During a YouTube interview, Justin Welsh shared his screen to show his personal content creation system in Notion. The mind-blown reaction from the expert hosts, Dickie Bush and Nicholas Cole, was the validation he needed to turn his internal process into a product, which became a multi-million dollar course.
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Beyond being a revenue stream, teaching can be a strategic tool for AI professionals. A foundational course provides user insights and product ideas, while an advanced course creates a community of experts who help solve real-world technical challenges for the instructor's primary business.
The core content for a course isn't built from a blank page. It's found in the proven, step-by-step advice you already share with friends, colleagues, or clients. These informal solutions are the raw material for a structured, marketable roadmap.
The journey to a flagship product is a marathon, not a sprint. Porterfield was profitable for eight years, launching multiple successful courses and making millions. However, she admits she didn't feel fully aligned in her 'zone of genius' until creating Digital Course Academy, her signature program.
You don't need to be the world's foremost authority to create a valuable workshop. If you have successfully achieved a specific result that your audience desires, you are an expert to them. Use AI to interview you and structure that specific knowledge into a professional curriculum, overcoming imposter syndrome.
To land Notion, co-founder Justin worked with extreme intensity, finding 300ms of latency in three hours and building a requested feature in 24 hours after promising it on the spot. This level of obsessive commitment is required to win transformative customers.
Building a seven-figure course business doesn't require mass-market appeal. For a specialized profession with hundreds of thousands of members, capturing just 1% of the market with a high-ticket course can generate millions in revenue, making the goal far more attainable.
Eric Coffey's entire media monetization plan—from courses to a tiered community—was mapped out for him by a YouTube subscriber. This engaged fan called him and detailed a concentric circle strategy, proving that the best business ideas can come directly from your most ardent followers.
Your audience will dictate your product roadmap if you listen. Porterfield's evolution was a direct response to customer feedback. They finished her webinar course and asked what to sell. They finished her product course and asked how to market it. The path to her flagship product was paved with their questions.
True productivity doesn't come from copying a guru's setup or using a third-party template. The most effective approach is to use flexible tools like Notion as a platform to build a completely personalized system that caters to your unique thought processes, goals, and daily workflow.
Notion’s initial abstract vision of letting users build their own software failed to gain traction. The key insight was that users don't want to build tools; they want to accomplish tasks. By providing a familiar "wedge" like note-taking, Notion got into users' workflows before revealing its deeper, more powerful capabilities.
