245 What 13 Years on YouTube Taught Me

Send us Fan MailGet your tripwire product ideas here: 👉🏼 https://datadrivenmarketing.co/tripwireMark Smith has been teaching bass guitar online since 2013. He has 450,000 YouTube subscribers, 150,000 people on his free membership, and a back catalogue of courses that includes one with 25 hours of video content. By any measure, he has built something real.And yet, sitting down for this conversation, Mark is the first to say he's left an enormous amount of money on the table. No tripwire funnel. Email campaigns with one email at the start and one at the end. About three minutes spent writing each one. Mark talks about the first two or three years when the business made nothing and his wife's gigs kept them afloat. He talks about sitting in the bath hearing PayPal pings for the very first time after launching an ebook, and thinking, we're making money. He talks about watching his friend Scott Devine pull ahead and knowing exactly why. We also get into why retirement-age students dominate music course audiences, why being relatable on YouTube matters more than projecting authority, and how Mark scripts his videos using a teleprompter while going off script the moment he picks up the bass.He's currently working through a funnel audit with our team, and it was great to have him on before that process really gets going.I think you'll enjoy this one.Check out Mark's work:🌐 https://www.talkingbass.net/📸 https://www.instagram.com/talkingbasslessons/▶️ https://www.youtube.com/ ⁨@talkingbasslessons⁩  

Send us Fan MailJason Kleinberg was trying to become a rock star. That's genuinely how this whole thing started.He played in bands, toured the world, recorded music. Sounds great until he tells you it mostly meant sleeping on floors covered in dog hair. At some point he started teaching fiddle, put some videos on YouTube for one student who kept asking him to film everything at 9pm when Jason was starving and just wanted to go home.. and somehow that turned into Fiddlehead, a full-time business doing just north of $200k a year.He didn't plan any of it. He'll be the first to tell you that.We had a really good conversation about how he built it, what makes his teaching approach different, community, AI, and what it felt like to finally get an app idea made that he'd been trying to get built for ten years. Developers kept flaking on him. He got it done with Claude Code in an hour.Jason's just a genuinely interesting person to talk to. He's honest about what he knows, honest about what he doesn't, and he's clearly still really enjoying what he does. That comes through.I think you'll like this one.Check out Jason's business:🌐 https://fiddlehed.com📸 https://www.instagram.com/fiddlehed/▶️ https://www.youtube.com/@fiddl3hed

Send us Fan Mail15 sales page elements you can't afford to miss - Get our free checklist 📝 https://datadrivenmarketing.co/elementsThe job market is changing fast. My guest today thinks we've got about 6 months before it looks very different to what it does now.Hemanand Vadivel is the co-founder of Code Basics, an EdTech platform out of India with 650,000 registered learners and over 6,000 five-star reviews for their courses and bootcamps in AI and data. They're doing about $2 million a year in course revenue... bootstrapped from day one, no outside funding, and no sales team.What I love about Hem's approach is how straightforward it is. 80% of everything they put out is completely free. The idea is simple... if people genuinely love what you're teaching them, they'll come back and buy the paid stuff. And it works.We got into how his whole team has shifted in the last few weeks, with everyone vibe coding and shipping products at a pace that would've seemed impossible not long ago. Development time that used to take six weeks now takes three days. They've built over 30 internal products recently with 12 already in production.We also talked about why institutional education is struggling to keep up with the rate of change in the job market right now, and what course creators should be thinking about to stay ahead of what's coming.Hem is a genuinely thoughtful guy and this ended up being one of the more interesting conversations I've had on the show in a while. Hope you enjoy it.🔗 https://www.codebasics.io📺 https://youtube.com/ ⁨@codebasics⁩  

Send us Fan MailWhat would you do if someone told you to put your entire best-selling online course on YouTube... for free?Most course creators would say no way. Emma McAdam said yes. And it took her from 100,000 subscribers to nearly a million.In this episode, my new co-host Dominik Dragun sits down with Emma McAdam, a licensed therapist and the creator behind Therapy in a Nutshell, a YouTube channel with over 2 million subscribers. They talk about how Emma built a thriving membership business while giving away her best content for free, how she sells online courses to people who could watch them on YouTube at no cost, and what her email marketing, sales funnel and evergreen promotions actually look like behind the scenes.If you're a course creator wondering how to grow your online course business without feeling salesy or holding back your best stuff... this one's for you.🎙️ Hosted by Dominik Dragun, co-host of The Art of Selling Online Courses📺 Therapy in a Nutshell: https://therapyinanutshell.com/📺 Emma's YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/c/TherapyinaNutshell

Send us Fan MailJoseph Hoffman was halfway through a conducting degree when he started teaching neighbourhood kids piano to pay the bills. He fell in love with it, pivoted his whole career, and eventually moved online with a pretty unconventional idea... give every single lesson away for free.That decision led to Hoffman Academy reaching over 200,000 students across 115 countries, $2M a year in revenue, and a team of 15 people building one of the most recognised online piano schools in the world.In this episode Joseph shares how the freemium model actually works in practice, what he's learned about converting free users into paying members, why a 30-day free trial completely flopped for them and what they did instead, and how he's thinking about growing the business in 2026.Really enjoyed this conversation. Joseph has built something genuinely special and there's a lot here for anyone running or thinking about running a subscription-based online course.🔗 Check out Hoffman Academy: https://www.HoffmanAcademy.com🔗 Find Joseph on social media:  @Hoffmanacademy  #OnlineCourses #SalesFunnels #CourseCreators #DigitalMarketing🤝  Get In TouchIf you'd like to talk more about how you can grow your course business, email me at john@datadrivenmarketing.

Send us Fan Mail2-10x your email list size in just 3 steps 📩 https://datadrivenmarketing.co/guideJosh Wright is a classical pianist who's performed at Carnegie Hall, the Kennedy Center, and on America's Got Talent. He's grown a YouTube channel to over 200,000 subscribers and 20 million views, and built a whole online course business teaching piano students all over the world.And yeah, that's all pretty cool. But maybe the more interesting part is how he actually built it.His whole channel is built around sharing his weaknesses. Not in some cringe, overly vulnerable way... just honestly. "Here's what I struggle with, here's how I fixed it." And his audience loves him for it. He actually calls it the superpower of the channel, which I think is a really good way to put it.So we got into why that works. Because I think a lot of course creators feel this pull toward seeming more professional, more polished, more put-together online. And Josh's experience is kind of the opposite. The more real he is, the more people trust him and want to learn from him.We also talked about the fear of promotion, which comes up a lot with course creators. Josh was pretty open about how uncomfortable he used to be with it and how he eventually got over it. If you've ever felt a bit weird about putting your stuff out there, that part of the conversation is worth a listen on its own.Really good episode. Hope you enjoy it.🎹 Check out Josh's work:🔗 www.joshwrightpiano.com🔗 youtube.com/joshwrightpiano🔗 facebook.com/joshwrightpiano🔗 instagram.com/joshwrightpiano🔗 Courses: https://learn.joshwrightpiano.com/#OnlineCourses #SalesFunnels #CourseCreators #DigitalMarketing🤝  Get In TouchIf you'd like to talk more about how you can grow your course business, email me at john@datadrivenmarketing.

Send us Fan Mail15 sales page elements you can't afford to miss - free checklist 📝 https://datadrivenmarketing.co/elementsJames Testani has built Good Guitarist into a channel with over 600,000 subscribers and nearly a million views a month... and he did it without chasing trends or trying to game the algorithm.His whole approach has been evergreen from the start. He releases lessons, they get a trickle of views, and then a year later they're just quietly bringing in people who searched for exactly that thing. It's a slower build, but it compounds over time in a way that trend-driven content just doesn't.In this episode we get into how that translates into course sales... because the journey his students take is pretty different from what you might expect. They don't usually opt in and go straight through a funnel. They watch his lessons for months, build trust, and then one day decide they want the full structured path. That changes how you think about your email list and your promotions.We also talk about the switch from selling individual courses to a subscription model, how he's thinking about quarterly promotions now, and the challenge of building a team around a business that's very much built around one person's teaching style.And we get into hiring... specifically how hard it is to find people who actually think about your business rather than just applying a formula they've used before.🎸 Check out James's site: https://goodguitarist.com

Send us Fan Mail🔥 Struggling with low conversions? Grab our FREE checklist of 15 must-have elements to optimize your sales pages! 👉🏼 https://datadrivenmarketing.co/elementsTom Geiss is the founder of GD&T Basics, a training company that teaches geometric dimensioning and tolerancing to engineers and manufacturers. It's a topic he'll openly tell you is boring to most people... and yet he's built a seven-figure business around it with a team of 10, no paid ads, and no sales team.In this episode we talk about how Tom approaches building course content around the problems his students actually face at work, rather than just the material itself. It's a simple shift in thinking but it makes a real difference to how engaging a course becomes, and how much easier it is to sell.We also get into how he's built a bridge between selling to individuals and selling to companies, which is something a lot of course creators haven't thought much about yet. And Tom shares how his thinking about marketing has completely changed since he started the business... going from someone who wanted nothing to do with it, to someone who now sees it as the core of everything.Tom is a really thoughtful guy and it was a genuinely enjoyable conversation. I think you'll get a lot out of it.🔎 Find Tom at https://www.gdandtbasics.com/🔎 Connect with Tom on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tom-geiss/ #OnlineCourses #SalesFunnels #CourseCreators #DigitalMarketing🤝  Get In TouchIf you'd like to talk more about how you can grow your course business, email me at john@datadrivenmarketing.

Send us Fan MailI've had the pleasure of meeting Benny Lewis a couple of times at conferences over the years, and I'm really happy to finally have him on the show. Benny built one of the biggest language blogs in the world, with over 2 million monthly visitors at its peak, a bestselling book, and a growing team. But at the height of that success, he was working 20-hour days, clinically depressed, and struggling with his health. In this episode, Benny shares what that period really looked like, how he got through it, and why he made the decision to completely simplify his life and business.We talk about his approach to language learning and why speaking from day one is central to everything he teaches, how he built and maintains a highly engaged email list, the importance of finding your niche and owning a specific point of view, and what he's working on now as he prepares to relaunch his YouTube channel after years away from it.It's an honest conversation about what it actually takes to build something online, what success can cost you if you're not careful, and how to figure out what you actually want from your business and your life. I really enjoyed this one and I think you will too.#OnlineCourses #SalesFunnels #CourseCreators #DigitalMarketing🤝  Get In TouchIf you'd like to talk more about how you can grow your course business, email me at john@datadrivenmarketing.

Send us Fan Mail🔥 Ready to double your course sales? Book your call at https://datadrivenmarketing.co/callLiam Ward is a blues harmonica player, teacher and founder of learntheharmonica.com. He's built a course business with 240,000 YouTube subscribers and millions of views... and he barely checks his numbers.In this episode we get into why Liam thinks your business doesn't have to run your life, how he's built a passive income school that fits around his life as a musician, and why joy might be a more useful metric than revenue for a lot of course creators. We also have a genuinely good debate about data, because I'm not going to pretend I just agreed with everything he said.It's a different kind of conversation to what we usually have on the show, and I think that's exactly why it's worth your time. If you've ever felt like your business is pulling you away from the reason you started it in the first place, this one will resonate.🎶 Liam's harmonica school: https://learntheharmonica.com🎶 Check out Liam's music side of things: https://liamwardmusic.com. If you want to find out how to grow your own course business in a way that actually works for your life, head to datadrivenmarketing.co/resources where you can get access to a range of free tools and guides to help you do exactly that.#OnlineCourses #SalesFunnels #CourseCreators #DigitalMarketing🤝  Get In TouchIf you'd like to talk more about how you can grow your course business, email me at john@datadrivenmarketing.