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300 The Truth About Lifetime Updates (And Why You Should Stop)
15 sales page elements you can't afford to miss - free checklist 📝 https://datadrivenmarketing.co/elements
Monica Froese built a multi-million dollar Pinterest ads course business, then shut it all down in a single conversation with her husband right after they signed the papers on their new house. That alone would make for a good episode. But Monica's story keeps going.
After pivoting to Empowered Business and launching her Digital Shop Experience to what she describes as her biggest launches ever, her marriage fell apart. She pulled back from the business, turned off her paid ads, and by 2024 her revenue had halved. Then in 2025 it halved again.
I talked with Monica about how she rebuilt from that. Not through a dramatic new launch or a big moment of inspiration, but through AI. Specifically, agentic AI. She talks about how tools like Claude, Fable 5, and MCPs allowed her to take back work she'd previously hired out, update a spreadsheet she'd been selling for ten years but never had time to improve, and relaunch a brand she'd been sitting on since 2013.
We also got into the lifetime updates problem, how she's rethinking course pricing as AI changes so fast, and the question she asks every new creator that stops them cold: what are you growing your audience for?
Monica is honest about the hard parts in a way that most people aren't. I think you'll get a lot out of this one.
Check out Monica's work: 🌐 https://monicafroese.com 🌐 https://www.skool.com/empowered-ai-collective/about 📸 https://instagram.com/monica.froese ▶️ Empowered Business Podcast® https://monicafroese.com/podcast
299 Growing an Email List From YouTube Before Black Friday
2-10x your email list size in just 3 steps 📩 https://datadrivenmarketing.co/guide
Chandeep Chhabra left his job as an investment banking analyst in December 2013 with no backup plan and one idea: that he could sell his spreadsheet skills. Over a decade later, he runs Goodly, a business built around teaching Excel and Power BI to data professionals, with 137,000 YouTube subscribers, over 19 million views, corporate training clients, a consulting agency, and a bestselling book on Power Query.
John sat down with Chandeep for what turned into a live audit of his business. Chandeep has roughly 350,000 YouTube views per month and an email list of about 26,000 people, but only around 500 new subscribers joining each month. John walked through exactly why that gap exists, what his opt-in pages are doing wrong, where the lead magnet link is buried in the video description, and what changes would get that number to 3,000 or 4,000 new subscribers a month.
They also got into Black Friday. Chandeep went from $20,000 to $60,000 in Black Friday revenue after adding webinars and a more structured email sequence. John connected him with his head of funnel strategy to take it further.
And then the conversation drifted somewhere unexpected: writing books. Chandeep is working on his second, and both he and John reflected on why it's so hard, why you should publish anyway, and why Chandeep thinks books are written for craft and authority rather than money.
It's a really honest conversation, and I think you'll enjoy it.
Check out Chandeep's work: 🌐 http://products.goodly.co.in 📸 https://www.linkedin.com/in/chandeepchhabra/ ▶️ https://www.youtube.com/@GoodlyChandeep
298 20 Years of Neuroscience, Packed Into a $44 Course
Grow your course revenue up to 30% in 7 days - no paid ads, no sales calls 📈https://datadrivenmarketing.co/roadmap
Stefanie Faye spent close to 20 years translating brain science for coaches, therapists, and leaders. She has done research at NYU, worked with Google, Stanford, MIT, and the FBI, and built a 25,000-person email list. This year, she made what she calls the best business decision of her career: packaging 20 years of expertise into a $44 micro-course.
Dominik sat down with Stefanie to dig into how she thinks about all of it. She talks about why she walked away from the sold-out live academy model, at least for now, and why micro-courses are reaching people in Nigeria, South Africa, and Israel who never could have joined a live group program. She explains her lead gen setup, using Meta ads and free downloads to drive a simple email funnel, and how emailing four to five times a week keeps that list warm.
There's a moment in this conversation where Stefanie compares "now money" to "later money" that stuck with me. She's essentially choosing to invest her time building assets that compound, rather than filling another cohort. She also has a phrase she uses with her own students that applies perfectly to building an online business: mistakes are always information for iteration.
She's thoughtful, specific, and genuinely excited about what she's building. I think you'll enjoy this one.
Check out Stefanie's work: 🌐 https://stefaniefaye.com 📸 https://www.instagram.com/stefanieffaye/ ▶️ https://www.facebook.com/mindsetneuroscience
297 Why I Left Udemy to Build My Own Course Empire
Struggling with low conversions? Grab our FREE checklist of 15 must-have elements to optimize your sales pages! 👉🏼 https://datadrivenmarketing.co/elements
John Bura started making mobile games during the 2008 financial crisis. Then everyone he met kept asking him the same question: how do you build an app? So in 2011 he made a course on Udemy, teaching people to make HTML5 games without coding. That course took off, and he never really stopped.
Fourteen years later, John runs Mammoth Club, a full membership platform with over a thousand courses, 15 to 25 staff, and a goal of selling a million annual subscriptions at $199 each, with a free book and a free shirt shipped anywhere in the world when you sign up.
I had a great conversation with John about how he built all of this, including the part where he walked away from three million Udemy students because their model made it impossible for publishers like him to scale. He talks honestly about the year revenue dropped 30% and felt like the world was ending, and what happened next. We also got into what he's working on now: onboarding design, A/B testing $1 trial offers, email sequences for win-back, building his own platform from scratch (and why he tells solo creators never to do that), and why producing more content this year didn't automatically mean more revenue.
John thinks carefully about things most course creators don't touch until something breaks. This one was worth the time.
Check out John's work: 🌐 https://mammothclub.com 📸 https://training.mammothinteractive.com ▶️ https://www.youtube.com/@mammothinteractive
Struggling with low conversions? Grab our FREE checklist of 15 must-have elements to optimize your sales pages! 👉🏼 https://datadrivenmarketing.co/elements
Bori Vigh built a course business in Hungarian. Not as a stepping stone to the English market. As the whole plan, on purpose.
Dominik sat down with Bori to find out how she turned a backpacker blog into a virtual assistant training program with around 20,000 people on her email list, and why she thinks selling to a small market is actually an advantage, not a limitation.
What came through in this conversation is how clearly Bori thinks about her audience. She noticed that her most-read blog post was always about how to make money while traveling, so she built her entire funnel around answering that question. Free webinar, entry-level career coaching course, then a cohort-based VA training program. Simple, but deliberate.
She also pushed back hard on the advice she kept getting to raise her prices or go international. Her argument is that pricing has to match the market, and that being the well-known face of location independence in Hungary is worth more than being unknown in a crowded global space. It's hard to argue with her logic.
The part that stuck with me most was her description of what the first two years actually look like. She was blunt about it in a way that most guests aren't.
I think you'll enjoy this one.
Check out Bori's work: 🌐 https://vahungary.com/ 📸 https://www.instagram.com/bori.vigh/ 🧩 https://www.linkedin.com/in/borivigh/
295 How to Double Your Q4 Revenue: The Black Friday Masterclass
🚀 Work With Me - https://datadrivenmarketing.co/done-for-you
Black Friday is the biggest revenue opportunity of the year for course creators, and the sellers who win it start planning in September. In this episode, John Ainsworth and Josip Bolina walk through the exact Black Friday playbook we use with our clients.
They cover why prep has to start in September, why Black Friday is the time to run your proven winner instead of testing new ideas, and how to build a dedicated offer for your best customers who already bought your main product. You'll also learn the two-promotion November strategy, how many emails to send and which types, and why the best offer beats the cheapest offer. Instead of slashing prices in half, a reverse discount that stacks bonuses on top of your existing product will usually make you more money. Plus: what to sell on Cyber Monday for the people who didn't buy, and the simple tracking setup you need.
In 2026, Black Friday is November 27 and Cyber Monday is November 30. Start now.
Want help with your Black Friday campaign? Email us: john@datadrivenmarketing.co josip@datadrivenmarketing.co
Looking for predictable revenue growth? Access our FREE 7-day roadmap to increase your income without paid ads or sales calls! 👉🏼 https://datadrivenmarketing.co/roadmap
Nadia Mologova grew up in a mining town in southern Russia, spotted an art school at six years old while walking with her grandmother, and eventually made her way to Florence, Italy, where she founded her own accredited academy in 2009. She built the entire curriculum herself, from anatomy to composition to copying the old masters, and has spent 17 years passing on a method of classical art that most of the world had mostly forgotten.
John talked with Nadia about how the Florence Classical Arts Academy works today, with in-person students capped at 60 a year, online groups deliberately kept to 5 or 10 students, and a hybrid program that brings people to Florence to finish what they started online. The pricing, the hiring of professors, the challenge of giving individual feedback across 12 time zones, all of it came up.
What stood out was how clearly Nadia has thought through the tradeoff between scale and quality. She could take more students. She has chosen not to. That's not a marketing line for her, it's just how she thinks about the work. She also talked honestly about stepping back from day-to-day leadership, the weight of running something this complex alongside raising two children and pursuing her own art, including a recognition from the Olympic Committee in 2026.
If you're running a course business and thinking about how much individual support is the right amount to offer, this one gives you a lot to think about.
Check out Nadia's work: 🌐 https://www.artac.org 📸 https://www.instagram.com/nadyamolugova ▶️ https://www.youtube.com/c/FlorenceClassicalArtsAcademyart
293 She Built a Makeup Empire. Online Is the Next Move.
15 sales page elements you can't afford to miss - free checklist 📝 https://datadrivenmarketing.co/elements
Louise Volschenk did her first bride's makeup at 14. She was charging the equivalent of about $10. By 16 she was teaching in salons. By 2013 she had turned her garage into an academy. Today she has nearly 100,000 followers, her own makeup product line, students flying in from other countries, and an online course she openly admits she has barely scratched the surface of.
Dominik sat down with Louise to trace the whole journey, from that garage studio in South Africa to a brand that is starting to reach people globally without really trying. What came through clearly is how much of Louise's business was built on personal connection, showing up as herself, talking to her audience, and being the face of what she built.
The moment that stuck with me most was when Louise described her email marketing, four newsletters a month, one per product or service area, and then said plainly that the online course is "income that I'm ignoring." Not said defensively, just honestly. She knows the opportunity is sitting there. She knows the course is already made. She just hasn't turned the tap on yet.
There's also a lot in here about what it actually takes to teach a skill well, why her students travel from other countries, what she'd tell her 14-year-old self, and why she thinks feeling stuck usually has more to do with watching other people than with your own work.
I think you'll enjoy this one.
Check out Louise's work: 🌐 https://www.halouw.co.za/ 📸 https://www.instagram.com/louisevolschenk1/?hl=en ▶️ https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCART2AOrqc0y-k77k4M_U_Q
292 30% of Workshop Attendees Buy the $3,000 Course
Struggling with low conversions? Grab our FREE checklist of 15 must-have elements to optimize your sales pages! 👉🏼 https://datadrivenmarketing.co/elements
Amanda Quinn built Canada's largest women's-only fitness company from a single bootcamp in a park in 2008. Then, a decade in, she and her co-founder Laura closed it down and started over, teaching other women to become certified health and nutrition coaches instead.
That decision turned into FitChicks Academy. In this episode, John sits down with Amanda to talk through how they actually built that, because the business model is more layered than it looks from the outside.
They get into her bonus strategy, which she thinks about in a way most course creators don't. Her paid and free workshops are converting at around 30% when people show up, and the bonuses are a big part of why. She also talks through a new $49 challenge funnel she's testing right now, built on the logic that getting someone to go from free to $49 is a very different ask than free to $3,000.
There's a good stretch on evergreen versus live funnels too. Amanda tried evergreen, found it was actually more work, and largely went back to live. But she has one certification that runs on a fixed monthly cycle and has converted consistently for two years, and she's not touching it.
She's also got bigger plans in motion: a self-coaching membership, a physical food product line, and a 1,000-person live event in 2027. It's a fun conversation with someone who's clearly been building for a long time and knows where she's going next.
Hope you enjoy it.
Check out Amanda's work: 🌐 https://fitchicksacademy.com/ 📸 https://www.instagram.com/fitchicksacademy/
291 $126K in Year One With Unedited YouTube Videos
Get your tripwire product ideas here: 👉🏼 https://datadrivenmarketing.co/tripwire
Melissa Mae Dillon left her teaching job in 2022, shaved her head, got a pink and yellow mohawk, and started filming insurance exam prep videos on YouTube with zero editing. No fancy setup. No plan. One take, every time.
Her first year she made $126,000. Her courses now bring in $130,000 to $150,000 a month.
I sat down with Melissa to talk about how she built Insurance Exam Queen from nothing, but what I didn't expect was how little of the conversation would actually be about tactics. Melissa is clear that the most important thing she did to build her business was internal work, not funnels, not email sequences, not better lighting. She talks about hiring from guilt, creating offers from desperation and watching them attract desperate clients, and how she eventually figured out that the energy you're in when you build something leaves an imprint on everything that comes from it.
We did get into the practical side too. Her YouTube channel sits at 103,000 subscribers and drives almost all her top-of-funnel traffic. Her Facebook study group has 22,000 members who actively sell her course for her without being paid. She has 3,400 five-star reviews. And we walked through an eight-email welcome sequence together and worked out how it would fit her audience.
Melissa is one of those guests who makes you think differently about what the work actually is. I think you'll enjoy this one.
Check out Melissa's work: 🌐 https://melissamaedillon.com/ 📸 https://www.facebook.com/melicious.pixie ▶️ https://www.youtube.com/@insuranceexamqueen
290 No One Bought at $1,000. So I Raised the Price
Grow your course revenue up to 30% in 7 days - no paid ads, no sales calls 📈https://datadrivenmarketing.co/roadmap
Azhelle Wade spent years inside the toy industry, earning three patents, managing six brands at Toys R Us, and eventually reaching VP level. Then she walked away and started teaching complete strangers how to do what she used to do for a living.
Dominik sat down with Azhelle, known as The Toy Coach, to talk about how she built her audience from 20 podcast downloads per episode, how a chance meeting at an industry networking event sparked the whole thing, and what actually happened when TV appearances on NBC sent a flood of leads her way with no real funnel to catch them.
They get into the real business decisions too. How she used AI to role-play as her own ideal customer and audit her sales page, discovering she was trying to speak to too many different people at once. How she restructured Toy Creators Academy from a cohort model into a self-study program with a separate one-on-one offer. And how raising her price 2.5x turned around a period where she could not understand why nobody was buying.
There is also a student story in here that genuinely stopped me when I heard it. One of Azhelle's students, Samantha, came close to quitting after her factory fell through. Azhelle talked her back in. Samantha ended up on Dragon's Den and disclosed $465,000 in revenue last year, then told Azhelle the number was already higher.
It is a good one. I think you will enjoy it.
Check out Azhelle's work: 🌐 https://www.thetoycoach.com/ 📸 https://www.instagram.com/thetoycoach ▶️ https://www.youtube.com/thetoycoach
Looking for predictable revenue growth? Access our FREE 7-day roadmap to increase your income without paid ads or sales calls! 👉🏼 https://datadrivenmarketing.co/roadmap
Nick Pezzopane spent 15 years doing motion graphics and animation for clients like Blizzard Entertainment and the History Channel. Then AI showed up, and instead of feeling threatened, he went deep. He taught himself to install and run open-source AI locally on his own machine, built custom setups for paying clients, and turned that knowledge into a course business called Pixel Pandorium Academy.
John sat down with Nick to dig into how he's building this from scratch, without a social following, using Meta ads as his primary traffic source. Nick's running one ad, spending around $1,000 to $1,500 a week, and has managed to break even on the front end while seeing roughly a 40% conversion rate on his $97 upsell. He's honest about what he got wrong with the ads early on and what he's still figuring out.
What made this conversation interesting was how clearly Nick thinks about the value he's delivering. His argument for running AI locally, cutting out subscription costs, removing censorship restrictions, and getting more raw processing power, is simple and compelling. You can feel how much he wants his students to actually succeed with this.
There's also a genuinely good moment near the end where Nick talks about waking up and realizing he's running a real business for the first time. It's the kind of thing that's easy to rush past, but worth sitting with.
Simone, known as The Bearded Guitarist, spent over 15 years teaching private guitar lessons before he started posting on YouTube in 2020. He now has half a million followers across platforms. And until about a year ago, he had almost no idea how to actually sell anything.
That's the honest thing he said early in our conversation, and it set the tone for everything that followed. Simone has clearly put in the work since then. He's built out a sales page with a VSL, testimonials, bonuses, multiple guarantees, an order bump, and a post-checkout upsell. He launched a coaching program structured more like personal training than traditional lessons. He's grown his email list from around 1,200 to just over 4,000 in twelve months.
We went through his funnel together on screen, called out what he's doing well, and got into the specific things worth fixing: where to place the pain-agitation-solution section, why an eyebrow headline matters, and what's missing from his checkout page that's probably costing him sales.
The bigger conversation was about email. Simone is getting around 300 new subscribers a month right now. John thinks he can get that to 1,000 or more, and explains exactly how monthly email promotions, done the right way, become the engine that makes everything else work.
Simone is the kind of guest I really enjoy talking to. He's far enough along to have made real decisions and learned from them, and honest enough to say where he got it wrong. I think you'll enjoy this one.
Check out Simone's work: 🌐 http://thebeardedguitaristcourses.com 📸 https://www.instagram.com/its_thebeardedguitarist ▶️ https://www.youtube.com/@TheBeardedGuitarist
287 Why Scaling Might Be What Kills Your Course Business
Jessica Lackey has a Harvard MBA, worked at McKinsey, and spent years inside Nike watching the company chase scale until it broke. Now she runs a multi-six-figure business on a list of 2,000 people, more than one in ten of whom buys from her every year. And she built it that way on purpose.
Dominik sat down with Jessica to find out how that actually works. What came out of it was one of the more honest conversations we've had on this show about what the online course industry gets wrong and what it costs people who follow the standard playbook without questioning it.
Jessica talks about how she spent four years doing free monthly workshops without selling anything, how she personally emails everyone on her waitlist before a launch, and why she keeps her prices low on purpose so she never has to sell hard. She also gets into the moment she realized that most marketing advice isn't bad, it's just built for a different kind of business than the one most people are actually running.
There's a section about the pull she still feels toward bigger numbers and higher prices, and why she chooses not to go there even when she could. That part stuck with me. It's rare for someone to admit that so clearly.
She also shares two sharp pieces of advice: one for people who haven't launched yet, and one for people who've plateaued after two years. Both are worth hearing.
Check out Jessica's work: 🌐 https://www.deeperfoundations.com/ 📸 https://www.linkedin.com/in/jessica-lackey/
286 He Hasn't Posted in 2.5 Months. Leads Didn't Drop.
Struggling with low conversions? Grab our FREE checklist of 15 must-have elements to optimize your sales pages! 👉🏼 https://datadrivenmarketing.co/elements
Leo Coelho trained as a doctor, worked in medicine for about a year, quit to become a digital nomad, tried translating, tried dropshipping, became a tour guide in Lisbon, and then the pandemic shut everything down overnight.
So he started making YouTube videos about the Portuguese language. Fifteen months later he had 100,000 subscribers. Today Portuguese with Leo is the biggest channel for learning European Portuguese as a foreign language, with 290,000 subscribers, 22 million views, and a course business doing low six figures a year at around 70% margins.
John sat down with Leo to talk through how he built all of this, and what he's working on next. They got into why Leo thinks YouTube consistency is overrated, how he keeps pulling in 1,500 new email subscribers a month without posting a video for nearly three months, and how his evergreen content does the lead generation work for him. Then the conversation shifted into something closer to a live strategy session, covering order bumps versus upsells, checkout page conversion, warm-up email sequences, and how to run promotions more often without burning out your audience.
Leo's got a clear north star, living and travelling on his own terms, and every business decision he makes runs through that filter first. That shapes everything about how he operates, and honestly it makes for a really interesting conversation.
Hope you enjoy it as much as I did.
Check out Leo's work: 🌐 https://www.portuguesewithleo.com ▶️ https://www.youtube.com/@PortugueseWithLeo
15 sales page elements you can't afford to miss - free checklist 📝 https://datadrivenmarketing.co/elements
Lindsay Müller built a Facebook group of 30,000 ukulele beginners without spending a single dollar on ads. She did it by showing up every day for five months, posting chord sheets, tutorials, and tips on a simple rotating schedule she made up herself. Then one day in January 2024, it just took off.
Dominik sat down with Lindsay to talk through exactly how she built that, and what she did with the audience once she had it. She walks through her posting system, how she turns free chord sheets into email signups, and why she deliberately teaches so much for free inside the group rather than gating it behind a paywall. Her logic is simple and it works.
There's also a really honest stretch of conversation about high-ticket offers. Lindsay is pretty much the only guest we've had who's looked at that whole world and said, that's just not for me, and then made a clear case for why it doesn't have to be. She's been at this for two and a half years, she's found something that works, and she's not pretending to have it all figured out.
Oh, and her children's song Grateful Heart just crossed a million streams on Spotify. She wrote it for a challenge and almost didn't record it. That story is worth hearing too.
I think you'll enjoy this one.
Check out Lindsay's work: 🌐 http://LindsayMuller.com/Ukulele 📸 http://instagram.com/ukelindsay ▶️ http://youtube.com/LindsayMuller
284 Content Won't Keep Members Anymore. Community Will
Want to 2-10x your email list size quickly? Download our FREE Double Your Email List Guide 👉🏼 https://datadrivenmarketing.co/guide
Shelley and CJ Hitz have run the same low-ticket membership for over eleven years. That alone is worth paying attention to.
They built Christian Book Academy for Christian writers, people who want to finish and publish their books but keep getting stuck. The membership costs $49 a month. They have over 300 members. And they have had to figure out, the hard way, what actually keeps people paying month after month.
Dominik sat down with both of them to dig into the mechanics. They talked about how they get 20 to 25 new paying members from a virtual conference twice a year, with no ads, just speakers emailing their lists. They talked about progress pods, small accountability groups inside the membership that have become so valued that one member's pod literally paid her subscription so she could stay. They talked about why removing the countdown timer on their conference offer tanked sales. And they were honest about the moments they almost walked away.
There was also a moment I did not expect. They turned down a spot in a book that hit the USA Today bestseller list because the topic did not fit their brand. No hesitation. They would do it again.
If you run a membership, or you are thinking about starting one, this conversation gets into the real economics in a way most people do not talk about publicly. I think you will get a lot from it.
Check out Shelley and CJ's work: 🌐 https://www.trainingauthors.com/ 📸 https://www.facebook.com/kingdomwriterspage/ ▶️ https://www.youtube.com/@kingdomwriterstv/
2-10x your email list size in just 3 steps 📩 https://datadrivenmarketing.co/guide
Alain Picard spent years saying no to teaching. He believed, genuinely believed, that those who can't do, teach. It took a recession, a pregnant wife, no commissions, and his German wife looking him in the eye and saying "you're burying your gifts in the ground" to change his mind.
That one conversation set off a chain of small yeses that eventually led to a membership community called Cultivate, three instructional art books, a YouTube channel, about 25,000 people on his email list, and a business built entirely around helping pastel artists transform.
Dominik sat down with Alain to pull apart how all of it actually happened. They talked about why "if you build it, they will come" is a lie for artists, how free YouTube content around simple questions like "what pastels should I buy" became his most powerful list-building tool, and how he structures Cultivate so that students enter through a signature course and stay for the community.
There was also a really good thread about what Alain calls the tyranny of the urgent, the idea that if you only ever respond to the small fires, you never build anything that matters. He's lived that tension for thirty years, and the way he describes it is worth your time.
If you're a course creator who feels like your identity is tangled up in your results, or you're stuck at a revenue plateau and not sure what to try next, this one is for you.
Check out Alain's work: 🌐 https://www.picardstudio.com/ 📸 https://www.instagram.com/alainpicard/ ▶️ https://www.youtube.com/channel/@UCWyF5CvAv8c0oP4M5gWBaFA
Grow your course revenue up to 30% in 7 days - no paid ads, no sales calls 📈https://datadrivenmarketing.co/roadmap
Billy Seol built his coaching business from Reddit. Not ads, not a big launch, not a personal brand with a large following. He started by showing up where people were already suffering and saying something useful. That's the whole philosophy in miniature.
Dominik sat down with Billy, a Buddhist life coach and former software engineer, to pull apart some ideas that don't get much airtime in the online course world. Billy's central argument is that most people who say they want success actually don't, not because they're lazy, but because success is a black box. They've never defined what their inner experience of it would actually feel like. And so, unconsciously, they steer away from it. It's the same reason a smoker keeps saying they want to quit.
What stuck with Dominik in this one was the confrontation piece. Billy deliberately activates his clients emotionally during sessions, and then asks them to look at themselves in that state. His reasoning: the person who shows up when you're stressed, defensive, or triggered is the person running your business. If you never see that person clearly, your business keeps replicating their behavior.
They also got into resonance direction, Billy's way of thinking about marketing funnels as one continuous emotional throughline rather than disconnected pieces, and his practical advice for anyone who's plateaued: are you selling to the list you already have, or just watching it grow?
I think you'll get a lot out of this one.
Check out Billy's work:
🌐 http://julylifecoach.com
📸 https://instagram.com/july_lifecoach
▶️ https://www.youtube.com/@Julylifecoach
281 How I Sell Out Photography Workshops Organically
2-10x your email list size in just 3 steps 📩 https://datadrivenmarketing.co/guide
Iwona Podlasińska picked up a camera in 2014 to photograph her own kids. Ten years later, she's run workshops in 17 countries, was named the most followed photographer on Flickr in 2017, and has thousands of students learning her distinctive dreamy, light-filled portrait style. John sat down with her to hear how that actually happened, and what running that kind of business really looks like day to day.
What came through most clearly was how honest Iwona is about the gaps. She knows she has a large, loyal audience across Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube. She knows she has products people want, from in-person workshops priced up to $1,000 a ticket to courses, presets, and overlays. But the bit in the middle, converting that audience into consistent revenue, is the part she's still working out. Her email marketing hasn't been performing and she's not entirely sure why. Her organic social reach, which has always driven workshop bookings, is starting to get harder. And she's thinking seriously about what she offers after someone has already done a workshop.
She also talked about something that doesn't come up enough in these conversations: the value of cooperation. Partnering with hosts, organizations, and other platforms has consistently widened her audience, even when it meant sharing the income. That's a trade-off she's made deliberately, and it's worked.
This one's a little different from our usual episodes. Iwona isn't sitting on a polished system. She's a world-class photographer figuring out the business side in real time, and that makes it a genuinely interesting conversation. I think you'll enjoy it.
Check out Iwona's work: 🌐 https://iwonapodlasinska.com 📸 https://www.instagram.com/iwonapodlasinska ▶️ https://www.youtube.com/@iwonapodlasinska
Get your tripwire product ideas here: 👉🏼 https://datadrivenmarketing.co/tripwire
Rosalie E'Silva spent years at CNN, NBC, Al Jazeera, and Bloomberg telling other people's stories. The whole time, she was keeping a secret: she'd been having out-of-body experiences since childhood and had never told anyone.
In 2024, she left broadcast journalism to teach Yoga Nidra for astral projection. She now has over 150,000 YouTube subscribers, more than 20 million views, and a course community whose students are so engaged they meet on Zoom and Discord without her, multiple times a week, just because they want to.
I sat down with Rosalie to talk about how she built this from scratch, starting with a video she almost deleted. They got into what astral projection actually is, why people seek it out, and what it does to someone who experiences it firsthand. Rosalie has a real gift for making something that sounds wildly esoteric feel completely accessible.
They also got practical. Rosalie's YouTube channel is bringing in around 207,000 views a month, but her email list sits at just over 1,500 people. I walked through exactly what I'd change, from where to place the lead magnet in meditation videos, to using her existing tracks as a tripwire offer, to what a simple value ladder could look like for her business.
It's a genuinely unusual conversation, part business strategy, part window into a world most people have never heard of. I think you'll enjoy it.
Check out Rosalie's work: 🌐 http://rosalieesilva.com ▶️ http://www.youtube.com/@RosalieYoga
279 What A Hostage Negotiator Taught Me About Selling
Jim Cockrum has been doing this for 24 years, and he still texted three coaching students personally this week just to check in.
That detail tells you a lot about how Jim runs his business. He's the founder of Proven Amazon Course, host of Silent Sales Machine Radio, and the author of a book that's been read by over a million people. His funnel starts at $7 and goes to $7,000, he's coached more than 7,000 students, and his Facebook community has 80,000 members. But the thing that struck me most in this conversation wasn't the scale. It was how much of his success comes down to a philosophy most people resist: give everything away for free.
We talked through his entire funnel, from how he spends $50–$90 to acquire a $7 customer and recoups it within 30–90 days, to why he says there's nothing behind his paywall except time and relationship. He told me about a real estate client who fired him for suggesting free, then called back months later when the paid version flopped. And he shared the Death Wish Coffee story, where a single email blast outperformed a Super Bowl commercial in sales.
We also got into email list hygiene, why he maintains 40% open rates by scrubbing non-clickers, and why he thinks getting people onto a screen is the most underrated move in any funnel.
Jim is sharp, generous with what he knows, and genuinely fun to talk to. I think you'll enjoy this one.
Check out Jim's work: 🌐 https://www.silentjim.com/ 📸 https://www.instagram.com/jimcockrum/?hl=en ▶️ https://www.youtube.com/c/silentjimdotcom
278 I Say No to Sponsors Almost Every Day. Here's Why
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Elsa runs Peace of French, a YouTube channel with hundreds of thousands of subscribers, and she built the whole thing again in Hebrew. Every day, companies email her offering money to promote their language apps. She says no almost every time.
Dominik sat down with Elsa to find out why, and what he got was a really clear-eyed conversation about what it actually means to run a course business rather than an influencer operation. Elsa started teaching French to her partner, found YouTube, and built from there, filming on a bad phone with no microphone until she hit 100,000 subscribers.
What I found most interesting was her thinking on trust in the age of AI. She isn't panicking. She thinks the creators who've built real relationships with their audiences have something AI can't replicate, and she's been quietly building that kind of connection by sharing her everyday life alongside her lessons.
She also talked through her quiz funnel, why she's cautious about over-discounting, how she deliberately prunes her email list, and what happened when she closed her membership and repackaged it as a one-time product. That last part is worth listening to if you have an offer that's plateaued.
She's honest about what's hard too, including the real cost of running two businesses at once and waiting two full years before starting her email list.
Check out Elsa's work: 🌐 https://www.pieceoffrench.com/ ▶️ https://www.youtube.com/@UCVzyfpNuFF4ENY8zNTIW7ug
277 You Don't Close High Ticket Clients. You Pick Them
Victor Damasio grew up selling newspapers on the Rio subway and working pub crawls to pay his way through law school. Today he has 729,000 Instagram followers in Brazil, nearly a quarter of a million YouTube subscribers, and a mastermind he charges $20,000 to join. This conversation is about what he figured out in between.
I sat down with Victor to talk about one specific idea: why course creators who already have an audience and existing clients are leaving serious money on the table by not having a high-ticket offer. Victor's argument is simple and hard to argue with. If someone in your audience would pay ten times more to get closer access to you, and you never give them the chance to do that, you're treating all your clients the same when they're not.
Victor walks through his four-question application process, what he calls the Spartan method, which flips the usual sales dynamic. Instead of you pitching someone, they apply to work with you. He explains exactly what to ask, what good answers look like, how to run a 20-minute vetting call, and why saying no to the wrong clients is something they'll actually thank you for.
There's also a genuinely useful analogy involving Qatar Airways business class that I haven't been able to stop thinking about since we recorded this.
Victor is just starting to build his English-language audience, so if you want to reach him while he's still responding personally to messages, now's the time.
Hope you enjoy this one as much as I did.
Check out Victor's work: 🌐 https://www.victordamasio.com/eng-us 📸 https://www.instagram.com/victordamasio/ ▶️ https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCEF03nN_kI6RKznPRw9x7MQ
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Mark Wales has had a career that is genuinely hard to believe. Sixteen years in the Australian Army, four tours of Afghanistan with the SAS, an MBA from Wharton, a stint at McKinsey, and then he won Australian Survivor. Now he is building an online course business around leadership and resilience, and he emailed John to say he had been studying the podcast and was ready to build his funnel.
What made this conversation so good is that Mark is right in the middle of it. The course is built, the YouTube channel has 1.8 million lifetime views, and the goal is $5,000 AUD a month in revenue. But the email list is at 1,300. So John walks through exactly what needs to change, from where to place lead magnet CTAs in videos, to the 1% opt-in benchmark Mark should be hitting, to how many offers he needs to make consistent monthly revenue.
There is also a genuinely fun stretch where they figure out how to turn Mark's keynote speaking appearances into a lead generation machine, including an idea involving shipping his new book to every attendee who signs up that Mark reckons could hit a ninety percent conversion rate.
Mark saw the potential of online courses back in 2017 when he was project managing course builds at McKinsey. It took him a few more years to put all the pieces together. You can feel in this conversation that the pieces are finally there.
I think you'll enjoy this one.
Check out Mark's work: 📖 Mark's New Book, Mission Ready: https://www.panmacmillan.com.au/9781761902796/ 🌐 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mark-wales/ 📸 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/mark.a.wales/?hl=en ▶️ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@mark-wales
275 How To Build A Membership That Members Never Cancel
Alicia Katz Pollock built something most course creators never think to build. She took QuickBooks training, a topic most people assume is dry and functional, and turned it into a tiered membership with over 50 courses, live community calls, a coaching program, five books, a podcast, and CPE accreditation that accounting firms actually require their staff to complete.
Dominik sat down with Alicia to trace how that happened. She started with a single beginner bootcamp, then kept adding courses every time a client asked about something new. Banking feeds, reconciliation, payroll, sales tax. Eventually she had enough that selling them one at a time felt expensive for the buyer, so she built a membership instead.
One thing Alicia said that stuck with Dominik: she fully expected members to stay one year and then leave once they'd worked through the curriculum. That didn't happen. People have been in the community for years, and when she asked why, the answer wasn't the 50 courses. It was the twice-monthly round-robin calls where members bring their real client problems and work through them together.
There's also a fascinating section on the four years she spent earning NASBA accreditation for CPE credits, what it took, and how it eventually opened the door to selling seats directly to accounting firms.
Alicia is honest, specific, and genuinely fun to listen to. I think you'll enjoy this one.
Check out Alicia's work: 🌐 https://royalwise.com/
274 10,000 New Email Subscribers Monthly From This One Technique
Milo Andreo built one of the biggest piano teaching businesses on the internet in Portuguese. Over a million subscribers, 26,000 students, a full course platform with a community, a music library, the works. Then he decided to do it all again, in English, from scratch.
Two years in, his English channel Easy Fast Piano is already past 170,000 subscribers and 10,000 students. And he's running both at the same time, producing videos in two languages every single week.
I had a great conversation with Milo about what that actually looks like. We got into his lead magnet system, where he creates a free PDF for every single video he publishes, which is now bringing in around 10,000 new email subscribers every month. We also talked about the difference between translating a business and actually adapting it, because Milo learned the hard way that the Brazilian market and the English-speaking market are not the same thing, even if the teaching content is identical.
Milo also shared how he's using AI across pretty much every part of his business and personal life right now. His answer when I asked where he'd found it helpful was just, "Everything. You name it, I'm using."
We also got into survey strategy, segmenting email lists by musical goals, and why long-form YouTube content converts to course buyers in a way that nothing else really matches.
I think you'll enjoy this one.
Check out Milo's work: 🌐 http://www.miloandreo.com 📸 http://instagram.com/@miloandreo ▶️ http://youtube.com/@miloandreo
273 Coaches Told Her to Go High-Ticket. She Said No.
Lauren Bateman has 650,000 YouTube subscribers, nearly 900 videos, and over 58 million views teaching guitar to older beginners. She also survived cancer at 16, quit a pharmaceutical job in her twenties, opened a brick-and-mortar music school, and now runs the online side of her business with a small team of VAs and an editor. There is a lot going on.
What I loved about this conversation was how clearly Lauren has thought about the trade-offs in her business. She knows exactly why she will not do high-ticket coaching, exactly what kind of life she is trying to protect, and exactly what kind of teaching lights her up. Not many course creators at her level are this honest about what they want and what they are willing to give up to get it.
We also got into some real tactical detail. Lauren has two different sales pages with different headlines for different traffic sources, and she has the A/B testing data to explain why. I walked through what I think she could do to significantly increase revenue from her YouTube traffic, and she was genuinely open to testing it. The back-and-forth on email list strategy, lead magnets, and conversion rates was one of the more practical exchanges we have had on the show in a while.
And then there is the personal side, which surprised me a bit. Lauren said she has spent 20 years working toward a specific goal, and she has reached it. Now she is working with a coach to figure out what comes next. That part of the conversation stuck with me.
I think you will enjoy this one.
Check out Lauren's work: 🌐 https://www.laurenbateman.com/ 📸 https://www.instagram.com/thelaurenbateman/ ▶️ https://www.youtube.com/LaurenBateman
Gabriel lost his job. While applying for new ones and getting rejected, he started teaching Spanish online and writing short stories for his students. The feedback was so good he thought, why not share this with the world?
Eighteen months later, his site Fluent with Stories is pulling in 250,000 visitors a month through SEO, adding close to 2,000 new email subscribers every month, and his debut A1 Spanish course launched to testimonials most creators would genuinely envy. And he's been taking it seriously for all of five months.
I sat down with Gabriel to talk through how he built all of this, what's driving the SEO traffic, how Amazon KDP became an unexpected lead generation engine, and where the gaps still are in his funnel. We also got into the tripwire conversation, single vs double opt-in, and why his sales page is missing the one section that could make a real difference to conversions.
Gabriel is one of those guests where you're just rooting for him the whole way through. He's humble, he listens to his audience, he builds what they ask for, and he has a genuinely different product in a very crowded niche. The bit where he talks about his readers begging to support him before the course even existed, that one stuck with me.
If you're early in building your course business and wondering whether the fundamentals actually work, this one is for you. I think you'll really enjoy it.
Check out Gabriel's work: 🌐 http://www.fluentwithstories.com
271 Why 170 Followers Was Enough to Sell My Course
Jeff Alipio had 170 followers when he launched his first course. Most of them were friends and family. He sold to nearly 500 students anyway, almost all of them complete strangers.
Dominik sat down with Jeff, a Philippines-based video editor and course creator with over 15 years in the industry, to talk about how he pulled that off, and why he thinks the obsession with follower count is one of the biggest traps course creators fall into.
What came through clearly in this conversation is how simply Jeff thinks about audience quality versus audience size. He makes the point that a million followers who came to you for prank videos are not going to buy your video editing course, and he built his entire growth strategy around that idea. Facebook ads, targeted tightly, finding the specific people who actually wanted what he was selling.
Jeff also talked through what he teaches inside Video Made Easy, his course for Filipino freelancers starting from zero. It goes well beyond editing basics. There are modules on storytelling, personal branding, profile optimization, and a freelancer mindset section about building a career that AI cannot easily displace.
The end of the conversation got practical. Jeff's advice for anyone who has the skills but hasn't launched yet: stop waiting for the perfect course and start with what you already know. The overthinking is the thing that's actually slowing you down.
Check out Jeff's work: 🌐 https://jefalipio.com/ 📸 https://www.instagram.com/jef_alipio/ ▶️ https://www.youtube.com/@jeffreyfernandoalipio7209
270 How I Fund My Boat Business With Online Courses
I sat down with Dan Lee, a self-taught wooden boat builder based in the Cotswolds, who turned a lifelong obsession into a full-time business, funded almost entirely by online courses he runs from a farm workshop. It's a genuinely great story.
Dan started building model boats at eight and full-size ones at seventeen. When COVID hit and his previous business, making tree-shaped bookcases, looked like it was going to collapse overnight, he decided to go all in on something he'd always wanted to do. He built a website, started modernising old wooden boat plans using CAD and CNC technology, created his first online course on varnishing, and never really looked back.
What I found fascinating talking to Dan is how clearly he's thought about why online teaching actually works better than in-person for hands-on crafts. The camera angles, the controlled lighting, the ability to overlay animations showing wet edges drying in real time. It's not a compromise on the in-person experience, it's genuinely better for teaching the foundations.
We also got pretty honest about where Dan's business has room to grow. He's doing well with Facebook ads and his courses are covering his workshop overheads, but his email list is sitting mostly untouched. We talked through what that could mean if he actually started using it properly, and the numbers are exciting.
If you're building a course business around a physical craft or a niche skill, I think you'll get a lot from this one.
Check out Dan's work: 🌐 http://www.danleeboatbuilding.co.uk 📸 https://www.instagram.com/danleeboatbuilding ▶️ https://www.instagram.com/danleeboatbuilding
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Brad Yates has 425,000 YouTube subscribers and 60 million views, built over nearly two decades. He has never once sat down to plan a content strategy.
I had a genuinely fun conversation with Brad for this episode. He started out as an actor, trained as a hypnotherapist when his first child was on the way, stumbled into EFT tapping through a workshop, and then one day thought it would be cool to put a guided tapping video on YouTube. He uploaded it, figured he was done, and came back six months later with another idea. That's basically how the whole channel was built.
What struck me most was how clearly Brad has thought about what he actually wants from his life and business, and how little he's willing to compromise on that. He talked about limiting the number of emails his marketing team sends, refusing to redo popular videos just because they performed well, and turning down tactics he knows would probably make him more money because they don't feel right. He quoted Bowie on why the mid-80s were the worst period of his career. It all hung together in a way that felt unusually honest for a business conversation.
We also got into his product lineup, his two memberships, his evergreen programs, and a new platinum lifetime membership he recently launched. If you're curious how someone builds a real business almost entirely on free content and genuine purpose, Brad is a great example.
I think you'll enjoy this one.
Check out Brad's work: 🌐 https:///www.tapwithbrad.com ▶️ https://www.youtube.com/@UCiHZMZejDS4RIxDdBwoie9A
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Dr. Andrea Furlan is one of Canada's top pain physicians, a full professor at the University of Toronto, and a senior scientist at the country's largest hospital. She's also a YouTuber with over 830,000 subscribers and 78 million views, which her colleagues definitely did not see coming.
When Andrea started her channel in 2019, she wasn't chasing subscribers. She just didn't have enough time in appointments to teach her patients everything they needed to know. So she started recording it. Her colleagues thought it was a strange move for a serious physician. She did it anyway.
In this conversation, John sits down with Andrea to talk about how she built that audience, what she's learned about YouTube after 240 long-form videos, and where her business is headed. One shoulder exercise video she filmed in her home during the pandemic, hair a mess by the end of a full day of recording, has now crossed ten million views and generated over $60,000 in ad revenue on its own.
They also get into the practical side of things: how Andrea runs two separate email lists for patients and healthcare professionals, how she uses AI to help develop scripts and thumbnail ideas, and the funnel advice John shares live on camera for growing her healthcare professional list faster.
Andrea is thoughtful, generous with what she's learned, and genuinely funny. If you're a course creator who came from a professional background and wondered whether your credentials could translate into an audience, this one is worth your time.
Hope you enjoy it as much as I did.
Check out Andrea's work: 🌐 https://www.doctorandreafurlan.com/ 📸 https://www.instagram.com/dr.andrea.furlan ▶️ https://www.youtube.com/@DrAndreaFurlan
Timotej Bonifer grew up in Slovenia, never studied English formally, and now coaches entrepreneurs around the world to sound like native speakers. His secret? Twelve years on a microphone playing video games. The same habit that probably worried his parents turned out to be the thing that built his entire career.
Dominik sat down with Timotej to talk about how he built Flip English, what it actually takes to turn an obsession into a business, and why he genuinely believes non-native speakers make better English teachers than the natives do. That last one tends to annoy people. Timotej makes a pretty good case for it.
They also get into the real stuff, the Facebook ads that do the heavy lifting, a Black Friday email disaster that tanked his deliverability for a year, why his School community experiments mostly flopped, how he went from doing every sales call himself to building a team of ten coaches, and the moment he raised his price to seven and a half thousand euros and a client just said yes without blinking.
There's a lot of honesty in this one. Timotej doesn't sugarcoat what went wrong, and his advice to his younger self, the kid with the headset on streaming to a few hundred people on Twitch, is just two words: sell earlier.
If you're building a course or coaching business and thinking about where to focus your energy, I think you'll find something useful here.
Check out Timotej's work: 🌐 https://timotejbonifer.com/ 📸 https://www.instagram.com/timotejbonifer/ ▶️ https://www.youtube.com/@timotejbonifer
266 Meet the Violin Teacher Behind 9,000,000 YouTube Views
📨 Get your lead magnet ideas here: https://funnels.datadrivenmarketing.co/8-highest-converting-lead-magnets-a
Most people who build a 122,000-subscriber YouTube channel and help over 20,000 students learn an instrument have figured out marketing. Beth Blackerby hasn't. And somehow it still worked.
Beth is the founder of Violin Lab, one of the very first structured online violin curricula on the internet, launched before "online course" was even a phrase people used. She started in 2007 because she noticed that adults learn the violin completely differently from children, and almost nobody was teaching to them. So she built something from scratch with no playbook, no subscription model to copy, and no real marketing strategy.
In this conversation with John, they talk through how her tiered membership works, from $35 a month for full curriculum access to $95 a month for weekly personal video feedback. They get into why she built loyalty pricing that dropped members down to $10 a month over time, what made her vibrato video the one that changed everything, and why she hid a marketing trick inside one of her most popular videos that had people emailing her every single day.
John also walks Beth through what an email funnel could look like built on top of everything she's already created, and it's one of those conversations where you can hear someone seeing a whole new layer of possibility for the first time.
Beth also talks about the in-person workshops she's been running since 2012, including one at a music retreat outside London, and why playing together in a room is something no online forum can replace.
She's warm, honest, and genuinely funny. I think you'll enjoy this one.
Check out Beth's work: 🌐 https://violinlab.com/ ▶️ https://www.youtube.com/@violinlab
Scott Gardiner does around $100K a month and has never taken a single sales call. No closers, no discovery Zooms, no objection handling. Every offer is evergreen, bought at whatever hour suits the buyer, while Scott is somewhere else entirely.
He helps men whose marriages are falling apart, guys whose partners have already said they're done. And he got into it the hard way. Six years ago his own wife told him she was done.
Dominik sat down with Scott to hear the full story, from being made redundant during COVID, spending $15,000 on a mentor he could barely afford, grinding through a fitness offer with four offshore setters and $2,000 a week in ads, to the moment his wife said she couldn't do it anymore, and how that sent him in a completely different direction.
They got into a lot of the practical stuff too. Why Scott thinks sales calls are only necessary if your offer is unconvincing. How he uses a $7 sprint course to feed his weekly subscription. The difference between problem-aware and solution-aware buyers, and why so many creators are building audiences full of the wrong one. What his email strategy actually looks like, three to five times a week, workshops, loom videos, and a document with payment at the end of a survey. And his kitchen table test for anyone thinking about launching something new.
Scott is one of those guests who has clearly thought hard about all of this, and is honest about the mistakes along the way. I think you'll get a lot out of this one.
Check out Scott's work: 🌐 https://elevatedman.com.au/q 📸 https://www.instagram.com/iamscottgardiner/
264 You Don't Need New Courses. Sell What You Have.
Most productivity coaches tell you to do more. Carl Pullein built a business teaching people to do less, and better. And it's working to the tune of around $300,000 a year.
I sat down with Carl recently and really enjoyed this one. He's a British productivity coach based in Seoul, South Korea, with over 150,000 YouTube subscribers, 17 million views, and an email list of 25,000 to 30,000 people. He built all of it over ten years, one video a week, around two proprietary frameworks he developed himself.
We talked about who he's actually helping, how his business breaks down between courses and coaching, and what's driven his growth. But honestly the most interesting part of the conversation was watching Carl work through some things in real time. He knew he was leaving money on the table with his YouTube promotions and his email list growth, and we got into the specifics of what he could change and why it would make such a difference.
He's also thinking bigger. He wants $500,000 this year and $10 million by 2030, and he's got a clear idea of how corporate training fits into that picture.
Carl's a thoughtful guy who's built something real, and he's genuinely honest about where he's been too relaxed and what he's going to do about it. That combination makes for a great conversation.
Alex Dunitz has built one of the top Italian language learning channels on YouTube. 266,000 subscribers, nearly 30 million views, a custom app with gamification, private lessons, group courses, books, webinars, trips to Italy. The whole thing.
And yet, when I sat down with him, the first thing that struck me was how much opportunity he was sitting on without fully realising it.
Alex is brilliant at what he does. His co-host Marta Cappellini spends around eight hours preparing a single ten-minute video. They have a genuine teaching philosophy, a real community, students who argue with them about lost points on the app. The product is genuinely good. But like so many course creators I talk to, the gap between what they've built and what they're earning is bigger than it needs to be.
We talk about how Passione Italiana grew from a local adult college side hustle into a global brand, why Marta was such a turning point for the channel, and what Alex calls the "euro drop" moment, his version of the penny dropping when a student finally gets it. We also get into the gamification system he's built on his website, including a points and ranking structure where students can rise from peasant all the way to emperor using Roman coins called Sesterzi. Genuinely fun stuff.
Then I put on my consultant hat for a bit and we have an honest conversation about funnels, email lists, and why pointing YouTube viewers at every product at once might be the thing holding the revenue back. Alex takes it well. Better than well, actually.
I think you'll enjoy this one.
Check out Alex's work: 🌐 https://www.passione-italiana.com/ 📸 https://www.instagram.com/passioneitaliana.official/ ▶️ https://www.youtube.com/@UC8gGkW17A_kbDCVNGvzGMrw
Get your tripwire product ideas here: 👉🏼 https://datadrivenmarketing.co/tripwire
Derek Callan has been coaching business English for over 22 years, has clocked more than 10,000 hours of in-company training, and has built a YouTube channel with 250,000 subscribers and nearly 10 million views. He is, by any measure, someone who knows his stuff. So what I really wanted to get into with him was the messier side of the journey, figuring out who your real customer is, what they actually want to buy, and how to build a funnel that lines up from first click to paid client.
Derek recently launched a high-ticket one-to-one coaching programme targeting professionals who freeze under pressure, presentations, meetings, the calls that matter. He sold out his founding five spots from a small segment of his email list. We talked through where to go from there, how to price it, and a specific idea around selling a paid assessment as a tripwire that leads cleanly into the main programme.
We also got into what he learned from our Instant Course Sales programme, why mindset is the biggest barrier in language learning, and what it actually looks like to try to align your YouTube content, your lead magnets, and your offers when you have several courses running at once.
Derek is genuinely great to talk to. Warm, thoughtful, honest about what is and isn't working. And the bit near the end about asking his wife to summarise the podcast for him... I will say no more. You will enjoy that part.
Check out Derek's work: 🌐 https://www.derekcallan.com/ ▶️ https://www.youtube.com/@derekcallan-englishforpros
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There's a guitar teacher in Colombia who has nearly 600,000 YouTube subscribers, has taught over 70,000 students, and is personally answering WhatsApp messages from every new student himself. And that last part is completely intentional.
I sat down with Miguel Martinez, founder of ClasesDeGuitarra.com.co, to talk about what's actually happening to online course businesses right now, especially in the education space. Miguel has been doing this since 2012 and he's seen a lot change, but nothing like the last 12 months. YouTube reach for his channel has dropped to around 500 views in the first 48 hours of posting. The same video on Facebook? 20,000 to 30,000 views. So he adapted.
What I found really refreshing about Miguel is his philosophy around AI. Instead of trying to automate everything, he's doing the opposite. Weekly live classes, personal WhatsApp replies, a lean email list he cleans every three months so only engaged readers stay on it. He genuinely believes the answer to AI is to be more human, and he's building his entire business around that idea.
We also got into TikTok, which is working for him in ways most course creators never figure out, including a smart insight about why you won't see TikTok showing up in your referral analytics even when it's driving real traffic.
Miguel's market is Latin America, his courses top out at $79, and he's making this work on his own terms. It's a really different perspective from most guests we have on, and I think that's exactly why it's worth your time.
Hope you enjoy it.
Check out Miguel's work: 🌐 https://clasesdeguitarra.com.co/ 📸 https://www.instagram.com/clasesdeguitarracomco/ ▶️ https://www.youtube.com/clasesdeguitarracomco
Get your tripwire product ideas here: 👉🏼 https://datadrivenmarketing.co/tripwire
Natalia Rethmeyer had 80,000 YouTube subscribers and not a single person on her email list. No tripwire, no funnel, no strategy. Just videos going out every week into what felt like a void.
That's where Dominik sat down with her for this one, and what came out of it was one of the more honest conversations we've had on the show about what it actually takes to build something that lasts.
Natalia moved to Germany from Ukraine 12 years ago, couldn't speak the language despite three years of studying it, worked as a waitress while trying to get her masters, and eventually built Learn German Fast into a proper online course business with a team, a feedback system, and a list that grows by around 4,000 subscribers every month.
She doesn't chase trends. She hasn't launched a new product in years. And her revenue keeps growing anyway.
They get into how her email promotions actually work, why she sends around 20 emails in a two-week window and why it works, where her funnel has real gaps (Dominik is pretty direct about that), how she built a course with live teacher feedback that nobody else in her space was doing, and what she'd go back and tell herself if she could.
Her answer to that last one is not what you'd expect.
Dominik also pushes her on surveys, tripwires, order bumps, and the stuff most course creators avoid thinking about. She takes all of it in good spirit and it makes for a genuinely useful conversation.
I think you'll like this one.
Check out Natalia's work: 🌐 https://learngermanfast.de/ 📸 https://www.instagram.com/learn.german.fast/ ▶️ https://www.youtube.com/c/LearnGermanFast
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Abbie Emmons built a YouTube channel closing in on 600,000 subscribers, 7,000 students across her courses, a Patreon membership she 10x'd in six months, and a traditionally published book on the way. And she teaches people how to write novels.
In this episode, I sit down with Abbie to pull apart how she actually built and runs her business. We get into the move from Patreon to her own membership site, why she prices and sells courses both inside and outside the membership, and how she turned $3 templates into a surprisingly meaningful revenue stream by simply deciding to stop giving them away for free.
One moment that really stood out was Abbie describing how a single quiz video brought in around a THOUSAND new email subscribers.
We also get honest about something a lot of creators struggle with. Abbie openly says her courses "kind of sit dormant" when she isn't actively promoting them, and the two of them dig into why that happens and what to do about it. I walk through the problem-agitation-solution email framework we use to give creators a real reason to talk about their courses, not just when something new launches.
If you're building a creator-led course business and you've ever felt weird about promoting what you've made, this one's for you.
Check out Abbie's work: 🌐 http://www.abbieemmonsauthor.com 📸 http://www.instagram.com/makeyourstorymatter ▶️ http://www.youtube.com/abbieemmons
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Ross Rosenberg has 38 million YouTube views, over 200,000 books sold in 12 languages, and a podcast in the top 2% globally.
Ross is one of the world's leading voices on codependency and narcissistic abuse. He founded the Self-Love Recovery Institute back in 2013 and has been building his audience online ever since, mostly by figuring things out as he went, which is both the charm and the challenge of his story.
We talked about how a throwaway tip at a dinner party got him onto YouTube before almost anyone else in his field. We got into why the shift from long-form to short-form content nearly crushed his business model, and what he's doing differently now to rebuild. He was refreshingly candid about a marketing company he hired that sent him clickbait scripts he flatly refused to follow, why his curated 10,000-person email list carries a 30 to 40 percent open rate, and what he's trying to get in place before he steps back at 67.
Ross isn't your typical "here's the funnel that made me a million dollars" guest. He's someone who built something genuinely significant, navigated a slowdown with honesty, and is still pushing forward on his own terms. I found his perspective really refreshing.
Hope you enjoy it as much as I did.
Check out Ross's work: 🌐 https://www.selfloverecovery.com 📸 https://www.instagram.com/rossrosenberg_slri/ ▶️ https://www.youtube.com/rossrosenberg
257 Stop Chasing Trends. Build What You Believe In
Eddie van Dongen spent years doing what most musicians dream of. Touring Europe, playing 200-show theater runs, recording, performing. And then COVID hit, and overnight there was nothing. No gigs, no income, no plan.
That moment forced him to ask a question he'd never had to ask before: what would it look like to actually build a business, not just be a freelancer hoping the phone rings?
Eddie is a professional drummer from Rotterdam, endorsed by major brands and featured on Dutch national TV. But what makes his story genuinely interesting is how he got from that COVID wake-up call to running Eddie's Drum Academy, an online platform built around a completely different way of teaching drums. Not fill packs, not lick libraries, but a creative framework that teaches drummers how to think.
In this conversation, Eddie and I got into a lot. His burnout at music college and how studying meditation changed not just his playing but his whole approach to business. Why he believes you have to be okay with being ignored if you're building something real. His Meta ads funnel selling a 37-euro ebook with a 2.5 to 3.5 ROAS. How his order bumps are converting around 40%. And what he's working toward next.
He's honest, thoughtful, and clearly someone who built this from scratch with no marketing background. I think you'll really enjoy this one.
Gillian Perkins runs a multi-six-figure online business, has over 700,000 YouTube subscribers, and works fewer than 20 hours a week. She's also a homeschool mum of six. If you've ever wondered whether that kind of setup is actually possible, this episode is a pretty good answer.
John sat down with Gillian to talk through how she structures her courses and cohorts, why she's stopped running tripwire funnels with her organic audience, and why she actually leads with her most expensive product first. That last one goes against most funnel advice you'll hear, and her reasoning for it is worth listening to carefully.
They also get into webinars, which Gillian is pretty blunt about. She says 10% conversion is her standard, and anything under that feels like a flop to her. She breaks down exactly which price points make sense for webinars and which ones don't, which is genuinely useful if you're trying to figure out where they fit in your own business.
There's also a great section on how she found and hired her integrator, how she thinks about building a small team without losing her lifestyle, and why shrinking her team actually made the business more enjoyable and sometimes more profitable.
Gillian has been making videos about online business since 2017 and has clearly thought carefully about how to build something sustainable. A lot of what she shares here is quietly counterintuitive. I think you'll get a lot out of this one.
Kim Foster spent 20 years as a family doctor before walking away to build a global platform around identity transformation. She now has over 250,000 YouTube subscribers, a TEDx talk under her belt, and a book coming out in 2026. But what made this conversation really interesting wasn't the credentials — it was how honest she was about what's working, what isn't, and where she's still figuring things out.
We got into her YouTube content strategy, specifically this idea of bringing people in with what they think they want, but giving them what they actually need. She talked about how she found her real niche through trial and error, not planning, and what the analytics told her that she never would have guessed on her own.
Then things got practical. John pulled up Kim's funnel live on screen and they walked through her opt-in rates, her confirmation page, her tripwire offers, and where the gaps are. It's a rare moment where you get to watch a real funnel audit happen in real time, with someone who's genuinely open about where she's leaving money on the table.
They also talked about her push into in-person speaking, the challenge of getting booked when you're known as a YouTuber, and why she's on the hunt for an integrator to help rein in her visionary side.
Warm, specific, and genuinely useful. I think you'll enjoy this one.
Check out Kim's work: 🌐 https://drkimfoster.com/ 📸 https://www.instagram.com/drkimfoster/ ▶️ https://www.youtube.com/KimFosterMD
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Most course creators build a course, put it online, and hope people stick around. Adam Morgan did something completely different.
Adam is a UK-based architect with over a decade of real practice experience, and the founder of Arcademia, a platform that's grown to over 4,500 members globally. Dominik sat down with him to find out how he got there, and honestly, the story is not what you'd expect.
It started with a small set of screen-recorded training videos made for new staff at his architecture practice. No grand plan, just a way to stop repeating himself. Then Brexit hit, the practice started struggling, and Adam picked the project back up with a lot more intention. He renamed it, rebranded it, and started building something much bigger.
When a provider quoted him £120,000 to build a custom platform, he learned Claude Code and built it himself over three to four months. What he ended up with is not just a course library. It's got gamification, a leaderboard, AI-generated contracts, portfolio hosting, CV builders, project trackers, and an AI assistant. All built by an architect who had never coded before.
He also talks about why his most valuable members never cancel, how he grew to over 150,000 Instagram followers starting with £10–15 boosts per post, and what he tells course creators whose revenue has flatlined.
Adam is a genuinely straight-talking guy and this one had a lot of good stuff in it.
Check out Adam's work: 🌐 https://www.archademia.com 📸 https://www.instagram.com/archademia_/ ▶️ https://www.youtube.com/c/archademia
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David Duffy is an Irish musician and bassist who co-founded Secrets of Solo, the biggest online school for solo swing dancing, with his wife Ksenia, a dance artist with over 200 million views online. One of their videos alone has 14 million views on YouTube. And yet, when those viral moments happen, the sales spike they expect... doesn't really come.
That's where this conversation gets really interesting.
John sat down with David to dig into the gap between attention and revenue, something a lot of creators feel but rarely talk about this honestly. David runs the marketing and business side of the school while Ksenia teaches, and he's refreshingly open about what's working, what isn't, and where they've been getting in their own way.
They get into the tension between being an artist and running a business, why Ksenia only wants one sale a year and what that's costing them, the €12 choreography challenge that brought in 70 new members at Christmas, and how to use analytics to figure out which part of your funnel actually needs fixing.
John also walks David through how to think about conversion benchmarks, monthly promotions, and why urgency works even when it doesn't feel like "you."
If you've ever felt like you're creating great content but not seeing it turn into consistent revenue, this one will resonate.
Jayne Havens never planned to build a business. She just wanted to help her kids sleep.
But after one year of running a sleep consulting practice and feeling maxed out, she made a decision that changed everything. She stopped taking more clients and started teaching other people to do what she did. That was 2019. Today, roughly 75% of her income comes from a single $2,700 certification course, and she's still running it all from her kitchen table.
Dominik sat down with Jayne to dig into exactly how she built this, and honestly, it's one of the more refreshing conversations we've had on the show. No complicated funnels, no big ad spend, no content machine. Just Jayne showing up in Facebook groups, having real conversations, and being, as she puts it, the most helpful person in the room.
She also talks about how she uses her podcast not to attract new leads, but to close them. How she keeps a personal list of warm prospects on her phone. Why her affiliate partners outperform paid ads by a wide margin. And why she thinks copying someone else's funnel is a trap most course creators fall into.
If you're building something in a specific niche and wondering whether you really need ads or a massive audience to make it work, Jayne's answer is pretty clear.
I think you'll find this one genuinely useful.
Check out Jayne's work: 🌐 https://thecpsm.com/ 📸 https://www.instagram.com/snoozefestbyjaynehavens/ ▶️ https://www.youtube.com/@Becomingasleepconsultant
251 How to Turn YouTube Viewers Into Email Subscribers
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Bethany McBride started her business because she needed to make a thousand dollars to cover some bills. That was it. No grand plan, no marketing strategy, just a Facebook group and a love for teaching worship music. A few months later, she and her husband had replaced his income entirely.
This week I sat down with Bethany, the creator behind Simplified Piano, an online piano education community helping beginners, mostly people in their 60s and beyond, learn to play worship songs using a simple chord-based method. She built the whole thing around four chords: C, F, G, and A minor. That's genuinely it.
What I loved about this conversation is how much of Bethany's business was shaped by constraints. Health challenges that made a 9-to-5 impossible. A toxic mold situation that forced her family into her parents' basement. Five kids. And yet she and her husband built something with 450,000 monthly YouTube views, around 160,000 email subscribers, and a model that's mostly evergreen and automated.
We talked about how she gets 4,300 new email subscribers a month from a lead magnet so simple it's almost obvious in hindsight, why she switched a one-time offer to a recurring membership almost overnight and barely noticed a dip, and what she wishes she'd known earlier about getting in front of real students and listening to them properly.
Bethany is warm, honest, and genuinely funny. I think you'll like this one.
Check out Bethany's work: 🌐 https://www.simplifiedpiano.com ▶️ https://www.youtube.com/c/simplifiedpiano