The short version: Online courses can generate real income, but "passive" is a lie; you'll spend 200+ hours building, marketing and supporting yours before you see a penny, and most fail because creators skip the audience-first step. The people earning £10k+ monthly have an existing email list or social following before they launch.
Let me be direct: I've built three online courses since 2019. The first one made £2,400 in six months and then flatlined. The second made nothing because I didn't market it. The third, launched in 2024 to my existing email list of 12,000 people, made £18,200 in the first year with almost no paid ads. The difference wasn't the course content. It was the audience.
Everyone talks about passive income like it's a beach holiday you've already paid for. It isn't. It's a job you do once, market forever, and then spend 5-10 hours a week answering questions, fixing technical problems, and updating modules when your platform changes its pricing or policy.
What Works (and What Doesn't)
Here's what I've learned by watching hundreds of creators launch courses and by launching three myself:
Courses don't fail because the content is bad. They fail because:
- The creator has no audience before launch (trying to build an audience after you've already built the course is backwards and exhausting)
- The price point is wrong for the market and the creator's credibility
- The platform chosen is painful or has terrible student experience (Thinkific, Kajabi, and Teachable are not the same; the wrong choice will cost you refunds and bad reviews)
- There's no clear problem the course solves, so nobody knows it exists or why they need it
- The creator disappears after launch, assumes it's done, and gets shocked when sales drop to zero after month two
My third course worked because I already had a list, the list knew my voice and trusted me, the course solved a specific problem (how to get your first email subscribers and sell something), and I sent weekly emails, hosted live Q&A calls, and replied to student questions personally for the first three months. That's not passive. That's a part-time job I'd do anyway.
The Real Timeline and Hours
Here's what I spent building Course Number Three:
- Planning and outline: 12 hours
- Writing modules and scripts: 80 hours
- Recording video: 25 hours (I recorded at 1.5x speed to save time; my students don't care if I speak fast)
- Editing video: 40 hours (I use CapCut; it's £3.99 monthly and good enough)
- Setting up the platform and automations: 20 hours
- Creating landing page and sales page: 15 hours
- Marketing and email sequences before launch: 30 hours
- First three months of launch support and live calls: 40 hours
- Ongoing: 5-8 hours weekly for customer support, refunds, and platform maintenance
Total before earning a pound: 262 hours. At the UK minimum wage, that's £3,100 of your time. If you value your time at £30 an hour, it's £7,860. My first-year revenue was £18,200, so my true profit after that first year was either £15,100 or £10,340 depending on how you calculate it. That's not nothing. But it's not passive, and it's certainly not the £100,000 in your sleep fantasy everyone sells you.
The Only Way This Works: Start With An Audience
I'll say it again because it's the secret that nobody admits: you need an audience before you build the course.
This could be:
- An email list (mine: 12,000 people who've opted in over four years)
- A YouTube channel with 10,000+ subscribers in your niche
- A TikTok or Instagram following of 20,000+ engaged followers
- A blog getting 5,000+ monthly visitors from Google
- An existing group of clients or customers who trust you
- A podcast with regular listeners
If you have zero audience, you have two choices: spend six months building one before you spend five months building the course, or spend the five months building the course and then spend two years marketing it with paid ads that will cost you £2,000-£5,000 a month.
Most people won't do either. They'll spend five months building the course and then get mad that nobody's buying it.
Platform Choices Matter
I've used Teachable, Kajabi, and Thinkific. Here's what's true:
Teachable (formerly Teachable, owned by 2U) takes 5% of revenue plus payment processing fees. A £97 course sale nets you about £75. Their hosting is fine, their student experience is fine, their reporting is fine. If you have 50-500 students, it's perfectly adequate.
Kajabi takes 10% of revenue for their £119-monthly plan or 5% on their £399-monthly plan. Their email built-in is the best of the three. Their landing pages are prettier. If you're serious and want to build multiple revenue streams (courses, email, landing pages) in one place, the £399 plan at 5% is worth it. I used this for Course One.
Thinkific (now called TL;DV) has a free tier for one course, then £39 monthly for up to 10 courses. They take no revenue cut, just the platform fee. If you're testing whether anyone will pay, free is worth it. If you sell more than two courses, the economics of Thinkific versus Kajabi change in Thinkific's favour.
Don't use a WordPress plugin or build a custom platform unless you know what you're doing. You'll spend three months debugging login problems instead of marketing.
Price Your Course For Your Stage
This is where I see the most delusion.
If you have zero followers and no portfolio, a £297 course is too expensive. It signals confidence you haven't earned yet. Start with £47-£97. Make the problem you solve really clear. Get 10-20 students, ask them for testimonials and case studies, and raise the price.
If you have 5,000 email subscribers and you're known in your niche, £197-£297 is reasonable.
If you have 50,000+ subscribers and genuine credibility, £497-£797 works.
The most common mistake I see: someone with 200 Twitter followers pricing their course at £397. It won't sell. Your price tag is a claim about your credibility. Price it honestly.
The Truth About Year Two and Beyond
Here's what happens after the first launch:
Want AI doing the heavy lifting in your marketing?
I build the systems that handle the boring 80 percent, so you get your week back. Done properly, with the human kept in.
If the course is good and you've marketed it to your existing audience, you'll get a sales spike at launch and then a decline. In months 2-12, expect 50-70% fewer sales than month one. In year two, if you do nothing, expect another 30-40% decline. If you keep emailing your list about it and you add new students to your list, sales can plateau or grow slowly.
My course sales by month in year one: £4,200 (launch), £1,800, £1,100, £950, £900, £750, £800, £700, £650, £600, £500, £350.
Seasonal changes matter. January and September are better months. July and December are brutal.
To make courses passive, you need multiple courses, each one with its own audience layer. That takes three to four years of work.
Is It Worth It?
Here's my honest answer: if you already have an audience or can build one in six months, yes. You get £10k-£40k in year one with effort, and it compounds if you're patient and disciplined.
If you don't have an audience and you don't have a strong platform or portfolio that makes one easy to build, no. The effort-to-reward ratio is too rough. You'll spend eight months making nothing while you build an audience, then build the course, then market it. A freelance business or a service business will pay you faster.
The people selling you "make £100k from courses" courses are making their money from selling you, not from their courses. They have 50,000 students on their email list specifically because they teach course building. They're not a good comparison.
If you have a real audience already, an online course is a useful second revenue stream. It's not a replacement income. It's not passive. It's a part-time business that takes genuine work, forever.
The Refund Request That Taught Me More Than Any Launch
Six weeks after my second cohort closed, a woman named Sarah emailed asking for her money back on a £297 course about building an email list. She'd completed 40% of it. My gut said refuse, my terms said I could, but I asked her one question first: "What made you sign up in the first place?" Her answer changed how I build courses from that point on. She said she'd bought it because my sales page promised she'd have "a working funnel in 30 days," but the course itself was structured around teaching concepts week by week, with the actual funnel-building not happening until module 6.
I gave her the refund and then went back through every course I'd sold that year. I found the same gap in two of my three products: I was teaching the way I'd learned, building up theory before application, but selling on the promise of a fast result. That mismatch is, I'd guess, responsible for a good chunk of the refund requests most course creators quietly absorb and never talk about publicly. Mine ran at roughly 4% across 210 sales in year one, which is close to industry average, but almost all of them clustered around the same complaint once I read the emails instead of just processing them.
The fix cost me a weekend, not a rebuild. I moved one exercise from module 6 to module 1: get a single opt-in page live using a template I provided, before touching any of the theory. Completion rates for that course went from 61% to 84% over the next 90 days, and refund requests dropped to under 1%. I did not add content. I reordered four existing pieces.
Two things I'd tell anyone selling a course right now:
- Read your own sales page as if you're the buyer, then check whether the course delivers that specific promise in the first 20% of the content, not the last 20%.
- Treat every refund request as a support ticket, not a loss. Ask why, in a curious way, before you process it. I only started doing this after Sarah, and it's the single change that improved my course quality most, more than any new module or bonus I added.
Nobody puts refund numbers in their income reports because they don't look good next to the revenue screenshot. But the 4% of buyers who ask for their money back are handing you the clearest product feedback you'll ever get for free.
Frequently asked questions
How much do online courses make in their first year?
If you have an existing audience of 5,000+, expect £5,000-£20,000 in year one. If you have zero audience, expect £0-£2,000 and two years of marketing investment. The top 5% of course creators make six figures, but they have huge audiences, multiple courses, or they're selling to their existing client base who already trusts them.
Should I launch with a free or paid course first?
Launch paid if you have any audience at all. Free courses teach your audience that your content has no value. If you have zero audience, build one for three to six months, then launch a low-price course (£27-£47) to your new subscribers. Testing demand with a free course is a waste of your time and your audience's attention.
How many students do you need before a course is profitable?
At £97 price point and Teachable fees, you break even (recovering your 250 hours of work) at about 30-40 sales. At £197, about 20 sales. At £497, about 10 sales. Most courses don't hit these numbers because they're launched without an audience. That's why starting with an audience matters.
What if I don't want to deal with customer support emails?
Don't sell a course. Seriously. Courses require ongoing support for at least six months. If you hate email or you're impatient with questions, this business model will make you miserable. Sell a product, not a service.
I go much deeper on this in the side hustles guide.
