approaches that work for most organizations:

Structured conversations with managers about where their teams are struggling or where performance gaps are most visible. Managers are the closest proxy to on-the-job capability.
Performance data review: where are errors, delays, or quality issues most concentrated? These are often training-addressable problems.
Exit interview themes: recurring mentions of feeling underprepared or unsupported signal gaps in onboarding or role-specific development. See the new hire training program guide for how to structure early-stage development to address these gaps before they show up in exit data.
New hire time-to-productivity: if people are taking significantly longer than expected to operate independently, the onboarding and early development program is a likely source. Teachable's training ROI calculator can help model the cost of extended time-to-productivity against training investment.

The goal is not a complete skills inventory across the entire organization. The goal is identifying the three to five highest-impact gaps, the ones where closing the gap would most directly accelerate the business goals identified in step one.

Step 3: Choose interventions based on the nature of the gap

Not every capability gap is a training problem. Some gaps are better addressed through hiring, process improvement, or clearer expectations. Before designing a learning program, the right question is whether this is actually a learning problem at all.

Learning is the right intervention when people lack knowledge they need or have not yet practiced a skill they are expected to perform. Other causes, unclear processes, misaligned incentives, or the wrong tools, call for different solutions. Applying training to a non-learning problem produces completion rates without behavior change.

For the gaps that are learning problems, match the delivery approach to the nature of the content:

Foundational knowledge and concepts: self-paced online modules that people can access when they need them
Applied skills and judgment: practice-based learning, worked examples, and scenario simulations
Complex or contextual capability: coaching, mentoring, or stretch assignments with structured reflection
Compliance and procedural requirements: structured modules with assessment and documented completion. See how Teachable handles certificates of completion for compliance-sensitive programs.

Step 4: Define what success looks like before building anything

Every learning initiative needs a defined success measure before it launches. The measure should be tied to the business goal it is supporting, not to the training activity itself.

100% completion is a participation measure. The right question is: what should be different in the organization six months after people complete this training?

For a sales onboarding program, success might be time-to-first-deal. For a compliance program, it might be audit pass rate. For a customer service training program, it might be CSAT score movement. Define the measure before content is built so there is something to evaluate against, and so the case for continued investment can be made when the program works. The guide to building a training program from scratch covers how to set measurable objectives at the design stage.

Step 5: Build governance, not just content

An L&D plan that does not answer the question of who decides what gets built next will drift. Without a clear governance model, training decisions get made reactively. Whoever asks loudest gets a program built, regardless of fit with the overall plan.

A practical governance model for most mid-market organizations requires three things:

A quarterly L&D planning review with functional leaders, covering what was built, whether it is working, and what is being prioritized next
A prioritization approach that weights learning investments by business impact, learner population size, and feasibility
A named owner for each learning program who is responsible for keeping content current and evaluating its effectiveness

This does not require a large L&D team. It requires clarity on who is accountable for what. For teams running training across distributed workforces, Teachable for enterprise training programs covers how to maintain governance and reporting across large learner populations without IT overhead. For organizations specifically managing safety or compliance requirements, the safety training program guide covers how to build accountability into programs where documented completion is a legal requirement.

The test of a good L&D strategy: does it make decisions easier?

A well-built L&D strategy makes it easier to say yes to the right things and no to the wrong ones. When a business unit requests a training program, the strategy provides the basis for evaluating it: does this close a capability gap tied to a business goal? Is the gap learning-addressable? What does success look like and when will it be measured?

Those questions, answerable from the strategy document itself, are what shift L&D from a request-taking function into a business partner. That shift is what the strategy is ultimately for. For teams evaluating which platform best supports execution of an L&D strategy, the corporate training software overview covers what to look for in assessment tools, reporting, and content management.

From onboarding to compliance to skills development, Teachable gives L&D teams the tools to execute without IT overhead.

News & Updates

What's new at Teachable: Mobile app, certifications & more

News & Updates

Apply to the early access waitlist.

April 30, 2026

We have been busy. Over the last few months we shipped updates to mobile, certificates, translations, and B2B distribution, plus there are a couple of existing features worth revisiting. Here is everything, and why it matters.

Mobile app improvements: offline access, push notifications, and more

According to Salesforce Research, smartphones generated roughly two-thirds of all US online shopping orders in Q3 2024. For your students, mobile is the primary screen, and in many global markets it is the only one. So we treated it that way.

We shipped a set of improvements to the Teachable mobile app: offline access, push notifications, expanded language support, and better performance.

iOS and Android are now fully on par. Whatever the experience is on one, it is the same on the other.

The bigger story is reach. The gap between someone enrolling in your course and actually completing it is largely a mobile problem. Most students browse, buy, and consume content on their phones, and any friction in that experience is a drop-off point.

Offline access means a student on a plane, a commute, or a spotty connection can still make progress. Push notifications mean you can bring them back when they drift. Together, these become completion rate levers.

For course creators, completion rates tie directly to reputation, reviews, and referrals. For anyone building a global audience or selling into markets where mobile is less a preference and more a given, this update closes a meaningful gap.

Certificates: turn every completion into a marketing moment

Completion certificates are now available on Teachable, with direct LinkedIn sharing built in. Full setup details are in the certificates support article.

Strategically, this is one of the underrated growth tools available to course creators. Every time a student shares their certificate on LinkedIn, your course name reaches their entire professional network: people who are exactly the kind of audience likely to be interested in what you teach.

That is organic distribution you do not have to pay for, driven by the people who have already validated your content by completing it.

There is a second effect worth naming: certificates change how students engage with a course before they finish it. Knowing a credential waits at the end raises the perceived value of completing, which means higher finish rates, better reviews, and stronger word of mouth.

See how Antoine van der Lee built his iOS developer community on Teachable. Certificates are part of that story.

For anyone running corporate training, customer education, or compliance programs, certificates also add a layer of institutional credibility that enterprise buyers often require.

One-click translations: your entire school, fully localized

One-click translations already existed on Teachable. Previously, they covered the dashboard, product catalog, and product detail pages. Curriculum, checkout, and all other pages were excluded, which meant a student could browse in their language and then hit a wall as they moved deeper into your school.

That gap is closed. Translations now apply to your entire school. Go to Site > Language and text, select from the dropdown, and every page updates, checkout included. We support 13 languages: English, Arabic, Spanish, French, German, Portuguese, Italian, Japanese, Thai, Chinese (Traditional and Simplified), and Turkish.

Language and custom text settings screen with a dropdown menu showing languages including Deutsch and English.

The strategic implication is significant. Language has always been one of the biggest invisible barriers to course sales. A student who finds your content in their language but hits English at checkout is likely to leave. Localization at the checkout level is a conversion issue, and now it is resolved with a single setting. For creators who have been building multilingual audiences or expanding into new markets, this removes the last real friction in the purchase flow.

Early access: B2B bulk distribution, built for learning at scale

B2B Bulk Distribution is now available in Early Access, and it is worth understanding what this opens up.

Until now, running a training program on Teachable at volume meant friction at the enrollment layer. Bulk distribution removes that ceiling. You can enroll entire groups in one action, which means the operational overhead that used to make large-scale training painful is largely gone.

This matters beyond convenience. For creators and companies building B2B revenue streams, selling training to other businesses rather than individual consumers, the ability to deliver across dozens or hundreds of learners is often the difference between a pilot and a real contract.

Enterprise buyers need to know the platform can handle their volume before they commit. Teachable for Enterprise is built for exactly that, and bulk distribution is a core part of how it works. You can read more about the B2B revenue model in how to sell online training B2B.

Early Access means two things: you can start using it now, and you get direct input into how it develops. We are actively working with early users to shape the product. If you are running or planning a large-scale training operation, this is the time to get in.

In case you missed it

Some of the most powerful things on Teachable are not new. Here are two features that creators are already putting to work, and worth knowing about if you have not explored them yet.

teachable:pay: tax handled, mobile payments included

If you are using teachable:pay, every sale you make is already covered for tax compliance: US sales tax, EU VAT, and UK VAT, with Teachable handling it automatically.

Most creators do not realize this is on by default, which means they absorb compliance worry they do not need.

The second piece is checkout conversion. teachable:pay supports Apple Pay and Google Pay, which means anyone buying on mobile can complete a purchase in a couple of taps.

Checkout abandonment is one of the most consistent revenue leaks in an online course business, and the payment step is a major contributor. This already exists. It is already working. If you have not enabled it yet, now is the time.

SOC 2 Type II: the security credential enterprise buyers ask for

Teachable has achieved SOC 2 Type II accreditation, a rigorous independent audit covering security, availability, confidentiality, and privacy.

A Type I certification confirms controls are designed correctly. Type II verifies they are consistently followed over time. That is a meaningful distinction for buyers doing due diligence.

If you are selling training to enterprise customers or running B2B programs, security compliance is often a procurement requirement. SOC 2 Type II answers that question before it becomes a blocker.

It is also a credential worth putting in front of potential B2B buyers proactively. Most will not ask until they are already deep in a buying process, but having the answer ready can move things forward.

We are always building. Keep an eye on your school and stay up to date with us on Instagram, LinkedIn, and YouTube for more!

News & Updates

Expert Exchange: What does the future of online learning actually look like?

Inside Teachable Collective: How top online educators are building for the future

April 24, 2026

Most company videos are scripted. Leadership says the right things, hits the right notes, and nobody gets surprised.

This one was different.

We put three of Teachable’s most senior leaders on camera: Giovana Carvalho (Managing Director), Anna Damico (Head of Sales), and Olivia Owens (Head of Product Marketing & Partnerships). We asked them the things nobody usually asks: whether what Teachable sells still matters when anyone can ask ChatGPT anything, what the most common reason creators fail actually is, and where they are placing their bets for the next 12 months.

No press release framing or scripted answers.

What followed was a candid 25-minute conversation about AI, creator identity, corporate learning, and where the real opportunities are right now. Below are the moments worth keeping.

“We want people with perspectives, lived experience, taste, to continue to create the experiences that create outcomes.” –Olivia Owens, Head of Product Marketing & Partnerships, Teachable

Watch Expert Exchange Episode 1

Watch Expert Exchange Episode 2

Watch Expert Exchange Episode 3

Does AI make online education less valuable?

Short answer: no.

The opening question was blunt. Does what Teachable sells still matter in a world where anyone can ask an AI to explain anything.

Anna didn’t hesitate.

“People need learning fast. People need people with experience sharing those learnings with them. I believe AI came to accelerate, to help Teachable as a concrete, solid, stable, reliable tool. But I don’t see that it will become obsolete. Absolutely not.” –Anna Damico, Head of Sales, Teachable

Olivia grounded it with a personal example. A few years ago, she took a time management course through a coaching program because she was struggling to juggle competing priorities. The course had content. But what actually changed her behavior was accountability.

“I could type into ChatGPT, 'here’s my calendar, help me fix this,' and do nothing with it. But I had to meet with her every week. 'How is that going? Did you actually change that behavior?' That’s what I can’t replicate.” –Olivia Owens, Head of Product Marketing & Partnerships, Teachable

Giovana went further, arguing that accountability is the core driver of learning at all.

“I need someone who’s depending on me, who’s putting faith in me. Competing against the amount of stimuli we’re all getting every single day is insane. We really need that human bonding and relationship. That emotional weight that comes with learning expectations” –Giovana Carvalho, Managing Director, Teachable

The Expert Exchange thesis in plain language: AI gives everyone access to the same information. The thing it cannot manufacture is the lived experience, judgment, and accountability that come from learning with a human who has actually done the thing. That gap is where creators build their businesses.

Generic learning is already broken

Every student who arrives at your course is there for a different reason. Students come from different backgrounds, want different outcomes, and carry very different prior knowledge. And yet most online courses still start everyone at lesson one.

Giovana called out the mismatch directly when the conversation turned to what Teachable is building next.

“Usually you start a course in the same place, but people come from from very different backgrounds, very different intents. I want to learn French because I want to go to Paris and feel like a local. That’s a very different application of the same subject.” –Giovana Carvalho, Managing Director, Teachable

The product bet she’s most excited about: learning paths that let students chart their own course. Not a fixed curriculum, but a system that assesses what each student already knows, where they want to go, and builds an experience around that.

Olivia extended the point from the creator side. Chasing completion rates misses the point entirely.

“The win is: I have this problem, this piece of information unlocked me so I could move forward. Being able to help creators deliver the content that speeds up that learning outcome moment for their student. That's the way they’re going to continue to add value.” –Olivia Owens, Head of Product Marketing & Partnerships, Teachable

What this means for creators: Shorter, more targeted content often outperforms the 50-hour course. Students don’t want volume. They want the specific insight that moves them forward. Learn how to structure your course curriculum to match student intent, not just cover the topic.

Corporate training is having a moment. Most companies are behind.

The conversation shifted to employee learning, and Anna brought data.

“Recent studies show that employees in the traditional workforce value professional development more than salary. It’s something connected to the value proposition of your brand. When you go to campus to hire talent, you can say: ‘We’re going to invest in your skills. We want to see you succeed.’ Companies doing that are attracting talent, retaining talent, and building careers in a more sustainable way.” –Anna Damico, Head of Sales, Teachable

The barrier used to be budget. Small businesses couldn’t afford dedicated learning platforms for their teams. That has changed.

“You don’t need a large investment to build a learning platform for your employees. You can own a bakery with 25 employees and teach them how to handle daily operations. In the past, very small companies had to outsource everything. The use cases go from fashion to food to upskilling to changing careers internally. Regardless of sector, industry, cohort, seniority. We have a solution for you.” –Anna Damico, Head of Sales, Teachable

Giovana made the cultural argument for why this matters beyond retention numbers.

“Corporate training used to be very stale. Employees are people. Your employees are students and consumers. They want to see what’s out there now, in real time.” –Giovana Carvalho, Managing Director, Teachable

For creators with existing audiences: Olivia pointed out that the same course you’ve built for individual students can be taken to companies. A design course for freelancers, for example, can also be sold to an in-house design team looking to level up. Teachable supports both routes. Read more about how creators use Teachable to sell to organizations.

Why most creators fail, and what to do instead

Anna had a clear answer when asked the question most company videos avoid entirely.

Anna had three answers. Fear of judgment tops the list, followed by striving for perfection and lacking consistency. Those are the traps she sees creators fall into repeatedly. Her take:

“Your first product is going to be very, very bad. Do it anyway. You need to test your methodology, your way of teaching, the appetite of your audience, whether you’re hitting the right persona. If your first launch is a success, you’re very late to this party.” –Anna Damico, Head of Sales, Teachable

Olivia built on that with an identity argument. Too many creators refuse to commit to a direction until everything is figured out.

“A willingness to be bad is critical for being a creator. You have to be willing to put things out there that are not perfect, that are not proven. And I think people don’t speak enough about the mental health side of being a creator. Every single day you’re putting yourself out there to be judged. That should not be ignored.” –Olivia Owens, Head of Product Marketing & Partnerships, Teachable

The practical move: Publish something before it’s ready. Treat your first launch as a test, not a finished product. Collect real feedback. Iterate. The creators who succeed are almost never the ones who waited until everything was perfect.

In an AI world, having an opinion is a competitive advantage

The most pointed exchange of the conversation came when Giovana raised what she called “the age of AI slop.” If everyone has access to the same tools and generates the same content, differentiation has to come from somewhere else.

“Do you have an opinion? Do you have a perspective? Do you have reasons for why you think this way? The people with the opinion are the people that always edge out for me. Because when something comes up, they’re going to be decisive. They’re going to say: we should do this.” –Olivia Owens, Head of Product Marketing & Partnerships, Teachable

Anna took it to the hiring context.

“In a world of AI where everyone can learn the same things and get the same answers, the human aspects are what will set us apart. When you get five resumes with the same hard skills and the same degree, I need to talk to those people. Don’t try to be the same. It’s not going to be sustainable.” –Anna Damico, Head of Sales, Teachable

For online course creators, this has a direct application. Formulaic content with no clear voice or perspective is already losing ground. The creators building durable audiences right now are the ones with something specific to say, and the willingness to say it.

Related: How to find your niche as an online course creator and build a business around what you actually know.

How to grow when paid media and organic reach both feel harder

Woman speaking with braided hair, wearing white shirt, gestures with hands beside text about unlocking insights.

Giovana asked Olivia directly: how do creators grow right now? Her answer had three parts.

1. Go deeper with who you already have

Before chasing new audiences, look at who has already bought from you. What comes next for someone who finished your course. Coaching, a higher-tier program, a community membership. Most creators underestimate what their existing audience is willing to invest.

2. Take your content to companies

The same intellectual property you’ve built for individual students can be packaged and sold to organizations. A course for independent designers can become team-level training. A sales methodology course can become onboarding for an entire revenue team. The content is already built.

3. Look at your global reach

If you pull your platform demographics, there’s a good chance you already have students in markets you’ve never actively targeted. That’s an audience that found you organically. Olivia’s point: there is probably more value in that global reach than most creators have explored.

For more on audience-building strategy: How to build and grow an audience for your online course.

The bottom line

The conversation covered a lot of ground. A few things stand out as worth carrying forward:

AI doesn’t replace human expertise. It makes the gap between generic information and genuine experience more visible.
Personalized learning paths are the direction the industry is heading. Creators who build for specific student intents will outperform those who build generic curricula.
Corporate learning is a real and growing opportunity for individual creators. The tools now exist for even small operators.
Having a clear opinion and a distinct voice is a competitive advantage, not a nicety. Formulaic content is already commoditized.
Your first product will be imperfect. The creators who waited until they were ready mostly never shipped.

Watch the full Expert Exchange conversation on YouTube, or start your free Teachable trial to see how the platform can support your next move.

News & Updates

April 13, 2026

The most successful creators on Teachable share one trait that rarely gets discussed: they treat growth as a new problem, not a continuation of the old one.

Getting to a serious revenue milestone requires one set of skills. Staying there requires a different set entirely. Buyer behavior shifts. Student expectations rise. Product ecosystems start to matter more than any single launch. The creators who recognize that shift early are the ones who keep moving.

That recognition is the through-line of Teachable Collective: a two-day invite-only gathering in Los Angeles this April, built for creators operating at scale who want to think seriously about what comes next. Follow along on Instagram for more updates as the week unfolds.

What the Collective is

Teachable Select and Elite creators are gathering in LA across two days of studio content, peer exchange, and recognition. Select tier starts at $250K in annual sales. Elite starts at $1M.

Day 1 is the Collective itself: a half-day session with peer hotseats, data insights from the Teachable team, and an external keynote.
Day 2 is the Awards: a boat tour and dinner in Marina del Rey celebrating creators who hit the $1M milestone in 2025.

The point is not the agenda. Creators at this level rarely get unstructured time with peers who understand the specific pressures of running a knowledge business at scale. That room does not happen by accident.

Day 1: The Collective

The Collective brings together 16 of the top Teachable schools, roughly 20 attendees, and that is entirely by design.

At this level, what creators need most is time with peers who understand the specific pressures of running a knowledge business at this revenue level, and direct access to what we are seeing across our top accounts. The Collective is built to deliver both.

What the day looks like

Our Managing Director Giovana Carvalho opens with Teachable's read on the creator education landscape and where we see the market heading
Our customer success team presents a data breakdown covering what is actually driving growth across our top accounts right now
An external keynote from ManyChat on how high-performing creator businesses are using automation to drive consistent sales without constant creator involvement
Hotseats: small groups where creators bring a live business problem and spend ten minutes working through it together.
Happy hour to close the evening and let the conversations keep going

What we are bringing to the conversation

The framing we are taking into this day is direct: what got you to your current revenue level is not necessarily what will grow you from here. Early-stage growth rewards volume. Launch, promote, repeat. At a certain point, the ceiling changes. Product depth, student retention, and the actual quality of your learning experience start to drive results more than any promotional push.

Here is what our data consistently shows across our top accounts:

Product depth matters more than launch frequency. Creators with the most stable revenue have built product ranges that serve students at multiple stages and price points.
Student outcomes are becoming a growth metric. Retention, referrals, and word-of-mouth all trace back to whether a course actually delivers results. Creators who prioritize this outperform those who focus only on acquisition.
Speed of adaptation is a competitive edge. Creators who adjust their positioning, pricing, and product mix in response to what students actually want are the ones growing fastest right now.

The ManyChat keynote ties directly into this conversation. For many of our top creators, automation is the mechanism that makes consistent revenue possible without the creator being involved in every sale. The keynote covers how that works in practice and what it looks like to build a course business that does not depend entirely on the creator showing up every day.

Day 2: The Awards

The following afternoon, we move to the marina. Our Teachable Elite creators board a boat for a cruise along the LA waterfront, with welcome drinks and a fireside chat on the water. After docking, we walk to Cast and Plow for a dinner recognizing the creators who crossed $1M in GMV in 2025.

That milestone is also not a finish line. For most creators who reach it, the moment is closer to a transition. New questions open up: which products are actually driving growth, how the student experience holds up at volume, what the business looks like when it runs without constant creator intervention.

What the Collective means for every creators

The Collective is invite-only. Most creators reading this are not in the room this round. That is fine.

The thinking behind it applies to every stage. The creator education market is evolving faster than most platforms acknowledge. Buyer behavior is shifting. Students expect more. What constitutes a quality learning experience keeps moving.

We launched the Customer Journey program because creators at $50K need different things than creators at $500K, and both need different things than creators pushing past $1M. The Collective is what that commitment looks like at the top tier. See what the Customer Journey includes when you qualify.

Talk to our team to understand how Teachable can support where your business is heading next.

How-Tos

How to create a course with Claude Code (and what happens next)

Resources & How-Tos

What happens when your vibe-coded course app breaks (and it will)

April 6, 2026

If you are a creator with a technical itch, the pitch is almost irresistible: describe what you want, let Claude Code build it, and launch your course platform in a weekend. No monthly platform fees. No revenue share. Total control over the student experience.

That pitch is real. Claude Code genuinely can scaffold a working LMS from your terminal in hours. But working and production-ready are two different things, and most builder-educators find that out the hard way around week three.

This guide gives you the honest version. You will learn exactly how to use Claude Code to build a course platform from scratch, with real commands, real stack decisions, and real code. You will also see precisely where the complexity compounds, so you can make the right call for your business. For context on what happens when that complexity catches up with you, see our companion post: What happens when your vibe-coded course app breaks (and it will).

What Claude Code is and whether it can actually build a course platform

Claude Code is Anthropic's agentic coding tool that runs directly in your terminal. It reads your entire codebase, writes and edits files, runs commands, and debugs errors, acting as a senior pair programmer with a 200,000-token context window. Yes, it can scaffold a fully functional course platform, including auth, payments, and video delivery. Anthropic's official Claude Code in Action course, available on both Coursera and Anthropic's Skilljar platform, confirms this architecture: you are directing an autonomous agent, not copying snippets into your IDE.

For course creators with some technical confidence, this opens a genuinely exciting door. The typical stack Claude Code reaches for when you ask it to build an LMS:

Next.js for the frontend and API routes
Supabase for the Postgres database, authentication, and file storage
Stripe for payment processing and subscription management
Mux or AWS S3 + CloudFront for video hosting and delivery (more on the cost difference below)
Vercel for deployment

That is a legitimate production stack. Now let's build with it.

How to set up Claude Code and start building your LMS

Install Claude Code via npm: npm install -g @anthropic-ai/claude-code. Authenticate with your Anthropic API key, then run claude in your project directory. Claude Code reads your filesystem and starts scaffolding immediately.

Before generating anything, spend 15 minutes writing a CLAUDE.md file in your project root. This is your project memory. Claude Code reads it at the start of every session. Include your stack decisions, naming conventions, and any constraints:

That context file is worth more than any prompt. Claude Code references it across the entire build, keeping your architecture consistent as the codebase grows.

Start the session:

Claude Code will generate a supabase/migrations/ folder with your schema, enable RLS, and write the corresponding TypeScript types. Review the output carefully. The schema decisions it makes here will shape every query you write for the rest of the project.

How to add Stripe payments to a Claude Code-built course platform

Tell Claude Code to implement Stripe Checkout for one-time course purchases and Stripe Subscriptions for recurring access. The critical pieces are a webhook endpoint to handle payment events, a Supabase function to update enrollment status, and idempotency logic to prevent duplicate enrollments from webhook retries. Teachable's Get Started with Payments support article is worth reading to understand what a production-grade payment integration looks like in practice.

Payments are where most AI-generated LMS builds introduce their first serious technical debt. Claude Code will implement the happy path correctly, covering customer creation, checkout session, and redirect. Three things it sometimes misses unless you ask explicitly:

Webhook signature verification. Every incoming Stripe event must be verified with stripe.webhooks.constructEvent() using your webhook secret. Without this, any attacker can fake a payment.
Idempotency keys on enrollment updates. Stripe retries failed webhooks up to three times. Without idempotent logic, a student gets enrolled multiple times and your analytics break.
Failed payment handling. invoice.payment_failed events need to downgrade or lock access immediately, or subscribers get free access after their card declines.

Paste the webhook handler above into your Claude Code session and ask it to implement enrollStudentIdempotent against your Supabase schema. It will write the upsert logic correctly when the full context is available.

How to handle video hosting for a custom course platform

Use Mux for video hosting rather than self-hosting on AWS S3. Mux handles transcoding, adaptive bitrate streaming, and signed URL protection out of the box. Direct S3 hosting works initially but becomes expensive and complex to secure as your student count grows.

Claude Code will happily generate an S3 upload pipeline. Starting there is not wrong. Here is what you need to know before you ship to real students:

Raw S3 video delivery with CloudFront costs roughly $0.085 per GB transferred. A 45-minute HD lesson runs about 2 to 3 GB. If 100 students each watch it twice in a month, you are looking at $34 to $51 in bandwidth for a single lesson. Scale that across a full course library and the bill surprises people. Mux prices by the minute, not by gigabyte, which makes costs more predictable. Current rates are published on Mux's pricing page and have dropped significantly since late 2025. For a direct comparison of the two approaches, Mux's S3 cost comparison post is worth reading.

Signed URLs expire, which is the right security pattern, but you need to regenerate them on each page load or your video players break mid-session. Claude Code generates this logic correctly, but the expiry management becomes a source of ongoing bugs in production.

Ask Claude Code to scaffold the Mux integration:

How to secure student data in a Claude Code-built Supabase app

Enable Row Level Security (RLS) on every Supabase table before you write a single query. Wiz Research found that 1 in 5 vibe-coded applications have critical security misconfigurations, with disabled or overly permissive RLS policies among the most common. RLS misconfiguration in a course platform means any authenticated user can read any student's data.

The Veracode 2025 GenAI Code Security Report, which tested over 100 LLMs across 80 real coding tasks, found that AI-generated code introduces security vulnerabilities in 45% of cases. Java had the highest failure rate at over 70%. The CLAUDE.md instruction we wrote earlier -- "RLS must be enabled on all Supabase tables" -- handles this if you are consistent. Verify it manually before you launch. In Supabase Studio, check every table in the Table Editor: the RLS toggle should be green.

Your core RLS policies for a course platform look like this:

Feed these to Claude Code and ask it to verify your entire schema has matching policies. It will flag any tables missing coverage.

What gets complicated when you run a custom course platform

The complexity that compounds as a custom LMS grows falls into four categories: video bandwidth costs, payment webhook reliability, certificate generation, and EU compliance (GDPR and VAT). Each is solvable. Each also requires weeks of engineering time that grows with your student count, not your feature list.

This is the part nobody covers in the weekend-build tutorials. You shipped. Students enrolled. Things work. Then:

Your AWS bill arrives. 500 active students watching 4 hours of video each month generates 2,000 hours of streaming. That number grows linearly with every student you add.
A webhook retry loop fills your database. Stripe retried a failed event 18 times over 72 hours. Your idempotency check had a gap. Now 14 students have duplicate enrollment records and their progress data is split across two rows.
A German student asks for a GDPR data export. Under GDPR, you have 30 days to respond with a complete export of all data you hold on that individual. You have no export tooling. You are writing raw SQL at midnight.
EU students want VAT invoices. VAT rates differ by country. You did not build VAT calculation into your Stripe integration. Every EU B2B customer is technically entitled to a proper VAT invoice.
A student reports that their certificate will not load. Your PDF generation library has a dependency conflict with the version of Node.js Vercel upgraded to. Certificates are broken for everyone. You spend a Saturday debugging.

None of these are insurmountable. Each one is a real engineering problem that pulls you away from creating content, building your audience, and running your education business.

When building your own LMS stops making sense

A custom Claude Code-built LMS makes sense for technical creators with highly specific requirements: unusual course structures, deep integrations with proprietary systems, or a business model that no existing platform supports. For most knowledge businesses, the maintenance overhead of a custom platform outweighs the platform fees within 6 to 12 months of launch.

The calculus is simpler than it sounds. Add up the hours you spent this month on infrastructure: debugging, updating dependencies, monitoring error logs, responding to student-reported bugs. Multiply that by your effective hourly rate. Compare that number to what a dedicated platform costs per month.

Most creator-educators who run that math end up in the same place. The platform fee is not a cost. It is a salary for a DevOps engineer who never sleeps.

If you have built your proof of concept with Claude Code and validated that students will pay, Teachable is the natural next move. You keep everything you built, your curriculum, your brand, your community relationships, and hand off the infrastructure layer entirely.

Teachable handles Stripe webhooks, video transcoding and video hosting and delivery, GDPR-compliant data management, EU VAT collection, automated certificate delivery, student progress tracking, and mobile optimization. All of it is included in your monthly plan. For a full breakdown of current plan options, see Teachable's 2025 pricing and plan updates. You stop debugging and start teaching.

The Claude Code build was not wasted. It validated your business model, sharpened your understanding of what your students need, and gave you the technical credibility to customize Teachable's integrations intelligently. Build to learn, then switch to ship.

If you are ready to stop playing DevOps and focus on what you are actually good at, start a free trial on Teachable and see how much of your week comes back.

Resources & How-Tos

Claude Code vs. Teachable: Which makes sense for course creators?

April 6, 2026

It starts with a feeling of total power. You open Claude or Cursor, describe your dream course platform, and watch a working application emerge from nothing.

Custom enrollment flows. A branded video player. Payment logic wired exactly the way you imagined. You shipped something real without hiring a single developer.

Then launch day arrives.

A dependency update pushed by an upstream npm package silently breaks your video player at 9:47 AM, twelve minutes after your first students try to log in.

This is the part of vibe coding that nobody talks about on Twitter: the maintenance.

This article covers what actually breaks in a custom-built course platform, why AI-generated code makes those failures worse, and how to recognize when the real cost of "free" software has outgrown your calendar.

(For context on what vibe coding is and why creators are building with it, see our related post: Claude Code vs. Teachable: Which makes sense for course creators?)

What vibe coding is why course creators are using it

Vibe coding is the practice of building software by describing what you want in natural language to an AI model and iterating on the generated code until it does what you need. For course creators, it became a path to custom platforms without hiring developers, often producing a working prototype in days rather than months.

The term was coined by AI researcher Andrej Karpathy in February 2025, and it spread fast. Creators who had spent years frustrated by the limitations of off-the-shelf platforms suddenly had a path to something custom: a course library with their exact UI, payment flows that matched their offer structure, and community integrations built precisely how they wanted them.

For a landing page, a lead magnet, or an MVP you want to test with your first ten students, vibe coding is genuinely effective. The problem appears on every day after that.

What breaks in a vibe-coded course app

The most common failure points in vibe-coded course platforms are dependency conflicts, video player integrations, payment webhook handling, and authentication edge cases. These are areas where the AI writes plausible-looking code that passes a surface test but fails under real production conditions, especially when a third-party package updates without warning.

Here is what actually goes wrong:

Dependency updates that nobody planned for

A vibe-coded platform runs on a stack of npm or PyPI packages that the AI selected for convenience. AI models do not pin versions the way a disciplined engineer would. When a package in your video player's dependency tree releases a breaking update, even a minor version bump, your player can silently fail. No error page. Just a blank div where your course content used to be.

Hacker News threads from early 2025 document creators hitting exactly this wall. One commenter described it plainly: vibe coding has "exponential levels of difficulty past the simple landing page," with auth and package management as the most common sticking points. When your video player is glued together with three AI-selected libraries that nobody audited for compatibility, any one of them can take your platform down on a Tuesday morning.

Payment webhook failures

AI-generated webhook handlers are particularly fragile. The code often looks correct. It receives the Stripe event, parses the payload, fires an enrollment. What it skips is idempotency logic. A duplicate event, which Stripe sends routinely during retries, triggers a duplicate enrollment or leaves a paying student locked out. Tracking down why one student got enrolled twice and another did not get enrolled at all means reading code that nobody on your team actually wrote. For a clear overview of how payment logic works on a purpose-built platform, see Teachable's Get Started with Payments support guide.

Auth edge cases that only appear at volume

AI-generated authentication code handles the happy path well. Password reset flows that expire in the wrong timezone. Session tokens that fail to invalidate on logout. OAuth integrations that work on your machine but break for students on mobile. These bugs do not surface in a demo. They show up when real people with real devices try to access content they have paid for.

Why AI-generated code is harder to maintain than it looks

AI-generated code produces roughly 1.7 times more major issues than human-written code, according to a December 2025 analysis of 470 open-source pull requests by CodeRabbit. The code often works on first run but accumulates logic errors, poor error handling, and security gaps that only surface under real usage.

The maintenance problem has two distinct layers.

The first is readability. CodeRabbit's analysis found that readability issues were three times more common in AI-authored pull requests than in human-written ones, the single largest gap in the entire dataset. The AI targets working code, not comprehensible code. Long functions, minimal comments, nested conditionals, inconsistent naming conventions. When something breaks at 2 AM, you are reading code that was never designed to be read.

The second is error handling. AI models routinely omit null checks, skip exception guards, and write error handling that covers the path they imagined a user would take, not the paths real users actually take. A Sonar analysis of leading AI models found that more than 90% of issues in AI-generated code are "code smells," subtle structural problems that do not throw an immediate error but degrade reliability over time.

The maintenance cost is real even for experienced developers. A Harness survey found that 67% of developers reported spending more time debugging AI-generated code. A 2025 METR study found that developers using AI tools were actually 19% slower on real-world codebases, even though they believed they were 20% faster. Code ships quickly. Fixes do not follow that timeline.

The launch day scenario

When a custom-built course platform goes down, there is no SLA, no rollback mechanism, no on-call engineer, and no support team. You debug alone or pay a freelancer emergency rates to decode code they did not write. Every minute your platform is down is a minute your students are filing chargebacks and losing trust in you as an educator.

Here is the scenario. Two months of building with Claude. Beta students loved it. You open enrollment on a Tuesday morning, send your launch email to 4,000 subscribers, and within fifteen minutes your video player goes blank. An npm package your AI-generated code depended on released a breaking patch at midnight.

The code lives in a GitHub repo you have added to and tweaked but never fully understood. You search Stack Overflow. You ask Claude to debug it. Claude suggests three different fixes, each of which introduces a new error. Two hours later, your launch window is gone. Some students have already asked for refunds.

The New Stack has documented how vibe-coded systems under real load surface failure modes that were invisible during testing, with experts warning of "catastrophic explosions" in 2026 as more production apps built this way hit real scale and real users. The core issue: AI has no awareness of what it does not know, and neither does the creator who prompted it.

What a custom course platform actually costs to maintain

The real cost of a custom-built course platform is not the build. It is everything after: developer time to debug AI-authored code, unplanned infrastructure costs, dependency management, security patches, GDPR compliance, and the opportunity cost of your own time spent on DevOps instead of teaching.

Here is what "free" actually costs:

Developer debugging time: A freelancer maintaining a vibe-coded codebase starts from scratch. The code was never written for human handoff. Expect higher hourly rates and longer timelines than they would quote for a conventional codebase.
Video delivery infrastructure: Hosting and streaming video at volume requires a CDN, adaptive bitrate encoding, and storage costs that compound with every student. AWS S3 egress costs money. So does CloudFront configuration and the time required to maintain it.
Payment processing edge cases: Stripe handles the transaction, but your platform handles the logic around it: refunds, subscription pauses, course access on failed renewals. Each edge case is a bug waiting to surface in AI-generated payment code.
Compliance: GDPR, CCPA, and tax handling do not write themselves. A vibe-coded platform has none of this unless you explicitly built it in. If you did not, you are exposed.
Security updates: A Georgetown CSET study found that 45% of AI-generated code contains security vulnerabilities. An unpatched dependency in your platform is a liability you carry without a support contract or a security team to catch it.

The hidden cost is attention. Every hour spent managing infrastructure is an hour not spent on curriculum, coaching, or building the relationships that make an education business work. You became a creator to teach, not to run your own DevOps operation.

The slopsquatting problem

AI models sometimes hallucinate package names, generating import statements for npm or PyPI packages that do not exist or that exist under slightly different names. Attackers have started registering malicious packages that match the names AI models commonly hallucinate. In September 2025, a malicious npm package called "nodejs-smtp" was discovered mimicking the legitimate "nodemailer" library, with 347 downloads before removal. If your vibe-coded app installed it, your students' data was at risk. This makes a vibe-coded production app an ongoing maintenance commitment, not a finished product you walk away from.

When to move off a custom-built course app

Moving to a dedicated course platform makes sense when maintenance costs you more time than building new features, when downtime affects student trust, or when you have outgrown what you can reasonably debug yourself. That is not a consolation prize. That is graduating to infrastructure purpose-built for exactly what you are doing.

The honest framing: you built a custom platform because you wanted control and flexibility. That was a smart instinct for the prototype phase. The value of your education business does not come from your server architecture. It comes from your expertise, your curriculum, and your relationship with your students. Every hour you spend maintaining infrastructure is a direct tax on the thing that actually generates revenue.

Teachable handles the parts of a course platform that are genuinely hard to build well and extremely tedious to maintain: video hosting and delivery via adaptive bitrate streaming, payment processing powered by Stripe with 0% transaction fees on paid plans via teachable:pay, GDPR compliance, student enrollment logic, and certificate generation. The platform maintains 99.9% uptime with a dedicated support team available Monday through Friday, 8 AM to 8 PM ET.

Teachable also supports the business model flexibility that made custom-building feel attractive in the first place. You can sell courses, coaching, memberships, and digital downloads, with bundles, certificates, and learning paths, without patching a single package. The platform is built for creators who are serious about their education business. For a full breakdown of current plans and pricing, see the 2025 pricing and plan updates post.

If maintaining your vibe-coded platform has started to feel like a part-time job, that is useful information. You have validated that students want what you are building. You have proven the model. The smart next move is to stop building the building and start teaching inside it. Start a free trial on Teachable and migrate your existing content to see how much of your week comes back.

Resources & How-Tos

Start your free trial | See Teachable’s plans | Talk to our team

April 1, 2026

The case looks obvious at first. Claude Code can scaffold a Next.js app, wire up Stripe webhooks, and write a Supabase schema in an afternoon. You have watched the demos and done the math on Teachable’s current Starter plan, and building your own course platform starts to feel like the smarter move. The assumption is that AI can generate the infrastructure, so paying for it feels unnecessary.

This is a question worth answering carefully. The creator economy in 2026 is full of people who are technically capable of building custom platforms, and increasingly reaching for AI tools to do it faster. Some of them should build. Most of them should not. The line between those two groups has nothing to do with technical skill. It comes down to what you actually want to be doing with your time.

This piece walks through both paths in real detail: what it takes to build a course platform with Claude Code, where the hidden costs appear, and how to decide which approach actually serves your education business. No glossing over costs on either side.

What is Claude Code, and can it actually build a course platform?

Claude Code is Anthropic’s agentic coding tool that runs in your terminal and can write, edit, and execute code across your entire codebase. It can generate the core components of a course platform: authentication, payment flows, content delivery, and student dashboards. Generating the code is only the first step of running a real platform.

Claude Code is available starting with the Claude Pro plan at $20/month, with higher usage limits on the Max plan starting at $100/month. See Anthropic’s current pricing for the latest plan details. It is a capable agentic coding assistant: give it a task, and it will create files, run commands, read your codebase, and iterate on its own output. For technical creators who want to prototype fast, it is impressive.

Here is what Claude Code can realistically scaffold for a course platform in a productive session:

A Next.js or Remix app with course listing, lesson pages, and student-facing dashboards
Stripe Checkout or Payment Links integration for one-time purchases and subscriptions
A Supabase schema for users, courses, enrollments, and progress tracking
Basic authentication flows using NextAuth or Supabase Auth
Webhook handlers for Stripe events like checkout.session.completed and customer.subscription.deleted
A minimal admin dashboard for uploading content and viewing enrollments

That is a real foundation. If you are building an internal training tool for your company, a one-off cohort program, or a prototype to validate a course idea before investing in infrastructure, Claude Code can get you there in days rather than weeks. The generated code is not always production-ready, but it is a solid starting point for a developer who knows how to review and harden it.

The critical word there is developer. Claude Code accelerates technical work. It does not replace the judgment of someone who understands what production-ready means. If you are not the person who will debug a 3am database connection error, you need that person on retainer before you start building.

How much does it cost to build a course platform versus paying for Teachable?

A custom course platform built with Claude Code typically costs $80 to $200/month in infrastructure before you count developer time. That is comparable to, or more expensive than, Teachable’s Builder plan at $89/month with 0% transaction fees, once you factor in hosting, video delivery, email, and payment processing.

The comparison that makes building look attractive is usually Teachable’s Starter plan versus a $5 VPS. That is not a fair comparison. Here is what a production-ready custom platform actually requires:

Infrastructure costs for a custom course platform (monthly estimate)

Hosting: A VPS on Render, Railway, or Fly.io capable of handling real traffic runs $20 to $50/month. A shared $5 server will buckle under video playback load and concurrent student sessions.
Video delivery: This is where the math changes fast. Mux charges $0.003/minute stored plus delivery fees. Cloudflare Stream charges $5 per 1,000 minutes stored and $1 per 1,000 minutes delivered. For a course library with 10 hours of video and 200 active students watching regularly, you are looking at $30 to $80/month, and it scales with every new student.
Email delivery: Transactional email through Postmark or Mailgun runs $15 to $35/month at meaningful volume. A proper email marketing tool for course promotions adds another $30 to $100/month once your list grows.
Database: Supabase’s Pro plan is $25/month and covers most course platforms comfortably, but you will outgrow the free tier quickly once students and content accumulate.
SSL and domain: Minimal cost at roughly $15/year for a domain, with most hosts including managed SSL.
Payment processing: Stripe’s standard rate is 2.9% + 30 cents per transaction on domestic cards. You pay this regardless of which platform you use, including Teachable. This is not a saving from building your own; it is a fixed cost of taking online payments.

Add it up: $90 to $190/month in infrastructure, before a single hour of your time or a developer’s. Compare that to Teachable’s Builder plan at $89/month with zero platform transaction fees and unlimited student capacity. The cost gap that looked obvious on a napkin disappears under real numbers.

What does Teachable’s current pricing actually look like?

Teachable’s June 2025 pricing refresh introduced four new plans. The Starter plan costs $39/month with a 7.5% transaction fee and one published product. The Builder plan removes all transaction fees for $89/month. Growth and Advanced plans add automation, webhooks, and higher product limits at $189/month and above.

The Starter plan triggers most of the “Teachable alternatives” searches, and the frustration is legitimate. A 7.5% platform fee on top of Stripe’s 2.9% means you are giving up nearly 11% of every sale to get started. On a $200 course, that is $22 per enrollment before you have paid for a single ad.

Here is the full picture of Teachable’s current plans:

Starter ($39/month): 7.5% transaction fee, 1 published product, 100 students. Good for validating one course with minimal upfront commitment.
Builder ($89/month): 0% transaction fee, 5 published products, 1,000 students, plus affiliate marketing and abandoned-cart emails. The right tier for a creator selling actively.
Growth ($189/month): Adds Zapier, webhooks, and 25 published products. The automation tier.
Advanced: Custom pricing for enterprise-scale product catalogs.

Worth noting: bundles, memberships, and community spaces do not count toward your published product limit on any plan. That matters if your business model includes bundling courses or layering in a membership community.

If you are currently on the Starter plan and frustrated by the transaction fee, the honest calculus is this: switching to Builder at $89/month pays for itself at around $667/month in course sales. That is not a high bar for a creator who is actively selling.

What does Claude Code actually do well for course creators?

Claude Code excels at generating custom integrations, automating repetitive dev tasks, and building one-off tools that no off-the-shelf platform covers: custom onboarding flows, API integrations with existing tools, and internal admin dashboards. It is a force multiplier for technical work, not a replacement for a course platform.

Some real-world cases where building makes sense:

You are a software company that wants to embed a custom learning experience inside your existing product, rather than send users to a separate Teachable school
You need a highly custom certification workflow that integrates with an industry-specific credentialing system
You are building internal training infrastructure for a company with strict data residency requirements that a SaaS platform cannot satisfy
You already have a development team and the platform cost is significant relative to your revenue

Outside those scenarios, building your own tends to look like cost savings and feel like technical ambition, but functions in practice as a long-running distraction from the actual work of educating people.

What gets complicated when your custom course platform starts to grow?

The Day 2 problems on a custom course platform include webhook reliability, GDPR compliance, failed payment recovery, video transcoding for different devices, student support infrastructure, and platform security updates. None of these problems are insurmountable, but each one requires someone’s time and attention.

Webhook reliability

Stripe sends a checkout.session.completed event when a student pays. Your handler has to receive it, verify the webhook signature, update the enrollment database, send a confirmation email, and do all of this idempotently, because Stripe will retry failed events and you do not want to enroll the same student twice or send five welcome emails. Claude Code will write this logic for you. Keeping it running as your traffic grows, your database schema evolves, and Stripe occasionally changes its event structure is ongoing maintenance work.

Video delivery and transcoding

Raw video files uploaded by course creators need to be transcoded into multiple resolutions for different devices and connection speeds. Mux and Cloudflare Stream handle this automatically. If you are managing your own video pipeline, you are either paying for a transcoding service, which brings you back to the infrastructure cost table above, or dealing with student complaints that videos will not play on mobile.

GDPR and data privacy

If any of your students are in the EU, you are responsible for data processing agreements, the right to erasure, and cookie consent flows. A platform handles this infrastructure for you. On a custom build, it is your compliance problem. Claude Code can generate the cookie banner, but the legal exposure from getting it wrong is not a code problem. For a deeper look at what compliance infrastructure looks like in a purpose-built learning platform, see our guide to choosing an LMS for continuing education.

Payment failure recovery

Subscription businesses lose meaningful revenue to failed payments. Teachable’s Builder plan includes automated abandoned-cart emails. On a custom platform, you are building a dunning system: retry logic, failure notification emails, and student communication flows. Skip it and you are leaving money on the table every month.

Platform security

Dependencies have vulnerabilities. Next.js releases security patches. Supabase updates its client libraries. On a SaaS platform, these updates happen without your involvement. On a custom platform, you are responsible for monitoring, testing, and deploying them, or you are running outdated software that is vulnerable to known exploits.

Each of these is a task that requires someone’s time. For a solo creator running a course business, that someone is you.

When does it make sense to use Teachable instead of building your own?

Teachable makes sense when your goal is running an education business rather than building platform infrastructure. If you want to spend your time creating content, teaching students, and growing revenue, a purpose-built platform lets you do that from day one.

For most knowledge business creators, the real comparison is not Teachable vs. a custom platform. It is Teachable vs. the opportunity cost of six months of infrastructure work. The platform cost shows up on your credit card statement. The cost of not launching a second course, not improving your content, and not building your student community while you are debugging webhook handlers is invisible, but real. For more on building a course business that compounds rather than stalls, see our guide to making money selling courses.

Teachable’s Builder plan, at $89/month with zero transaction fees, gives you:

Video hosting and delivery without a Mux bill or a CDN to configure
Student progress tracking and completion certificates out of the box
Affiliate marketing tools and abandoned-cart recovery without custom dunning logic
A mobile app your students can use without you building one
Payment processing through Stripe with webhook handling Teachable maintains
Compliance infrastructure, including GDPR and VAT collection in applicable regions, that Teachable’s team manages

That is not a consolation prize for creators who lack the technical skills to build. It is the infrastructure layer that frees you to do the work that actually requires your expertise: designing curriculum and teaching students in ways that actually change what they can do.

The honest peer recommendation here is this: if you are reaching for Claude Code to avoid a $39 Starter plan fee, the infrastructure math does not support it. If you are on the Builder plan and frustrated by a specific limitation, a custom integration, a unique content format, or a workflow your current setup cannot handle, that is when Claude Code becomes useful as a tool to extend your platform rather than replace it.

The builders who get the most out of AI tools are not the ones replacing their course platform. They are the ones using AI to create better content faster, and letting Teachable handle the infrastructure that makes selling and delivering that content reliable. For more on how established creators are using AI to scale their content output rather than their DevOps burden, see how to make money selling courses.

Claude Code vs. Teachable: the honest call

Claude Code is a powerful tool for technical creators who need custom integrations, internal tools, or platform features that do not exist off the shelf. For most course creators focused on growing their education business, Teachable’s purpose-built infrastructure delivers more value than the equivalent time and cost of building from scratch.

If you are evaluating this decision right now:

Build with Claude Code if: you have a development team, specific requirements no platform covers, strict data residency requirements, or you are building an embedded learning experience inside an existing product
Use Teachable if: your primary goal is creating and selling courses, you want to launch quickly, you would rather spend your hours on content than DevOps, or the infrastructure cost comparison does not clearly favor custom

Most creators land in the second category. The technical capability to build something and the business case for building it are not the same thing, and AI tools, as good as they have gotten, do not change that calculus.

The pitch is seductive. Claude Code can scaffold a Next.js app, wire up Stripe webhooks, and write a Supabase schema in an afternoon. You've watched the demos. You've done the math on Teachable's new Starter plan — $39/month plus a 7.5% transaction fee — and you've decided that building your own course platform is the obvious move. Why pay for infrastructure when AI can generate it for you?

This is a genuinely interesting question, and it deserves a genuinely honest answer. The creator economy in 2026 is full of people who are technically capable of building custom platforms — and who are increasingly reaching for AI tools to do it faster. Some of them should build. Most of them shouldn't. The line between those two groups isn't technical skill. It's about what you actually want to be doing with your time.

This article walks you through both paths in real detail: what it takes to build a course platform with Claude Code, where the hidden costs appear, and how to decide which approach actually serves your education business. No hand-waving, no vendor spin — just the honest picture a senior developer friend would give you over coffee.

What is Claude Code, and can it actually build a course platform?

Claude Code is Anthropic's agentic coding tool that runs in your terminal and can write, edit, and execute code across your entire codebase. Yes, it can generate the core components of a course platform — authentication, payment flows, content delivery, and student dashboards — but generating the code is only the first step of running a real platform.

Claude Code is available starting with the Claude Pro plan at $20/month, with higher usage limits on the Max plan starting at $100/month. It's a capable agentic coding assistant: give it a task, and it will create files, run commands, read your codebase, and iterate on its own output. For technical creators who want to prototype fast, it's genuinely impressive.

Here's what Claude Code can realistically scaffold for a course platform in a productive session:

A Next.js or Remix app with course listing, lesson pages, and student-facing dashboards
Stripe Checkout or Payment Links integration for one-time purchases and subscriptions
A Supabase schema for users, courses, enrollments, and progress tracking
Basic authentication flows using NextAuth or Supabase Auth
Webhook handlers for Stripe events like checkout.session.completed and customer.subscription.deleted
A minimal admin dashboard for uploading content and viewing enrollments

That's a real foundation. If you're building an internal training tool for your company, a one-off cohort program, or a prototype to validate a course idea before investing in infrastructure, Claude Code can get you there in days rather than weeks. The generated code isn't always production-ready, but it's a solid starting point for a developer who knows how to review and harden it.

The critical word there is "developer." Claude Code accelerates technical work — it doesn't replace the judgment of someone who understands what production-ready means. If you're not the person who'll debug a 3am database connection error, you need to have that person on retainer before you start building.

How much does it cost to build a course platform versus paying for Teachable?

A custom course platform built with Claude Code typically costs $80–$200/month in infrastructure before you count developer time. That's comparable to or more expensive than Teachable's Builder plan ($89/month, 0% transaction fees), once you factor in hosting, video delivery, email, and payment processing.

Let's run the real numbers. The comparison that makes the "build your own" option look attractive is usually Teachable's Starter plan versus a $5 VPS — but that's not a fair comparison. Here's what a production-ready custom platform actually requires:

Infrastructure costs for a custom course platform (monthly estimate)

Hosting: A VPS on Render, Railway, or Fly.io capable of handling real traffic runs $20–50/month. A shared $5 server will buckle under video playback load and concurrent student sessions.
Video delivery: This is where the math changes fast. Mux charges $0.003/minute stored plus delivery fees. Cloudflare Stream charges $5 per 1,000 minutes stored and $1 per 1,000 minutes delivered. For a course library with 10 hours of video and 200 active students watching regularly, you're looking at $30–80/month — and it scales with every new student.
Email delivery: Transactional email (enrollment confirmations, password resets, drip sequences) through Postmark or Mailgun runs $15–35/month at meaningful volume. A proper email marketing tool for course promotions adds another $30–100/month once your list grows.
Database: Supabase's Pro plan is $25/month and covers most course platforms comfortably, but you'll outgrow the free tier quickly once students and content accumulate.
SSL and domain: Minimal — $15/year for a domain, and most hosts include managed SSL. Not the budget item people worry about, but worth noting.
Payment processing: Stripe's standard rate is 2.9% + 30¢ per transaction on domestic cards — you pay this regardless of which platform you use, including Teachable. This isn't a "build your own" saving; it's a fixed cost of taking online payments.

Add it up: $90–190/month in infrastructure, before a single hour of your time or a developer's. Compare that to Teachable's Builder plan at $89/month with zero platform transaction fees and unlimited student capacity. The cost gap that looked obvious on a napkin disappears under real numbers.

What does Teachable's 2025 pricing actually look like?

Teachable's June 2025 pricing refresh introduced four new plans. The Starter plan costs $39/month with a 7.5% transaction fee and one published product. The Builder plan removes all transaction fees for $89/month. Growth and Advanced plans add automation, webhooks, and higher product limits at $189/month and above.

The plan that triggered most of the "Teachable alternatives" searches this year is the Starter plan — and honestly, the frustration is legitimate. A 7.5% platform fee on top of Stripe's 2.9% means you're giving up nearly 11% of every sale to get off the ground. On a $200 course, that's $22 per enrollment before you've paid for a single ad.

Here's the full picture of Teachable's current plans:

Starter ($39/month): 7.5% transaction fee, 1 published product, 100 students. Good for validating one course with minimal upfront commitment.
Builder ($89/month): 0% transaction fee, 5 published products, 1,000 students, plus affiliate marketing and abandoned-cart emails. The right tier for a creator selling actively.
Growth ($189/month): Adds Zapier, webhooks, and 25 published products. The automation tier.
Advanced: Custom pricing for enterprise-scale product catalogs.

Worth noting: bundles, memberships, and community spaces don't count toward your published product limit on any plan. That matters if your business model includes bundling courses or layering in a membership community.

If you're currently on the Starter plan and frustrated by the transaction fee, the honest calculus is this: switching to Builder at $89/month pays for itself at around $667/month in course sales. That's not a high bar for a creator who's actively selling.

What does Claude Code actually do well for course creators?

Claude Code excels at generating custom integrations, automating repetitive dev tasks, and building one-off tools that no off-the-shelf platform covers — things like custom onboarding flows, API integrations with existing tools, and internal admin dashboards. It's a force multiplier for technical work, not a replacement for a course platform.

This is the part of the article where we're honest: Claude Code is genuinely excellent at a specific kind of work. If you have a technical need that a platform like Teachable doesn't cover out of the box, it's a powerful tool for filling that gap. Some real-world examples where building makes sense:

You're a software company that wants to embed a custom learning experience inside your existing product — not send users to a separate Teachable school
You need a highly custom certification workflow that integrates with an industry-specific credentialing system
You're building internal training infrastructure for a company with strict data residency requirements that a SaaS platform can't satisfy
You already have a development team and the platform cost is genuinely significant relative to your revenue

Outside those scenarios, "build your own" tends to be a decision that looks like cost savings and feels like technical ambition — but functions, in practice, as a long-running distraction from the actual work of educating people.

What gets complicated when you run a custom course platform at scale?

The Day 2 problems on a custom course platform include webhook reliability, GDPR compliance, failed payment recovery, video transcoding for different devices, student support infrastructure, and platform security updates. These aren't unsolvable, but each one takes time that isn't going toward your course content.

Claude Code can write the code for your Stripe webhook handler in twenty minutes. Running that handler reliably for a year is a different project. Here's what the production reality looks like once students are paying you money:

Webhook reliability

Stripe sends a checkout.session.completed event when a student pays. Your handler has to receive it, verify the webhook signature, update the enrollment database, send a confirmation email, and do all of this idempotently — because Stripe will retry failed events, and you don't want to enroll the same student twice or send five welcome emails. Claude Code will write this logic for you. Keeping it running as your traffic grows, your database schema evolves, and Stripe occasionally changes its event structure is ongoing maintenance work.

Video delivery and transcoding

Raw video files uploaded by course creators need to be transcoded into multiple resolutions for different devices and connection speeds. This is what Mux and Cloudflare Stream do automatically. If you're managing your own video pipeline, you're either paying for a transcoding service (which brings you back to the infrastructure cost table above) or dealing with student complaints that videos won't play on mobile.

GDPR and data privacy

If any of your students are in the EU, you're responsible for data processing agreements, the right to erasure, and cookie consent flows. A platform handles this infrastructure for you. On a custom build, it's your compliance problem. "Claude Code can generate the cookie banner" is true — but the legal exposure from getting it wrong isn't a code problem.

Payment failure recovery

Subscription businesses lose meaningful revenue to failed payments. Teachable's Builder plan includes automated abandoned-cart emails. On a custom platform, you're building a dunning system — retry logic, failure notification emails, student communication flows — or you're leaving money on the table every month.

Platform security

Dependencies have vulnerabilities. Next.js releases security patches. Supabase updates its client libraries. On a SaaS platform, these updates happen without your involvement. On a custom platform, you're on the hook for monitoring, testing, and deploying them — or you're running outdated software that's vulnerable to known exploits.

None of these problems are insurmountable. But each one is a task that needs someone's time and attention. If you're a solo creator running a course business, that someone is you.

When does it make sense to use Teachable instead of building your own?

Teachable makes sense when your goal is running an education business rather than building platform infrastructure. If you want to spend your time creating content, teaching students, and growing revenue — rather than debugging deployment pipelines — a purpose-built platform lets you do that from day one.

There's a version of the "build your own" conversation where the math genuinely works out. If you're a developer who enjoys the infrastructure work, if you have specific requirements no platform covers, or if you're building at a scale where platform fees represent serious money — building can be the right call. But that's a much narrower group than the Teachable alternatives search traffic suggests.

For most knowledge business creators, the real comparison isn't "Teachable vs. my custom platform." It's "Teachable vs. the opportunity cost of six months of infrastructure work." The platform cost is visible on your credit card statement. The cost of not launching a second course, not improving your content, and not building your student community while you're debugging webhook handlers — that's invisible, but it's real.

Teachable's Builder plan, at $89/month with zero transaction fees, gives you:

Video hosting and delivery without a Mux bill or a CDN to configure
Student progress tracking and completion certificates out of the box
Affiliate marketing tools and abandoned-cart recovery without custom dunning logic
A mobile app your students can use without you building one
Payment processing through Stripe with webhook handling Teachable maintains
Compliance infrastructure — GDPR, VAT collection in applicable regions — that Teachable's team manages

That's not a consolation prize for creators who can't build. It's the infrastructure layer that frees you to do the work that actually requires your expertise: designing curriculum, teaching students, and building the kind of learning experience that creates real transformation.

The honest peer recommendation here is this: if you're reaching for Claude Code because you want to avoid a $39 Starter plan fee, the infrastructure math doesn't support it. If you're on the Builder plan and frustrated by a specific limitation — a custom integration, a unique content format, a workflow your current setup can't handle — that's when Claude Code becomes genuinely useful, as a tool to extend your platform rather than replace it.

The builders who get the most out of AI tools aren't the ones replacing their course platform. They're the ones using AI to create better content, faster — and letting Teachable handle the infrastructure that makes selling and delivering that content reliable.

The bottom line: Claude Code vs. Teachable for course creators

Claude Code is a powerful tool for technical creators who need custom integrations, internal tools, or platform features that don't exist off the shelf. For most course creators focused on growing their education business, Teachable's purpose-built infrastructure delivers more value than the equivalent time and cost of building from scratch.

If you're evaluating this decision right now, here's the honest framework:

Build with Claude Code if: you have a development team, specific requirements no platform covers, strict data requirements, or you're building an embedded learning experience inside an existing product
Use Teachable if: your primary goal is creating and selling courses, you want to launch quickly, you'd rather spend your hours on content than on DevOps, or the infrastructure cost comparison doesn't clearly favor custom

Most creators land in the second category. The technical capability to build something and the business case for building it aren't the same thing — and AI tools, as good as they've gotten, don't change that calculus.

If you're ready to stop thinking about infrastructure and start building your education business, Teachable's free trial lets you try the platform before you commit. The Builder plan's zero-fee structure and course delivery tools are worth a real look before you spin up a VPS.

Grow Your Business

It’s Tax Day: Here's everything Teachable handles for you

Grow Your Business

How to increase your revenue with Buy Now Pay Later (BNPL)

April 15, 2026

You launched your course to teach what you know. Somewhere between recording lessons and writing sales copy, you probably gave zero thought to international tax law. Fair enough. Most creators don't, until a student in Berlin triggers an EU VAT obligation or a purchase from Austin adds Texas sales tax to the equation.

Selling digital products across borders creates a tax situation that grows more tangled with every new student in a new jurisdiction. Different states charge different rates. Different countries enforce different rules. Some tax digital courses outright; others exempt certain categories. The compliance landscape shifts constantly, and staying current takes time most creators would rather spend building their next product.

Here's the good news: if you're on teachable:pay, most of this is already taken care of.

What Teachable actually handles on your behalf

The specifics depend on where your students are located, so let's break it down by region.

U.S. sales tax

Teachable calculates, collects, and remits sales tax in every applicable U.S. state under marketplace facilitator laws. These laws require platforms like Teachable to handle sales tax collection on behalf of their creators. If you're on teachable:pay, you don't file state sales tax on Teachable transactions yourself. The platform does it for you, based on where each student is located at the time of purchase.

EU and UK VAT

Value Added Tax is charged automatically on purchases from students in European Union member states and the United Kingdom. Teachable calculates the correct rate based on the student's country, collects it at checkout, and remits it to the appropriate tax authority. For a full breakdown of how VAT works on the platform, see Teachable's EU/UK VAT support article.

Rest of world

Teachable also handles tax calculation, collection, and remittance in 20+ additional countries, including Australia, Canada, India, Mexico, and others. This applies to non-domestic sales processed through teachable:pay. For the full list of supported countries and payment gateway-specific details, check the digital content tax handling article.

All of this runs automatically through teachable:pay. No manual filing. No tracking rate changes in 50 states or dozens of countries.

Tax-inclusive vs. tax-exclusive pricing

Creators on Teachable can choose how tax shows up in their pricing. Tax-inclusive means every student sees the same listed price regardless of location, with tax subtracted from the total on the back end. Tax-exclusive means your base price stays the same, but students in taxable regions see tax added as a line item at checkout. Each approach has trade-offs: inclusive pricing creates a consistent buyer experience, while exclusive pricing keeps your per-sale earnings more predictable. You can toggle this in Settings > Taxes. For a deeper look at how this affects your transaction reports, see the tax-inclusive pricing article.

What Custom Payment Gateway creators need to know

If you're using a Custom Payment Gateway (CPG), the tax situation looks different. Here's what that means in practice:

U.S. sales tax is not collected or remitted by Teachable on CPG transactions. That responsibility falls on the creator.
EU and UK VAT is still calculated at checkout by Teachable, but the creator must remit it to the relevant tax authorities directly.
For countries outside the U.S., EU, and UK, CPG creators are responsible for determining and meeting their own tax obligations.

Creators on CPG can use Teachable's transaction reporting tools to review tax data. Export a CSV from Sales > Transactions and reference the delivery_address_country and non_us_tax_fees columns to calculate what you owe. For more on payment gateway options and what each one includes, see Get Started with Payments.

What you do still need to handle yourself

Teachable covers a lot of ground on tax compliance, but it doesn't cover everything. A few areas where you'll want to stay informed:

Personal income tax: Revenue from your Teachable school is still taxable income in your home country. Consult a local tax professional about your reporting obligations.
Tax forms: Creators on teachable:pay or the Monthly Payment Gateway with earnings above $100 USD will be prompted to submit a W-9 or W-8 form through their school admin under Settings > Taxes.
Tax exemptions: If your school qualifies for a tax exemption (non-profit status, B2B buyers with valid Tax IDs), you'll need to submit documentation to Teachable Support directly.

Teachable publishes a disclaimer in its own support documentation recommending that creators consult their own tax, legal, and accounting advisors. That's good advice worth repeating here. For details on tax forms and filing requirements, review the Tax Forms on Teachable article.

Check your tax settings today

Take five minutes to confirm your setup. Go to Settings > Taxes and verify that teachable:pay is active, check whether your pricing display is set to tax-inclusive or tax-exclusive, and download a transaction CSV from Sales > Transactions if you want a full record of what was collected and remitted this year. For a walkthrough of your transaction data and export options, see Transaction History and Reports.

Tax compliance gets complicated fast. Teachable's job is to make sure you can focus on building courses, coaching students, and growing your business while the platform handles the tax math in the background.

Grow Your Business

Your 30-minute plan to close more year-end sales

February 26, 2026

You’ve probably already heard of Buy Now Pay Later (BNPL), given that it’s one of the fastest growing payment methods of the last decade. Since 2021, BNPL has seen over 20% annual growth in market share and is expected to be adopted by more than 900 million people by 2027.

The majority of schools on Teachable, especially our top sellers, offer Buy Now Pay Later to their customers.

But how does BNPL even work? What are the benefits, and how can you use it to grow your business?

How Buy Now Pay Later works

BNPL providers allow customers to split a purchase into smaller payments over time instead of paying the full amount upfront.

Imagine you’ve created a bundle of courses on a topic in your area of expertise. You’re confident in its value and you choose to offer it for $400.

A prospective customer visits your checkout page and considers buying the bundle, but they can’t afford to pay the full amount right now.

If you’ve enabled BNPL as a payment method, your customer can select a BNPL provider like Afterpay or Klarna and choose a payment plan from a list of options with different installments and interest rates.

The buyer logs in or creates an account with the BNPL provider and finalizes the terms. When approved, they return to Teachable and we confirm their purchase.

The benefits for businesses

Guaranteed Earnings

Traditional payment plans delay your earnings as you wait for installments from your customers, and more than 60% of payment plan sales end without the buyer successfully completing all payments.

With Buy Now Pay Later, you receive immediate payment in full, regardless of the number of installments or the billing schedule chosen by your customer. Crucially, this also eliminates the risk of failed payments; any payment issues are between the buyer and their BNPL provider. If the buyer misses a payment or fails to complete the payment plan, you still keep your full earnings.

Higher order value

BNPL increases the buying power of your customers, allowing them to buy more of your products or consider higher price points.

Industry estimates expect a 20-40% increase in average order value (AOV) when BNPL is offered, and we see similar trends on Teachable. Comparing schools selling into the same market, on average those with Buy Now Pay Later enabled have an AOV over 60% higher than those who don’t. Schools with BNPL see an up to 15% increase in AOV after enabling the feature.

Expanded reach

Missing a preferred payment method is one of the top reasons for cart abandonment. As BNPL becomes more popular, many purchasers expect to see it as an option at checkout, and may reconsider purchasing a product which doesn’t support it.

How can your business use Buy Now Pay Later on Teachable?

Not all businesses benefit from BNPL equally, and you may need to update your strategy to make the most of it.

1. Price your product appropriately‍

We offer BNPL as a payment method for one-time purchases, and purchasers prefer to use it for higher-priced products.

Explore a pricing model where you offer either an intensive single course or a collection of related products for a single, relatively high price point.

On Teachable, you can use our bundles feature to combine different products into a single, sellable package that can be sold at a premium. That’s a great opportunity to leverage BNPL in your pricing strategy.

Alternatively, if you already have a high price point product that you offer a payment plan model for, consider offering a higher, one-time payment option to replace or supplement it. Your students will have more payment options to choose from, and you won’t have to worry about managing their payment plan.

2. Advertise the option to use Buy Now Pay Later.

When implementing this strategy, it’s essential that your students know they can pay in installments using a BNPL provider.

Include messaging on your sales page that lets students know about available payment methods—and that they don’t need to pay the full price upfront if they don’t want to.

If you use a Teachable sales page or product detail page, we take care of this for you with dynamic messaging based on your pricing plan and the student location, so your student knows exactly what BNPL providers to expect, and what options they’ll have:

$100 USD one-time purchase with flexible payment options Klarna and Afterpay, as low as $18/month.

‍

There’s no better time than the new year to review your pricing and the payment options you offer. Try our Buy Now Pay Later on Teachable this year and see how it can help grow your business!

For more information on how to enable Buy Now Pay Later, eligibility requirements and fees, please visit our Help Center.

Grow Your Business

Learn more about the challenge here.

December 19, 2025

Think it’s too late to sell more this December? Think again.

If you already have an offer and an audience, there’s still time to generate sales—with very little effort—before the year ends. You don’t need a new launch, a new offer, or a big, multi-channel campaign. You just need 30 focused minutes to close open loops.

Below is a practical checklist you can implement today, even if the rest of your team is already in holiday mode.

Step 1 (5 minutes): Add a simple gift as a limited-time bonus

Pick one product you already have ready to go, for example:

A bonus lesson
A checklist
A short resource

Attach it to your existing offer and position it as an end-of-year extra. That’s it. You can offer added value without building something new.

If you don’t have anything ready to go, don’t worry—you can still make this tactic work for you. Offer a live session as a bonus (like a welcome session or a Q&A) and schedule it for January.

Goal: Make the buyer’s decision feel easier.

Step 2 (10 minutes): Flash reopen your end-of-year or Black Friday offer

This one’s simple: Reopen the same offer you already ran recently. You can use the same page, same checkout, and even the same pricing.

The most important thing is to add a clear deadline and position this moment as the last chance of the year. Just that slight tweak in messaging can drive more sales.

Didn’t run an end-of-year or Black Friday offer? No problem. Just reuse what you already have, even if it’s your evergreen offer.

This works especially well when marketed to people who:

Abandoned checkout
Engaged with the offer before but didn’t buy
Have already bought from you before and trust your brand

Goal: Help people decide now instead of “later.”

Step 3 (10 minutes): Publish 1–2 clear social posts

You don’t need a content strategy—just clarity.

Publish or schedule one or two posts that clearly spell out:

Who the product is for
What problem it solves
That this is the last opportunity to buy in 2025

Don’t overthink it! Reuse copy from past campaigns. Create a simple Canva layout.

In fact, if you need a little guidance on where to start, we selected a few free Canva templates for you: see here, here, and here.

Goal: Remind the right people that the offer exists.

Step 4 (5 minutes): Add a reminder inside your student dashboard

If people are already logging into your Teachable school, that means they’re already engaged. That’s why the dashboard is prime real estate when it comes to messaging limited-time offers. Don’t miss the opportunity!

Add a dashboard banner aligned with that same “last chance” framing:

One sentence
One link
One action

You can use the same Canva template you’re using for your social posts, just make sure to resize it so it displays well. The recommended size for the student dashboard banner is 1024 × 576.

Goal: Reinforce the decision without extra effort.

Close the year strong—and win prizes while you’re at it

If you want extra motivation to put these ideas into action, the Teachable Sales Challenge is still open!

Keep selling until December 31 and win exclusive rewards, from subscription credits to Creator Grants, and even an all-expenses-paid trip to Brazil to attend one of the world’s biggest creator economy events.

Four tiers of sales rewards from $10k-$249k to $1.5M+, with various credits, grants, and perks.

It’s a simple way to stay focused during the final days of the year—using low-effort tactics like the ones above—while keeping momentum going into the new year.

Success Stories

How Amie Tollefsrud made $11M on Teachable the “lazy” way

Success Stories

How Kelly McKenna crossed $1M in course revenue on Teachable

May 29, 2026

Amie Tollefsrud calls herself a lazy person. She has generated over $11 million on Teachable saying so.

"I am a self-proclaimed, very lazy person." – Amie Tollefsrud, Founder of Rebelle Nutrition and Lazy Millionaire

Most creators treat that word as the enemy. Amie treats it as the whole strategy.

Amie's Teachable story at a glance

The turning point: From nanny gigs to a scalable business

There are only so many hours in a day, and trading them for money never scales.

The nutrition courses worked, and as they kept working, her audience started asking her about something other than nutrition.

That repeated question was its own market research. Her audience told her what they wanted before she ever built it, the exact validation signal she now teaches her students to watch for.

So she followed it. The nutritionist became the course-creation expert.

The throughline from that first nutrition course to the business today comes down to a handful of principles Amie applies every single time. Here are the ones doing the heaviest lifting.

Amie's strategies for building an 8-figure course business

Strategy 1: Sell the shift your student is buying

The biggest mistake Amie sees in first-time creators is selling the wrong thing. They list their modules, their PDFs, their hours of video, then wonder why nobody buys.

Amie points to her own dentist as the perfect salesperson.

"Immediately, I was like, 'Take my money. I want that.'" – Amie Tollefsrud, Founder of Rebelle Nutrition and Lazy Millionaire

Take action

Write the shift in one sentence: "This course takes you from ______ to ______." Say it aloud to someone outside your industry. Hesitation on their end means it needs sharpening.
Replace every fuzzy outcome like "clarity" or "confidence" with something the buyer could point to in real life.

Strategy 2: Get specific enough to stop the scroll

Selling a shift only works when it gets specific enough that the right person cannot scroll past it.

Her litmus test sits in the gap between "Learn how to eat clean" and "A step-by-step guide to clear your hormonal acne in 30 days."

Take action

Rewrite your title to name a clear outcome, and add a realistic timeframe when you can stand behind it.
Read your title for jargon. Any word your ideal student would never say out loud in conversation has to go.

Strategy 3: Validate before you build a single lesson

Amie is blunt about why so many capable creators, even ones with big audiences, launch into silence. They guessed.

Her method skips surveys and spreadsheets.

Amie has creators hold three to five real conversations with people who feel like ideal students, through DMs, email, or a quick call.

She also reframes the whole exercise so it never feels like begging for approval.

Take action

Before building anything, run three to five conversations with ideal students and capture their exact words. Those words become your sales page copy.
Track urgency over politeness. "That sounds interesting" carries far less signal than "when can I buy this."

Strategy 4: Launch imperfect, then get 1% better forever

For all the strategy, Amie credits one unglamorous habit above the rest. She ships before it is ready.

Her first launch, by her own description, was scrappy and far from what she wanted. It still made $5,000 in an hour.

The creators who never break through are usually the ones tweaking and refining until the moment to launch quietly slips past.

That iteration habit also keeps students coming back. Asked what most reliably turns a one-time buyer into a repeat customer, Amie answered without hesitating.

Take action

Set a launch date before the course feels finished, and treat version one as a starting point instead of a final product.
Build your first module to deliver a real, fast win. Early results earn you the student's next purchase.

Strategy 5: Build a passive funnel, then get more from every buyer

Amie's revenue does not come from chasing new customers all day. It runs on a system that works without her and pulls more value from every person who already decided to buy.

Automated email sequences of five to seven messages follow up over the next week with anyone who did not buy right away, paired with a real reason to act now.

The lazy genius shows up in what she layers on top: order bumps and post-purchase upsells.

Someone who just decided to spend money will spend a little more, so one buyer becomes worth far more without any extra traffic.

Take action

Replace one-off launches with an evergreen funnel: free value such as a masterclass leading to your paid offer, backed by an automated email sequence.
Add an order bump or post-purchase upsell at checkout. The buyer already said yes, which makes it the easiest revenue you will add all year.

Why Amie bets on being human in the age of AI

The obvious objection to any course in 2026 sounds simple. Plenty of people ask why they would pay for a course when AI hands over information free.

Amie does not dodge that objection. She agrees that good free information exists everywhere, then explains why it falls short of the real thing.

Her edge comes from having lived the outcome she teaches, start to finish.

She sees the same change defining the whole industry. The creators who win next will skip the losing game of competing with a chatbot on facts.

In practice, that means pairing the digital course with something only a person can give: community, group support, an occasional live touchpoint, whatever fits the creator's energy and style.

Looking ahead

These days, Amie is most excited about Substack, which she started in the past year.

"I look at every article I write almost like a 12-minute course." – Amie Tollefsrud, Founder of Rebelle Nutrition and Lazy Millionaire

For someone who has done eight figures, she stays remarkably clear that the path was never about being special.

The advice she would give the version of herself still working that nannying job is the same advice underneath everything she teaches today.

What to do next

Get Amie's free playbook: Grab The Profitable Course Playbook on Teachable, where Amie walks through how to find the right course idea, validate it, and build something people actually pay for.

Watch the full interview: See Amie tell her complete story on YouTube.

Explore more from Amie: YouTube | Instagram | Teachable School | Website

Explore more creator stories: Read how other educators are winning on Teachable in our Success Stories collection.

Success Stories

Cross-Exam: Professional pilot and licensed engineer put each other to the test

May 28, 2026

Kelly McKenna's grandmother was a therapist. Kelly always assumed she would be one too.

The account grew because people across the country recognized something in her posts they had never quite seen before: a therapist being a real human.

By the end of her first full year in private practice, Kelly had earned $250,000. Within four years, her revenue across practice and digital products had crossed $1 million annually.

"Creating a private-pay practice didn't just transform my income, it transformed my life. I became a better therapist, a more present wife and mother, and built a business aligned with the life I actually wanted to live." — Kelly McKenna, LCSW, MBA, Founder of Business of Therapy

Kelly's Teachable story at a glance

From one-on-one to a course that reached 1,000 therapists

When Kelly's Instagram audience started growing, so did the demand for her time. She filled her caseload, and quickly other therapists started asking her for help.

She was managing a full therapy caseload at the same time. The math on one-on-one coaching made no sense as a long-term model. The calls were useful, but there was a ceiling baked into the format.

"There was a clear moment when I realized something had to change. I was receiving more inquiries and coaching requests than I could realistically handle alongside my full therapy caseload. It became obvious that continuing to grow demand without changing my delivery model would lead to burnout." — Kelly McKenna, LCSW, MBA, Founder of Business of Therapy

‍

The signal that a course for therapists made sense: therapists kept DMing her asking her for help and booking 1-1 calls. The market had been asking for something before she had built it.

"I was drawn to Teachable's strong reputation, clean interface, ease of use, and low prices. After testing the free trial and experiencing how intuitive the setup was, it felt like the right platform to confidently build and scale my digital products." — Kelly McKenna, LCSW, MBA, Founder of Business of Therapy

Kelly's strategies for building a therapy education business

Strategy 1: Build your audience around radical transparency, not polished expertise

This was not a calculated content strategy at the start. It was how she naturally worked. Clinical training taught Kelly about rapport and authenticity. Kelly brought that same instinct to her posts.

"As I built my own business publicly, I shared the real-time process including the wins, the pivots, the fear, and that transparency became a core value of my brand." — Kelly McKenna, LCSW, MBA, Founder of Business of Therapy

Take action

Post about the process, not just the outcome. If you're building something, share where you are in it, including the parts that feel unresolved. Audiences build around people they trust to be honest, and trust comes from specificity, not polish.
Identify the things your industry tends to avoid talking about publicly and write about those directly. Those posts tend to perform best because they fill a gap the audience already knows exists.

Strategy 2: Treat marketing as a clinical skill therapists already have

One of the clearest ideas in Kelly's teaching is that therapists already know how to market themselves. They have just never been told to think of it that way.

"Marketing, at its core, is reflective listening — understanding someone's pain, naming it clearly, and mirroring that back to them. That's exactly what therapists do every single day. When therapists learn how to translate their clinical skills into client-centered messaging, marketing stops feeling salesy and starts feeling aligned." — Kelly McKenna, LCSW, MBA, Founder of Business of Therapy

Take action

Before writing any marketing copy, write down the specific problem your ideal client is experiencing in their own words. Then write a post that names that problem exactly as they would name it, before offering anything. That mirroring is what creates the recognition that drives inquiries.
Review your last five pieces of content and ask whether they reflect what clients are feeling or what you think they should know. The former performs; the latter educates without converting.

Strategy 3: Price the product to reflect what a caseload change is actually worth

Kelly's first digital product, the anxiety course, was priced as a low-ticket entry point. The Private Practice Academy Bundle went in the opposite direction.

"I firmly believe therapists are naturally some of the best marketers but they just don't realize it. Every therapist deserves to make six figures." — Kelly McKenna, LCSW, MBA, Founder of Business of Therapy

"The most profitable digital products are the ones that actually get people results. And that requires work. You should constantly be evolving your digital products as you learn more and get feedback from customers. Not necessarily to add more material, but to simplify and speed up what folks need to do to get the desired result." — Kelly McKenna, LCSW, MBA, Founder of Business of Therapy

Take action

Price your course against the value of the outcome, not the hours of content inside it. A 4-module course that reliably produces a specific financial result is worth more than a 20-module course that covers everything without a clear transformation.
Schedule a curriculum review every quarter. The goal is not to add more material. The goal is to remove anything that slows a student down before they reach their first result.

Strategy 4: Add a subscription product to sit alongside the flagship course

The Private Practice Academy Bundle is a one-time purchase. The Reels Membership is a recurring subscription that gives therapists a steady stream of content ideas and templates for Instagram.

"I'm constantly evolving the PPA Bundle. I see the course as a living resource that adapts alongside the therapists it serves." — Kelly McKenna, LCSW, MBA, Founder of Business of Therapy

Take action

Identify the recurring execution problem your students face after completing your main course, then build a subscription product around solving that specific problem. The subscription should not duplicate the course. It should handle what students need to do every week after they have learned the core material.
On Teachable, you can run both a one-time course and a subscription membership under the same school. Map out the student journey: which product do they buy first, and what do they need next?

‍How Kelly thinks about scaling without losing the clinical foundation

"My background as a therapist has deeply shaped my teaching style. In clinical work, authenticity and relational safety are everything. People grow when they feel seen, not talked down to. I bring that same philosophy into my content and teachings." — Kelly McKenna, LCSW, MBA, Founder of Business of Therapy

"The timeline depends less on the material itself and more on how quickly someone takes action. Those who implement consistently tend to see momentum build quickly." — Kelly McKenna, LCSW, MBA, Founder of Business of Therapy

What students take away

The student messages Kelly shared in her case study application are not about follower counts or viral posts. They are about what financial stability makes possible.

One student wrote: "Since starting my own private practice and having some private pay clients I have been able to buy my first condo and get myself out of credit card debt."

"The feedback that has meant the most to me isn't about follower growth or even revenue, it's about how therapists have been able to change their lives. When a therapist tells me they've bought their first home, paid off debt, doubled their income while working part-time, or finally felt financially secure enough to start a family, that's what stays with me." — Kelly McKenna, LCSW, MBA, Founder of Business of Therapy

Looking ahead

Kelly lives in Miami with her husband Tom, their son Aidan, and their dog Jozi.

What to do next

Explore Kelly's work:

Visit businessoftherapy.com to access the Private Practice Academy Bundle, the Reels Membership, and Kelly's free training on marketing a therapy practice on Instagram.

Connect with Kelly:

Try Teachable yourself:

Kelly moved from one-on-one coaching calls to a course that has served over 1,000 therapists. Start your Teachable trial and build the product your audience has been asking for.

Success Stories

Watch the full episode of Cross-Exam.

May 21, 2026

Round 1: The physics behind flying airplanes

Dan opened with the lift equation: Lift = Coefficient of Lift x (1/2) x air density x velocity squared x wing surface area.

He walked through each variable, but kept coming back to velocity. Because it carries an exponent, small changes in airspeed affect lift far more than equivalent changes in any other factor.

Before getting into the equation though, Dan had to dismantle something first.

"If I slow the aircraft down, I can maintain my altitude by increasing angle of attack… I call this the Star Wars conception of how things fly. You point the ship in a certain direction and it just goes there at an angle." — Dan George, founder of FlightInsight

Naming the wrong model before replacing it is a teaching move that works better than most educators realize.

Once the flawed assumption is on the table, students will let go of it. Before it is named, they hold onto it quietly and build misunderstandings on top.

Round 2: The core formula behind electrical engineering

Wasim covered Ohm's Law: V = I x R, voltage equals current times resistance.

Rather than define the variables abstractly, he built the whole thing around a water pipe.

Voltage is the pressure difference between two ends. Current is the rate of flow. Resistance is whatever obstructs it.

"If there's dirt in here, if there are obstacles, rocks, pebbles, they're going to impede the flow of current." — Wasim Asghar, founder of Study For FE

From there, he went after the most persistent misconception in electrical safety: that voltage is what kills you.

It is actually current.

Roughly 40 milliamps through the body is a guaranteed fatality. A coffee maker draws about 1,000 milliamps. The lethal threshold is two to five percent of what runs through a kitchen appliance.

"It's not the voltage that is dangerous. It's really the current." — Wasim Asghar, founder of Study For FE

A bird sitting on a 1,000-volt transmission line survives because the voltage difference across its two feet is zero.

For anyone building a course on a technical subject: definitions without physical anchors give learners nothing to hold onto.

A concrete system they already understand gives the new concept traction.

What the best educators do differently

Dan described what happens when he teaches the same material over and over.

"Every time I do it, it gets a little bit different. I can always rediscover some kind of a new insight or some new way of teaching." — Dan George, founder of FlightInsight

Watch the full episode

Dan and Wasim both teach on Teachable. Between them they have built course libraries that reach students in dozens of countries, in fields where getting the material wrong carries real consequences.

Both of them became better teachers by treating their explanations as working documents rather than finished products.

Want to know more about this episode’s guests?

Follow Dan George: YouTube | Website | Teachable School | Instagram | LinkedIn

Follow Wasim Asghar: YouTube | Website | LinkedIn

Teachable gives you courses, coaching, digital downloads, and memberships in one place. See plans and pricing.

Teachable & Learning

From online course to program: The shift worth making

Teaching & Learning

Introducing Teachable AI Academy: Live workshops with AI experts

June 10, 2026

That tells us that the biggest opportunity for online educators isn’t necessarily in making better courses. It’s in better structure.

That’s where Learning Paths come in. Brand new to Teachable, Learning Paths allow you to turn your existing courses into structured, multi-course programs.

The standalone course problem

The courses you’ve already built do more, because they’re working together.

Students want more advanced coursework

Here are two more numbers from the same survey:

93% of students said they're likely to buy from the same creator or school again.
59% said advanced or related coursework is what would bring them back.

Repeat purchase intent is high, and most students aren’t asking for a community or a workbook or a cheaper option. Instead, they want the next level of the thing they just finished.

What changes when you sell a program

A course says: here’s a topic I’ll teach you.

A program says: here’s a transformation, and these are the stages you move through to get there.

That reframe alone justifies more premium pricing. It’s the difference between “I bought a yoga course” and “I enrolled in a 200-hour teacher training.”

You’re selling your same expertise, just packaged differently. The way you market your learning should be less about content and more about outcomes.

The growth lever isn’t a new audience

Note: Learning Paths are currently available in beta. To request to join the beta group, complete this form.

Teaching & Learning

Course hosting platform: What it is & how to choose one

June 1, 2026

That's the gap we built Teachable AI Academy to close.

Every session is free to attend. Each one is hosted live, and we record all of them, so the replay is waiting on Teachable whenever you want it.

What is the Teachable AI Academy?

AI Academy is a run of live, online workshops. More than 20 AI creators and experts are on the schedule, and each one picks a topic straight from their own work.

They teach it live, in real time, and they leave room for your questions at the end.

The people teaching have built audiences in the millions and run real businesses with these tools. So the advice you get is grounded in what they actually do day to day.

We host every session, and we keep the replay up afterward. That means the library grows every week as new workshops go live.

Why did we build the Teachable AI Academy?

Here's how we see this moment. AI made information instant, and that made the hunger for real skill sharper than it has ever been.

The hard part is knowing where to start. When everyone is posting at once, it's tough to know whose advice you can trust.

AI Academy is our answer. We put practitioners you can trust on a set schedule, each teaching one concrete thing you can use.

That number is worth sitting with for a second. The people whose entire job is teaching skills are moving on AI right now, and AI Academy is built for everyone trying to keep pace with them.

Once you learn something in a session, you can put it to work inside Teachable. Our own AI features sit right in the platform, so the courses and content you build benefit from the same tools.

The June 2026 Teachable AI Academy lineup

The first wave of workshops runs through June, and each session below is open for registration now.

More sessions coming through the summer

June 2026 is only the opening stretch. New workshops drop every week through August 2026.

Names already on the schedule include Mariana Antaya, Sai Kumar, Sundas Khalid, Sadie St. Lawrence, Anjali Viramgama, Ale Thomas, Tina Huang, and Matt Wolfe.

How to join

Registration is open for every session on the AI Academy page.

Pick the workshops that fit what you're building, save your seat, and add them to your calendar. If a date passes before you get to it, the replay will be waiting for you on Teachable.

Head to the AI Academy page to see the full schedule and register for the sessions you want.

Teaching & Learning