I Stopped Trying to Build Courses and Started Making $300/Week

You know that moment when you realize you’ve been doing the same dumb thing five times in a row?

I had that moment at 2am staring at another comprehensive project I’d invested weeks in that nobody asked for.

Let me give you some examples of what I mean, based on my own stupid mistakes.

I’d spent months building a course.

Six different formats — videos, slides, PDFs, even a bonus video nobody asked for. Thirty bucks.

Every aspect of my creative method packed into one comprehensive package.

I sold nine copies. Most of those were discounted.

Then I made three more guides.

Each one hit 100 pages. Each one tried to teach my entire method.

Too many concepts, not enough depth.

Ten bucks each. Barely moved.

The math was humiliating.

All that work, all those “comprehensive resources,” and I’d made maybe $200 total across months of effort.

Here’s what I came to understand: people don’t want your method.

They want the answer to one specific problem they have right now. They don’t want an omnibus of your collected knowledge. They don’t want a curriculum of courses that will take them days, weeks, or months to master.

They want one solution to one problem they have, and they want it now.

So I tried something stupid simple.

About 20 pages. One idea. “A Short Guide to the Long Game.” Just basic stuff to help someone get started. Some bullet lists, a couple of rudimentary AI prompts. I priced it at two dollars.

Hundreds sold.

Not dozens. Hundreds.

Last month I made over a grand from three small PDFs.

One was pay-what-you-want. The other two cost ten bucks. Just over a hundred sales total between them.

Same month. Three focused guides. More money than my biggest course made in its entire lifetime.

The shift wasn’t about better marketing or a bigger audience.

I just stopped trying to teach everything and started solving one problem at a time.

Turns out when you’re trying to help someone who has a day job and two hours on Tuesday night, they don’t want your 100-page dissertation. They want to fix the thing keeping them stuck right now.

Comprehensive sounds valuable but focused actually helps. Simple beats impressive every single time when your audience is building around real life constraints.

I now ship small PDFs weekly. The system takes about 90 minutes per guide — find one pain, write seven steps, add screenshots, list it. Nothing fancy. Just useful.

That system? You can get it right here. It’s only $10. What have you got to lose compared to what you might gain?