What to do if AI is killing your course business

Last week I wrote about how AI will kill some (but not all) info products.

To recap, I said that if AI is a bigger expert at what you do than you, you're in trouble.

For example, if you sell courses on how to use a software, AI can teach that software better than you — and for free.

If your courses teach stuff that ChatGPT can't teach, you'll be fine. Your business won't change at all.

But if you sell courses that ChatGPT could teach, here's what to do.

When you compete with humans, you need to differentiate yourself. You need to offer something your competition doesn't. Otherwise, people will ask "why should I buy from you when I could buy from anybody else?"

When you're competing with AI, the same principle applies. You need to offer something that ChatGPT can't offer.

That can be:

-A personal touch. If people just like you and your personal brand, they'll spend extra money on your course.

For example, the influencer "Miss Excel" sells courses on how to use Excel for like $300, even though there are better Excel courses available for free. That's because people like her.

-Information that isn't available anywhere else on the internet. If you've figured out something that nobody else has figured out yet, then an AI can't teach it, only you can. (A lot of biz-opp offers fall into this category.)

-Better user experience. Right now I'm teaching myself Turkish. I'm using ChatGPT to help me practice, but I also happily pay $15/month for a software that automates a lot of the grunt work (like tracking what words I've seen already, transcribing podcasts and YouTube videos, etc.) 

If you can present your information better than ChatGPT can, you can tell your audience that you make the learning journey easy. People pay for that.

-A done-for-you element. If you can do some of the work for your audience, you're golden.

-A better AI tool. Can you sell access to a GPT you built that understands your subject better than regular ChatGPT? It's not that hard to build your own GPT (I'm building a couple of my own right now). This works well for business related stuff, or anything where your audience probably subscribes to the $20/month ChatGPT Plus account.

"Do more of that"

Once, Kansas City Royals starting pitcher Zack Grienke called his teammate Alex Gordon into the film room.

"There's something I want to show you," he said.

Gordon probably thought that Greinke was going to show him something wrong with his mechanics, or that the other team's pitcher was tipping his pitches.

Instead, Greinke put a video of himself batting, from back when pitchers also had to bat. Greinke hit "play" on the video. Then the Greinke in the video hit a home run.

"Do more of that," he said.

That isn't the best advice in baseball, but it's really good advice in marketing.

Every time I get a new client, the first thing I do is identify what's worked for them in the past.

Then I do more of it.

I'll look at their best-performing emails, rewrite them a bit, and send them again.

Or I'll look at their YouTube channel, watch their most-viewed YouTube videos, and then write emails on the same topics.

You don't need to overcomplicate marketing — just figure out what works, and do more of it.

Do you get a lot of leads from YouTube? Make more YouTube videos.

Do you make lots of money every time you do an email promo? Send more emails.

Figure out everything that's working in your business...

And double down on it.

-Theo

Will AI kill courses?

People say that AI is "killing" courses.

Are they right?

Yes and no.

Yes, some courses are going to die.

For example, right now I'm teaching myself to use Make.com.

Maybe once upon a time, I would have bought a Make.com course. But today I don't need to. If I have a question about how to do something in Make.com, I just go to the Make.com GPT and ask it for the solution. 

There are GPT's for basically every software I use, making it completely unnecessary to pay for courses to learn those softwares.

But I do NOT use AI to get better at marketing. I would still pay for a marketing course if it was from somebody I respected and I thought I could learn something new from it.

What's the difference? In Make.com I'm a beginner, and AI is an expert. I don't need a human to teach me anything because the AI can teach me everything.

But in marketing I'm an expert, and AI is only beginner-intermediate. With marketing, I view ChatGPT as a junior assistant that takes work off my plate — NOT a teacher.

Meanwhile, there are still humans who are a lot better than me at marketing who sell courses revealing their secrets. In the past few months I've bought a handful of those courses... and learned quite a bit from them.

Do you sell courses on stuff that AI knows really well? Then you're probably out of business. But if you're showing people how to do something they can't figure out how to do with AI, you have nothing to fear.

But what if you sell to beginners? Or what if AI is already really good at what you do?

You're not completely out of luck. You do have a few options, which I'll go over in next week's email.