The online education space is saturated.

And that’s not going to change any time soon.

In the early 2000s, it was blogs and affiliate marketing—everyone jumped on the bandwagon. 

A select few people made tons of $, most made nothing.

Then it was low ticket info products and courses (peaked a few years ago IMO). Again, the victor gained all the spoils and most people made nothing. 

We’ve recently gone through the high-ticket era thanks to the influence of people like Sam Ovens, Taylor Welch, and others. The application of old school sales methods combined with extremely scalable product/service (course + group coaching calls) enabled people to build a fairly profitable business quickly without a ton of marketing knowledge.

But this golden age is also coming to an end as the market becomes more and more saturated. Most high-ticket courses are regurgitated (shittier) versions of what’s already out there. The market is already shifting. 

Speaking of the market, let’s take a look at where we’re at right now in 2022.

The Online Course Market in 2022

From my perspective (as someone who’s been in the online course space for almost a decade), the market has trended in two directions: 

1. Low price/high-volume

2. High price/low-volume

Being in the middle is probably the worst place to be unless you have a solid brand and audience, but more on that later in the article. 

Low price/high volume

Online courses have quickly become commodities. If you want to learn an ultra-specific skill like coding in Javascript, or drawing in Procreate on your iPad, then you have a plethora of options.

The majority of people—including myself—are going to choose the cheapest course with the best rating on a platform like Skillshare or Udemy.

If I want to learn how to draw on my iPad, I’m not going to sign up to someone’s blog. I’m not going to spend hours trying to find the best course. I’m going to search Google for “How to draw on Procreate,” click the first link, and if it all looks good—I’m in. 

$20 and a few hours later, I’ve learned some stuff.

This low-price/high-volume section of the market is great for certain niches, topics, and courses. But it’s also saturated. 

If you want to make a javascript course, then you’re competing with someone like Jonas Schmedtmann who’s had over 500,000 students purchase the course. 

It’s not that you can’t make it work, it’s just going to be extremely hard. But if you can find an under-represented niche that has a big enough market size, then you’ll do well. 

High price/low-volume

On the opposite end of the market, we have the world of high-ticket.

Instead of $20 courses, we’re talking $2,000+.

Most people selling courses at this price range (and above) are offering some sort of coaching (group or one-on-one) and perhaps other services too. 

If you’re an expert in something, able to teach/coach it, and lack marketing experience—then is a much better path than trying to go low-price/high-volume. You just need to be able to convince people on a sales call that your course/coaching service will solve their problem. 

But even this space is getting saturated. And it’s getting harder and harder to build a business this way if you don’t already have an existing audience. Ad costs are making it more and more difficult to be profitable enough to justify the model (especially if you’re offering coaching—that’s trading your time for money). 

More and more consumers are starting to realize that paying $5k for a course and a few group coaching calls (that aren’t really that valuable) is just not worth it. 

If you’re in this space, you need to create something more irresistible and higher value. Especially if you want a long-term sustainable business. 

Mid price/medium volume

Probably the hardest category to compete in if you don’t have an audience or great marketing skills.

The economics are hard to make work with paid ads, and often people will find your course too expensive compared to the alternatives on platforms like Udemy.

Usually at this price range, people buy from you because of the following:

• You have a great brand. People like you, and therefore they’d rather buy from you than someone else (even if it’s 10 times cheaper).
• You have very good marketing from paid ads to email funnels and sales pages.
• It’s a niche market and there isn’t much out there.

Admittedly, one of my businesses (EDMProd) is in this section of the market. We sell sub $500 courses. 

But we also have a ton of organic traffic and we’ve been around for a long time + we have a flagship course that’s become a “household name” of sorts.

Even still, we are changing our strategy to focus on cohort-based courses.

So, let’s talk about that. Let’s talk about the emerging category in the market that I think you should strongly consider focusing on. 

The Scalable, Profitable, Audience-First, Cohort Model

Forget low-price/high volume. Forget sales calls to sell high-price/low-volume.

Let’s talk high-enough-price and high-enough-volume.

Would you rather:

• Build a cheap course and hope for the best on a platform like Udemy or Skillshare. A platform that is not yours, and that you can’t market further to your students… 
• Build a high ticket coaching program that requires you to jump on sales calls every week, and constantly work on fulfillment…
• Or rapidly build a dedicated audience, create your own niche, and run a cohort-based course 2-4 times per year and get real results for your students—without having to jump on sales calls, compete on price, and anxiously cycle through marketing tactic after marketing tactic trying to make $?

I’ve picked the latter—both for my new biz (CourseThrive) and my other biz (EDMProd). 

Here’s why you should consider doing the same. 

The market is trending in this direction. You’re still early. 

Gagan Biyani, the co-founder of Udemy is now working on Maven.

What’s Maven? 

It’s a platform for cohort-based courses. 

If the co-founder of Udemy sees the market moving in this direction, that’s saying something. 

And it makes a lot of sense.

Monthly is another example. While I wouldn’t call their courses true cohort-based courses (more of a hybrid model), there are definitely elements. There’s a shared start time. There’s a community. There’s feedback. No wonder they’ve grown so quickly.

Cohort-based courses are better for students

Here’s an interesting statistic for you: 

We have an average 15% completion rate on our self-paced courses over at EDMProd.

That means 85% of people are not finishing the course.

I’d estimate half of those people don’t even really start.

And this is normal. This is across the industry. 

I’m sure you’ve bought courses that you’ve hardly touched. I know I have. 

Here’s the thing…

People want to learn, but they want to learn within a community. They want goals, accountability, structure, feedback, and deadlines. 

They want the university experience without the ridiculous cost, and without professors that are a decade behind in their knowledge.

I’m personally far more likely to opt for a cohort-based course over a self-paced course myself, especially if it’s something I know I need to learn/work on. 

It’s obviously better for the student, and I do think there’ll come a point where mid/high-priced self-paced courses will be relegated to a tiny corner of the market. 

But is it better for you as a creator, instructor and business owner? 

Let’s take a look.

Cohort-based courses are better for your business

As we’ve looked at, the market seems to be trending in this direction. If you can build with market tailwind behind you, then you should. It’s like entrepreneurship on easy mode.

That’s the first reason why you should consider CBCs, but here are some others. 

You can charge more than a self-paced course

The perceived value of a cohort-based course is much higher than that of a self-paced course.

The combination of community, group/live coaching, deadlines, start/end dates and a clear outcome all result in higher perceived value. 

People are not just paying for education, they’re paying for a result. They know they’re more likely to achieve that result if there are deadlines, community and accountability.

It’s easier to sell a CBC

You don’t have to jump on sales calls (though you could depending on price point). You don’t have to try and hit volume. You don’t have to even have to have the best marketing chops (ever seen a college course “landing page”—it’s not the most compelling thing, and they still make money).

Cohort-based courses are inherently easier to sell for the following reason…

Scarcity.

If you don’t sign up now, then you can’t take part. It’s that simple.

With self-paced courses, scarcity just isn’t there unless you artificially create it, run discounts, or open/close the course. Even then, it’s not as strong as literally saying “here’s when the course starts, you need to sign up before then—no matter what—otherwise you gotta wait another 6 months.”

The product development cycle is more forgiving than a normal course

Most of the time, if you’re making a self-paced course then the product development journey goes something like this:

1. Validate idea
2. Pre-sell (you should be doing this. You really should)
3. Develop
4. Get feedback and notice flaws in course
5. Develop version 2
6. etc

It’s a lot of filming, recording, and pushing out into the world. 

But with cohort-based courses, you can teach most of it live. That’s what Ali Abdaal did with his Part-Time YouTuber Academy.

The best thing? You record those live sessions, and now you’ve got evergreen content.

But one unique thing about CBCs that make the product development cycle so interesting is that you have the ability to iterate with each cohort.

The first cohort you do might not be that good. You get feedback from students, and then implement it for the next cohort.

Rinse and repeat.

You improve your course each time. You improve your marketing each time. You iterate and achieve expontential growth and expontential student results. 

How I’m executing on this

Over at EDMProd, we’re shifting our focus to cohort-based courses.

That doesn’t mean we’re abandoning or discontinuing our self-paced courses, but we’re heavily investing in CBCs. 

Last year, we ran our first CBC called Create30. The idea was to create 30 song ideas in 30 days. It was a great experience for the students (based on the feedback we received), but the offer wasn’t quite strong enough. 

This month, we’re launching a brand new cohort-based course which I’m hoping will do much better. I’ll report back with details. 

With CourseThrive, I’m focused on helping people build and scale highly profitable, audience-first educational businesses. While I’m strictly focused on building the audience for this business first, I do plan on running a cohort-based course as the core product. So, watch this space.