Chris Chan

A large audience and a thriving business are two different things.

Plenty of creators build the first and assume the second will follow. The ones who grow past a certain point work out something harder: how to turn attention into demand, and demand into a business that holds up across markets, languages, and currencies.

That problem is the reason we brought Europe's top creators to Rome.

Teachable Collective Rome is a three-day, invite-only gathering running June 23 to 25, built for established European creators who want time with peers operating at the same level and direct access to what we see across our top accounts.

It is the European counterpart to the Collective we hosted in Los Angeles earlier this year. Follow along on Instagram as the week unfolds.

What the Rome Collective is

Twenty-two Teachable schools and around 30 creators and operators are in the room, and the guest list is regional by design. Seventeen of the schools are based in Europe, with a few more traveling in from the United States, Canada, and Australia. The largest groups come from the UK, Italy, Spain, Austria, France, and Romania.

What these creators teach covers a lot of ground. Languages lead the room, followed by music, exam and interview prep, and tech. Around those sit creators teaching astrology, aviation, dance, marketing, nutrition, philosophy, and photography. One attendee runs a language podcast with more than 400 million downloads.

Teachable Select schools start at $250K in annual sales and Elite starts at $1M, the same tiers we recognize across the Customer Journey program. Rome is what that support looks like at the top of the range in Europe. Like our week at SXSW this spring, it is built as much around the rooms between sessions as the sessions themselves.

What we're bringing to Rome

The framing we are taking into the day is direct. A big audience is a strong starting point. Turning it into a strong business takes a different set of moves. Early growth rewards reach and repetition. Past a certain point the ceiling changes, and what drives results is product depth, repeat purchases, and how well a creator sells into new markets.

Three things come up again and again across our top European accounts:

• Creating demand is the real constraint. Most creators in the room already have the audience. The harder work is turning that attention into consistent sales.
• Pricing for new audiences opens up growth. Creators who rework their pricing for buyers in different countries and at different stages tend to grow faster than those who run one price everywhere.
• Selling globally works best when buying feels local. Students are more likely to buy when the checkout, currency, and payment options match what they already know. Helping creators sell to students around the world with a local buying experience is a growing part of what we build.

Day one: The welcome dinner

The first evening is a welcome dinner on a rooftop terrace in the center of Rome. No agenda, no presentations. The point is to let the group meet, warm up, and set the tone before the working day that follows.

Day two: The Collective

The full content day takes place at Soho House Rome and runs from morning into the evening. Our Managing Director, Giovana Carvalho, opens with Teachable's read on where creator education is heading in Europe. From there the day moves through three creator keynotes:

• Stefano Chiaromonte, an Italian-language educator known to his students as Teacher Stefano, on how he uses AI across his business day to day.
• Philip Hofmacher, on building a Substack newsletter into the main sales engine for his Teachable school.
• Giulia Nardini of Hotmart, on running a language-learning business that reaches students across Brazil.

Between the keynotes, our data and product team breaks down what actually drives repeat purchases across top accounts and how to price for audiences a creator has not sold to before. After lunch, the whole group moves into hot seats, where creators bring a live business problem and the room works through it together. The day closes with a happy hour, and our team films creator content throughout.

Day three: The experience

The final day moves out of the city. The group heads to Frascati, in the hills outside Rome, for a wine tour and tasting. It is the least structured part of the event, and that is on purpose. Some of the most useful conversations at the LA Collective happened in exactly these moments, away from a stage, when creators compare notes on what is working in their businesses.

What Rome means for every creator

Rome is invite-only, and most creators reading this are not in the room this round. The thinking behind it applies at every stage.

The demand for expert-led education is growing, and it is global. Goldman Sachs Research expects the creator economy to roughly double to $480 billion by 2027, up from around $250 billion. 

The creators who grow into that are the ones treating their teaching as a real business, with deeper products, stronger repeat purchases, and pricing and payments built for buyers in more than one country.

We run the Customer Journey program because a creator at $50K needs different things than a creator at $500K, and both need different things than one pushing past $1M. 

The Collective is what that support looks like at the top tier. Rome is where we bring it to Europe.

Talk to our team to understand how Teachable can support where your business is heading next. If you are ready to start building, you can do that today.

Before Youness Es-Sebiy built Youness School into a course business that has trained more than 2,000 students, he did what most serious creators do first: he tried the other options. 

He taught on several platforms and compared what each one actually delivered for his school. 

The answer he reached was Teachable, and he is direct about the reasons.

"I have tested other platforms in the past, including Thinkific and Podia. While they are good platforms, I ultimately chose Teachable because of two factors that were very important for my business and my students … The first is security … The second is the mobile learning experience." — Youness Es-Sebiy, Founder of Youness School

That decision came from someone who knows the stakes from the inside. In Morocco, the road to a top engineering school runs through CPGE, the Classes Préparatoires aux Grandes Écoles: two intensive years after high school studying advanced math, physics, chemistry, and engineering sciences, then one national exam that decides which schools will take a student. Youness went through all of it. He reached the other side and graduated from École Hassania des Travaux Publics, one of the leading engineering schools in the country.

Then he started teaching the students coming up behind him. He launched Youness School in 2019 while he was still an engineering student himself, recording lessons for the exact exams he had just survived. By 2023 the school was his full-time work.

Today it has directly supported more than 2,000 students preparing for Morocco's national exam (the CNC) and the French Grandes Écoles exams, with more than 20,000 others reached through free lessons and his YouTube channels across Morocco, France, Tunisia, and Mauritania.

The two reasons he named for choosing Teachable, security and the mobile experience, run through every part of how that school works.

Youness's Teachable story at a glance

The turning point

Youness built Youness School around a problem he had felt directly. CPGE students carry an enormous load across many subjects, and a lot of them hit a wall in one or two of those subjects with little structured help to get past it. He wanted to give them that help in a format that fit how they actually live and study.

" I went through the same preparatory classes, and they were very difficult. My goal is to help students who are facing the same problems, to help them grow and reach the best engineering schools." — Youness Es-Sebiy, Founder of Youness School

He made one early decision that shaped everything after it. Youness School would be online only. He had looked at in-person tutoring and found it too limited for what he wanted to build.

"We chose e-learning because we find the platforms very efficient. Physical classes are limited, and for our students online learning is the best solution." — Youness Es-Sebiy, Founder of Youness School

That decision raised the stakes on the platform itself. If an entire school lives online, the platform has to protect the content, reach students on whatever device they own, and keep working when the connection drops. Those three requirements are what pointed Youness toward Teachable over the other tools he had tried.

Youness's strategies for running an online engineering-prep school

Youness runs the school with the same clarity he asks of his students. Five choices shape how Youness School finds, teaches, and keeps its students.

Strategy 1: Diagnose before you sell

Most enrollments at Youness School begin with a conversation, usually on WhatsApp, where his sales team finds out where a student is actually struggling before recommending anything.

"In the beginning, we try to understand the needs of the student. If a student has problems across many topics, we offer a bundle with the whole platform. If they only have difficulty in one subject, we give them one or two courses." — Youness Es-Sebiy, Founder of Youness School

The result is a recommendation matched to what the student actually needs. A student weak in one subject buys a single course. Someone starting the full two-year climb buys a bundle, which Teachable lets him package as one grouped program.

Take action

• Map your catalog to specific problems before you set pricing. When a buyer can see the one course that solves their exact issue, the decision gets easier for both of you.
• Use a short intake conversation or form to route students to the right product. Bundles let you group related courses into a single program for learners who need the full path.

Strategy 2: Blend recorded courses with live teaching and coaching

Youness School runs on three formats at once: recorded lessons students watch on their own time, live sessions with collaborating professors, and one-on-one coaching.

"We use both approaches. We have recorded classes on the platform with Teachable, and we have live courses with professors who teach in these preparatory classes. There is also coaching to answer questions and correct their work." — Youness Es-Sebiy, Founder of Youness School

The recorded library carries the core curriculum and reaches every enrolled student. Live sessions and coaching cover the moments where students need a person in the room with them: stuck on a problem set, preparing for a mock exam, or talking through method. Together they create the kind of student experience that keeps learners moving through the material.

Take action

• Treat recorded and live formats as partners. Recorded content delivers your teaching to every student who enrolls, and live sessions add the accountability and feedback that keep them on track.
• Decide which parts of your subject truly need real-time interaction, and reserve live time for those. Let the recorded library handle everything a student can absorb on their own.

Strategy 3: Protect the content so it stays worth paying for

For a school that sells exam-prep video, the content is the product. Youness named content protection as one of the two factors that decided his platform choice.

"As an online school, protecting our educational content is a top priority. I found Teachable's video hosting and content protection to be particularly strong, which gave me more confidence using the platform for premium courses." — Youness Es-Sebiy, Founder of Youness School

Secure video hosting keeps his lessons from leaking out, which matters when the same exam prep sells to a fresh cohort every year. Content that walks out the door loses the value he priced it on.

Take action

• If your courses are your main income, weigh content security when you choose a platform, not after you have already built on it.
• Price premium material with the assumption that it will keep selling for years. Protection is what keeps that assumption true.

Strategy 4: Make the school work on a phone, and offline

This is the choice most specific to where Youness teaches. His students are spread across Morocco and the wider Francophone world, and the connection they study on is uneven. The Teachable mobile app, and offline downloads in particular, became central to how the school reaches them.

"The mobile app lets students access their courses easily on their phones and tablets. The ability to download videos for offline viewing has been extremely valuable, especially for students who do not always have a stable internet connection." — Youness Es-Sebiy, Founder of Youness School

The context behind that quote is real. In 2025, about 36 percent of people in Africa used the internet, the lowest rate of any world region, according to the International Telecommunication Union. For a student living inside that gap, a course that only streams is a course that stalls every time the signal drops. An offline download turns a commute, a power cut, or a weak connection into study time.

Take action

• If any part of your audience studies on mobile or deals with patchy internet, test the offline experience yourself before you commit. Download a lesson, switch off your data, and watch what your student would see.
• Shoot and format your video for a phone screen. Most of these students learn on a device they hold in one hand.

Strategy 5: Keep the door open on price and access

Youness prices across a wide range, from single courses around $60 to full programs above $1,000, so a student pays only for what they need. He also gives free access to families facing financial hardship, and he has used free trial periods to let students try the school before paying.

"We give some courses for free to families facing financial difficulties. We want talented students to have access regardless of their financial situation." — Youness Es-Sebiy, Founder of Youness School

More than 5,000 students have come through Youness School's free-access and trial campaigns, which widened his reach and let prospective students experience the platform before buying. Payment access shapes the model too. In Morocco, many students and parents pay by bank or cash transfer, and a card is rarely the default, so a real conversation often comes before a sale.

Take action

• Build a price ladder. A range from one course to a full program lets students sort themselves by need and budget.
• Give people a low-cost way to try before they buy. A free lesson or trial period does the convincing a sales page cannot.

How Youness thinks about access

Youness built the school around one belief, and he states it plainly.

"We believe talented students should have access to elite-level education regardless of their city, country, or financial situation." — Youness Es-Sebiy, Founder of Youness School

That belief is why offline access matters so much to him, and why the price range stays wide. The students he most wants to reach are often the ones with the least reliable connection and the tightest budgets. Building for them first is what makes the school useful to everyone else.

What his students take away

The measure that matters to Youness is straightforward: whether his students get into the schools they are aiming for. Since 2019 he has worked directly with more than 2,000 of them, with another 20,000-plus reached through free lessons, webinars, and his YouTube channels. They sit the same national exam he once sat, and the strongest performers go on to the top engineering schools in Morocco and France.

"My advice would be to focus on the student experience and content protection. If security, accessibility, and mobile learning matter to you, I would recommend Teachable. Students can learn from any device and access content wherever they are, and that makes a real difference." — Youness Es-Sebiy, Founder of Youness School

Youness is one of a growing number of creators using Teachable to teach students far beyond their home country. Elisa Azoum grew French Mornings to more than 2,850 language students across dozens of countries on the same platform. The pattern is consistent: subject expertise, a clear program, and a platform that travels with the student.

Looking ahead

Youness has a wider plan for the school. CPGE is a small field by design, with roughly ten thousand students entering each year in Morocco. He wants to take the same model to high school students, a group he puts at around half a million in Morocco alone, and eventually to learners in other countries.

"I have a global strategy to develop Youness School and help more people. In Morocco there are about half a million high school students, and we want to give them similar platforms and solutions." — Youness Es-Sebiy, Founder of Youness School

The plan he describes brings together education, technology, and the careful use of AI, built for students who would otherwise sit outside the reach of this kind of coaching.

Youness's students pay differently than a US or European creator's audience does. Cards aren't the default in Morocco. Many families pay by bank transfer. And selling across Morocco, France, Tunisia, and Mauritania means four different markets, currencies, and different sets of tax rules. But the best part is that none of which Youness will have to manage manually.

That's exactly what Teachable Payments is built for. Local payment methods appear automatically at checkout based on where the student is. Tax is calculated, collected, and remitted across 45+ countries without the creator filing anything. Prices display in the student's local currency without manual configuration. For a school built around the belief that talented students should have access regardless of where they live, the checkout experience should reflect that too, and now it does.

What to do next

Explore Youness School: Visit younesschool.com to see the courses and programs, and youness.online for more on Youness's work. Follow Youness Es-Sebiy on LinkedIn and YouTube, and follow the Youness School YouTube channel and company page on LinkedIn.

Try Teachable today: Youness built a school that protects its content, reaches students on any device, and keeps teaching when the internet drops. Teachable handles the video hosting, the mobile app, and the payments so creators can spend their time with students. With Teachable Payments, that now includes local payment methods for an international student base like his.

‍Start your free Teachable today.

Most training programs share the same problem. The content gets built, distributed, and largely ignored. Completion rates stay low. Managers ask whether anyone actually learned anything. No one has a clean answer.

This is the challenge Daniela Bianchin, Product Marketing Lead at Teachable, opened with during a recent global training webinar. The session brought together L&D professionals, healthcare trainers, solo course builders, and people managing partner education at companies like Google — joining from Brazil, Canada, Australia, Russia, Georgia, and the United States.

Their top two challenges: measuring impact and getting learners to actually engage.

Below is a summary of what the session covered, including the specific features Daniela demonstrated and the questions attendees raised.

Why scattered training programs fail

When training lives across PDFs, slide decks, and shared folders with no consistent structure, measuring it becomes nearly impossible. You lose track of who completed what, which concepts landed, and where learners dropped off.

According to the 2023 LinkedIn Workplace Learning Report, 89% of L&D professionals agree that proactively building employee skills is the best way to navigate the future of work — yet most organizations still rely on fragmented content to deliver it.

A platform purpose-built for training addresses this at the delivery level. Teachable for business gives you course structure, compliance tools, and reporting in one place, so you can see exactly what is happening inside your program.

Two examples from the webinar illustrate the difference:

• ManyChat, the marketing automation platform, runs product training on Teachable for over 2,000 users, including both employees and customers. Their product marketing manager described how fast they could build and update quizzes to test knowledge after each lesson.
• The City of Albuquerque uses Teachable to train over 1,000 seasonal workers every year, with time-limited access managed without IT involvement. Previous platforms required too much setup overhead. They stood up their Teachable program in under a week.

Course compliance keeps learners moving

The most requested topic during the session was accountability: how do you confirm someone actually went through the material?

Teachable addresses this through course compliance settings. You can require learners to pass a quiz before advancing to the next lesson. You can require them to watch at least 90% of a video before moving forward. Either way, both requirements generate data you can act on.

When learners consistently miss the same quiz questions, you can see which concepts need reinforcement. When they skip sections, the reporting shows it. This matters both for measuring learning and for improving the material over time.

In a recent Teachable survey of more than 500 students, over 60% said that having a clear structure with a defined path forward was the main reason they came back to finish a course.

That is the practical difference between a course people start and a course people complete. Structured paths with clear next steps give learners a reason to return. Compliance checkpoints give administrators something to report on.

For more on how new hire training programs use these features, that post covers the setup in more depth.

Building the course

You can create a course on Teachable using AI to generate a first draft, or upload content manually. The two approaches work together. A common setup is to use AI to generate a section outline, then replace the placeholder content with your own material.

Course content supports: video (MP4, MOV, AVI), PDFs, audio, text and images, embedded video from external platforms like YouTube, and live sessions connected through Zoom. Quizzes sit alongside this content as standard lesson types, not a separate system.

AI can also generate quiz questions from your existing lessons. Select the lessons you want covered, and the tool produces a draft set of questions. From there, you edit to match your specific terminology and objectives.

For teams that need structured sequences, Learning Paths (currently in beta) lets you chain multiple courses together in a defined order. Learners move through them in sequence and cannot skip ahead. Bundles, by comparison, give access to a collection of courses without enforcing any particular order — useful when learners can self-direct their path.

Keeping your brand in the experience

Learners notice when training looks generic. For enterprise training programs in particular, a branded experience signals that the program was built intentionally. It reads as deliberate, not assembled from whatever tool was available.

Teachable supports custom domains, branded color schemes, and white-label configuration so the environment stays consistent with your organization's visual identity. Design templates give you a starting point. Custom code access opens full control for teams with specific requirements.

Multi-language support extends this to global teams. You can set the learner interface to a specific language, and video subtitles can be translated to match. This also covers accessibility: subtitles help learners who process written material more easily than spoken audio.

Certificates at the end of a course can carry your brand. Learners can share them directly to LinkedIn, which creates organic visibility for your program without any additional promotion effort. For more on how certificates work, see the Teachable certificates support article.

Managing multiple organizations or client groups

For L&D professionals working across business units, or trainers delivering to multiple client organizations, having all learners in a single undifferentiated list creates real management problems.

Teachable's Organizations feature (currently in beta) creates separate containers for each group. Each organization can be assigned specific courses and a defined access window: a seasonal cohort gets 30 days, a specific team sees only the courses built for their function. An organization admin inside the client company can manage enrollment directly, so you are not routing every access request through your own account.

Reports are scoped per organization. You can see who logged in, which lessons were completed, quiz scores, and open-response answers. A leaderboard view shows relative engagement across the group at a glance.

For organizations selling training to other businesses, the B2B online training guide covers how to structure these programs for external clients.

Pricing and payments

Plans start at $29 per month. Course compliance features are available on higher-tier plans, so reviewing the full feature comparison at teachable.com/pricing before selecting a plan is the clearest way to match your needs to the right tier.

teachable:pay handles payment processing and tax management for sellers. It supports more than 30 payment methods through a Stripe partnership. Withdrawal schedules run daily, weekly, or monthly depending on your preference.

One-time purchases, installment plans, and limited-enrollment pricing are all available when setting up a product. Enrollment limits can be set by the number of students or by a specific date window.

See Teachable pricing plans.

See how Teachable works for your team

Teachable gives training teams the tools to build structured courses, track completion, and produce real data on whether learning is happening. See how it works for business training.

Open any feed right now and you'll find a thousand people explaining AI. Most of them are explaining the same five tips. Very few are showing you what it looks like to actually use these tools to run a business.

That's the gap we built Teachable AI Academy to close.

It's a live workshop series. We bring in creators and experts who use AI every day, and we put them in front of you to teach the exact systems and workflows behind their work. The first sessions kicks off on June 15, 2026, and the full lineup carries into August 2026.

Every session is free to attend. Each one is hosted live, and we record all of them, so the replay is waiting on Teachable whenever you want it.

What is the Teachable AI Academy?

AI Academy is a run of live, online workshops. More than 20 AI creators and experts are on the schedule, and each one picks a topic straight from their own work.

They teach it live, in real time, and they leave room for your questions at the end.

The people teaching have built audiences in the millions and run real businesses with these tools. So the advice you get is grounded in what they actually do day to day.

We host every session, and we keep the replay up afterward. That means the library grows every week as new workshops go live.

Why did we build the Teachable AI Academy?

Here's how we see this moment. AI made information instant, and that made the hunger for real skill sharper than it has ever been.

People want to build things. They want to change careers and pick up abilities that have nothing to do with what they trained in. We call this the Learning Renaissance, and we think it's the most exciting thing happening in education right now.

The hard part is knowing where to start. When everyone is posting at once, it's tough to know whose advice you can trust.

AI Academy is our answer. We put practitioners you can trust on a set schedule, each teaching one concrete thing you can use.

This is showing up in the data, too. In its 2025 Workplace Learning Report, LinkedIn found that 71% of learning and development professionals are already exploring, experimenting with, or integrating AI into their work.

That number is worth sitting with for a second. The people whose entire job is teaching skills are moving on AI right now, and AI Academy is built for everyone trying to keep pace with them.

Once you learn something in a session, you can put it to work inside Teachable. Our own AI features sit right in the platform, so the courses and content you build benefit from the same tools.

The June 2026 Teachable AI Academy lineup

The first wave of workshops runs through June, and each session below is open for registration now.

Charlie Hills, June 15 at 1:00pm EST. The AI-powered content system for personal branding. Charlie Hills grew from zero to more than 200,000 LinkedIn followers using a repeatable, AI-assisted content system. He breaks down the tools and workflows he uses to generate ideas, speed up production, and turn attention into business, all while keeping his own voice in the output. If you want background reading first, Teachable has a guide on how to build a personal brand.

Katia Smith, June 17 at 1:00pm EST. Filling the AI gaps: from prototype to product launch. Katia Smith is a former Microsoft engineer and the founder of Second Life Software, where she turns rough, AI-built prototypes into products ready for real users. She walks through the five gaps AI coding tools tend to leave open, including security, error handling, and what a user sees when something fails, using real before-and-after examples from her agency work.

Sandra, June 22 at 1:00pm EST. Ship AI-built apps without shipping risk. Sandra is a cybersecurity educator with a following of more than 550,000 security and IT professionals. She shares the flaws that ride along with fast, AI-built apps, from exposed API keys to weak authentication, and gives you a seven-point checklist you can run on anything you build before it goes live.

Anna York, June 24 at 1:00pm EST. How to become the source AI recommends. Anna York is an AI Visibility Architect and the founder of Citation School, recognized as a LinkedIn Top 12 AI Voice in Europe. She studies how tools like ChatGPT and Perplexity decide what to recommend, and she walks through her keyword research process for AI search, showing how to turn one question into a full content plan.

Mariana Antaya, June 29, 2026 at 1:00pm EST. Your first machine learning model. In 40 minutes.. Mariana is a former AI Product Manager at Microsoft who now ships her own machine learning models and teaches a community of more than 700,000 people. In 40 minutes she takes raw, messy e-commerce data and builds a model that answers a real business question: will this customer buy again in the next 90 days. You'll walk away with the working model, the code behind it, and a process you can reuse on any dataset.

More sessions coming through the summer

June 2026 is only the opening stretch. New workshops drop every week through August 2026.

Names already on the schedule include Mariana Antaya, Sai Kumar, Sundas Khalid, Sadie St. Lawrence, Anjali Viramgama, Ale Thomas, Tina Huang, and Matt Wolfe.

The topics run wide: building your first machine learning model, learning data analytics with AI, building AI agents for everyday work, and using AI with more intention. We add new dates to the AI Academy page as each session locks, so it pays to check back.

One more thing worth knowing. A lot of the people teaching also sell what they know on Teachable, and any creator can do the same. Courses, coaching, memberships, and digital downloads all run on one platform, with payments handled through teachable:pay.

How to join

Registration is open for every session on the AI Academy page.

Pick the workshops that fit what you're building, save your seat, and add them to your calendar. If a date passes before you get to it, the replay will be waiting for you on Teachable.

Head to the AI Academy page to see the full schedule and register for the sessions you want.

Amie Tollefsrud calls herself a lazy person. She has generated over $11 million on Teachable saying so.

"I am a self-proclaimed, very lazy person." – Amie Tollefsrud, Founder of Rebelle Nutrition and Lazy Millionaire

Most creators treat that word as the enemy. Amie treats it as the whole strategy.

She runs an eight-figure course business from her bed or a beach club lounger, and she got there by doing less of the wrong work, not more of it. The lazy move, in her hands, keeps turning out to be the smart one.

Amie's Teachable story at a glance

The turning point: From nanny gigs to a scalable business

Before the eight figures, Amie worked a nannying job and felt certain it was not going to be her life. She trained as a nutritionist, started seeing clients one-on-one, and hit the ceiling every service provider eventually hits. 

There are only so many hours in a day, and trading them for money never scales.

So she did the lazy thing, which also happened to be the smart thing. Amie took the advice she repeated to clients over and over and built it into an online course that could reach all of them at once.

"That's when I created my first online nutrition course to try and reach and help more people all at once. A little less effort from there." – Amie Tollefsrud, Founder of Rebelle Nutrition and Lazy Millionaire

She built that first course from a tiny hut in Maui, carrying five figures of debt and using an outdoor toilet. Amie had no business degree, no investors, and by her own account no tech skills. The slick tools creators reach for today did not exist for her, so she sold it without them. Then she ran her first launch.

"One of my first course launches ever, I think I had made like $5,000 in the span of an hour. And I just remember, like, jumping up and down. [It] was the most money I'd ever made at once in my entire life." – Amie Tollefsrud, Founder of Rebelle Nutrition and Lazy Millionaire

The nutrition courses worked, and as they kept working, her audience started asking her about something other than nutrition.

"All anybody ever wanted to ask me was, like, how I ran [and] how I built [my] business online, because it allowed me to travel the world and really do all the things that I dreamed about growing up." – Amie Tollefsrud, Founder of Rebelle Nutrition and Lazy Millionaire

That repeated question was its own market research. Her audience told her what they wanted before she ever built it, the exact validation signal she now teaches her students to watch for.

So she followed it. The nutritionist became the course-creation expert.

That pivot grew into Rebelle Nutrition's eight-figure education business: Online Course Academy, Passive Income Academy, and the program that ties them together, the Lazy Millionaire Method, which has helped more than 4,000 students across niches build profitable courses of their own. 

Amie has been on Teachable since close to the platform's earliest days, running the same play on repeat for the better part of a decade: take lived experience, turn it into a course, sell the shift it creates, and let it run.

The throughline from that first nutrition course to the business today comes down to a handful of principles Amie applies every single time. Here are the ones doing the heaviest lifting.

Amie's strategies for building an 8-figure course business

Strategy 1: Sell the shift your student is buying

The biggest mistake Amie sees in first-time creators is selling the wrong thing. They list their modules, their PDFs, their hours of video, then wonder why nobody buys.

"When somebody buys a course, they're not just buying the number of lessons or modules or PDFs. They're buying a shift, a shift in how they feel, how they think, what they can do, or what their life is going to look like after the course is finished." – Amie Tollefsrud, Founder of Rebelle Nutrition and Lazy Millionaire

Amie points to her own dentist as the perfect salesperson.

Curious about Invisalign, she expected a pitch about process and timeline. Instead he showed her a photo of her teeth that day, next to a mockup of her teeth a year later. He simply sold her the result she actually wanted.

"Immediately, I was like, 'Take my money. I want that.'" – Amie Tollefsrud, Founder of Rebelle Nutrition and Lazy Millionaire

Amie has her students build what she calls a before-and-after blueprint. They write the student's exact frustration today in the student's own words, then the specific, tangible result waiting on the other side.

The result has to be concrete, never a fuzzy phrase like "feel empowered." It should be something a person could physically point to, like "I don't even need to wear foundation anymore because my skin is so clear," or "I got my 5K down by five minutes." The course becomes the bridge between those two points.

Take action

• Write the shift in one sentence: "This course takes you from ______ to ______." Say it aloud to someone outside your industry. Hesitation on their end means it needs sharpening.
• Replace every fuzzy outcome like "clarity" or "confidence" with something the buyer could point to in real life.

Strategy 2: Get specific enough to stop the scroll

Selling a shift only works when it gets specific enough that the right person cannot scroll past it.

"Vague doesn't sell. Specific sells. Specific is what makes people stop scrolling. Specific is what makes people pull out their wallets and buy." – Amie Tollefsrud, Founder of Rebelle Nutrition and Lazy Millionaire

Her litmus test sits in the gap between "Learn how to eat clean" and "A step-by-step guide to clear your hormonal acne in 30 days."

Identical expertise sits underneath both titles. The second one aims at one specific person with a real promise, and that version is the one that sells. Broad offers leave buyers quietly wondering whether the thing is really for them, and uncertainty kills the sale.

"When somebody is not sure, they do not buy. But when your offer is specific, it builds instant trust. It shows people that you know exactly what they're going through and exactly how to help them." – Amie Tollefsrud, Founder of Rebelle Nutrition and Lazy Millionaire

Amie pushes for a timeframe wherever it stays honest, such as "in 30 days" or "in 90 days," because a clear timeline makes the result feel achievable. She also insists on the buyer's actual language over insider jargon.

Take action

• Rewrite your title to name a clear outcome, and add a realistic timeframe when you can stand behind it.
• Read your title for jargon. Any word your ideal student would never say out loud in conversation has to go.

Strategy 3: Validate before you build a single lesson

Amie is blunt about why so many capable creators, even ones with big audiences, launch into silence. They guessed.

"You wouldn't want to open a French bakery without knowing if anyone in town likes croissants, right? So same thing here. Let's make sure you're baking what people are actually hungry for." – Amie Tollefsrud, Founder of Rebelle Nutrition and Lazy Millionaire

Her method skips surveys and spreadsheets.

Amie has creators hold three to five real conversations with people who feel like ideal students, through DMs, email, or a quick call. 

The questions stay simple: their biggest frustration with the topic, what they have already tried and why it fell short, and whether a step-by-step course to the result would actually help. Then she listens for the line between polite interest and real urgency.

"We're not looking for perfection, we're just looking for proof. Proof that your idea has legs, and proof that people are already searching for this solution." – Amie Tollefsrud, Founder of Rebelle Nutrition and Lazy Millionaire

She also reframes the whole exercise so it never feels like begging for approval.

"Validation is not about asking for permission. You are the expert. You have the vision. This is just about making sure that your offer meets people where they are before you invest the time turning it into something amazing." – Amie Tollefsrud, Founder of Rebelle Nutrition and Lazy Millionaire

Take action

• Before building anything, run three to five conversations with ideal students and capture their exact words. Those words become your sales page copy.
• Track urgency over politeness. "That sounds interesting" carries far less signal than "when can I buy this."

Strategy 4: Launch imperfect, then get 1% better forever

For all the strategy, Amie credits one unglamorous habit above the rest. She ships before it is ready.

"That's also, I think, exactly why I have been successful, because I take action and I launch things actually before they're perfect." – Amie Tollefsrud, Founder of Rebelle Nutrition and Lazy Millionaire

Her first launch, by her own description, was scrappy and far from what she wanted. It still made $5,000 in an hour.

The creators who never break through are usually the ones tweaking and refining until the moment to launch quietly slips past.

"Launch quickly and fast and let it be imperfect. And also just always go back and iterate, like, there's always something you can make better, and then you can get, like, 1% better every time. And it really, over time, does make a difference." – Amie Tollefsrud, Founder of Rebelle Nutrition and Lazy Millionaire

That iteration habit also keeps students coming back. Asked what most reliably turns a one-time buyer into a repeat customer, Amie answered without hesitating.

"The results that they get the first time around. So if they feel like you went above and beyond the thing that they thought they were going to get, they're definitely going to come back in for a second time." – Amie Tollefsrud, Founder of Rebelle Nutrition and Lazy Millionaire

Take action

• Set a launch date before the course feels finished, and treat version one as a starting point instead of a final product.
• Build your first module to deliver a real, fast win. Early results earn you the student's next purchase.

Strategy 5: Build a passive funnel, then get more from every buyer

Amie's revenue does not come from chasing new customers all day. It runs on a system that works without her and pulls more value from every person who already decided to buy.

The top of her funnel is her audience on Instagram, TikTok, and now Substack. From there she offers something free and valuable, a fully automated hour-long masterclass, and sells her program at the end of that training.

Automated email sequences of five to seven messages follow up over the next week with anyone who did not buy right away, paired with a real reason to act now.

The lazy genius shows up in what she layers on top: order bumps and post-purchase upsells.

"Think about, like, when you're at the grocery store and there's all the candy right before you checkout, the people are buying things anyway. So at the last minute, it's a really good time to upsell them on similar items that they might also want." – Amie Tollefsrud, Founder of Rebelle Nutrition and Lazy Millionaire

Someone who just decided to spend money will spend a little more, so one buyer becomes worth far more without any extra traffic.

"It's just a really easy and lazy way, honestly, to generate more revenue with the same amount of effort. You [don't] have to be continuously, like, chasing down [a new] client. You can just make more off of the one-time purchase." – Amie Tollefsrud, Founder of Rebelle Nutrition and Lazy Millionaire

Take action

• Replace one-off launches with an evergreen funnel: free value such as a masterclass leading to your paid offer, backed by an automated email sequence.
• Add an order bump or post-purchase upsell at checkout. The buyer already said yes, which makes it the easiest revenue you will add all year.

Why Amie bets on being human in the age of AI

The obvious objection to any course in 2026 sounds simple. Plenty of people ask why they would pay for a course when AI hands over information free.

Amie does not dodge that objection. She agrees that good free information exists everywhere, then explains why it falls short of the real thing.

"[AI] can give you a lot of valuable information, but [it hasn't] actually done the thing in real life and achieved the results that you're looking for. Like a human can." – Amie Tollefsrud, Founder of Rebelle Nutrition and Lazy Millionaire

Her edge comes from having lived the outcome she teaches, start to finish.

"I actually have achieved the results that I'm teaching in real life. I'm somebody who literally started from zero. I didn't have any money to invest. I didn't even have tech skills... I went through years of, like, struggle and figuring it out and trying things that didn't work and failing. And that was years of experience in real life." – Amie Tollefsrud, Founder of Rebelle Nutrition and Lazy Millionaire

She sees the same change defining the whole industry. The creators who win next will skip the losing game of competing with a chatbot on facts.

"The next wave of successful course creators will be the ones who are thinking really innovatively about what they can offer and sell that is... offering people more than what they can just go to [AI] and find an answer to." – Amie Tollefsrud, Founder of Rebelle Nutrition and Lazy Millionaire

In practice, that means pairing the digital course with something only a person can give: community, group support, an occasional live touchpoint, whatever fits the creator's energy and style.

This reframe helps any creator worried that AI made their knowledge worthless. Amie's bet runs the other direction. The more information becomes free and instant, the more valuable a real guide who has walked the path becomes.

"People don't want a robot or a guru or a PhD professor. They want a real person who's relatable and a few steps ahead of them." – Amie Tollefsrud, Founder of Rebelle Nutrition and Lazy Millionaire

Looking ahead

These days, Amie is most excited about Substack, which she started in the past year.

It has become both a fresh revenue stream and a surprisingly strong top of funnel. Readers who find her there often go on to buy her courses, sometimes converting better than social media. Her approach to it stays pure Amie: every post gets treated like a tiny product.

"I look at every article I write almost like a 12-minute course." – Amie Tollefsrud, Founder of Rebelle Nutrition and Lazy Millionaire

For someone who has done eight figures, she stays remarkably clear that the path was never about being special.

"To be honest, I always imagined that this would be my life... I just had no clue, like, how [I was] actually going to do that." – Amie Tollefsrud, Founder of Rebelle Nutrition and Lazy Millionaire

The advice she would give the version of herself still working that nannying job is the same advice underneath everything she teaches today.

"Keep going. Let the things that you are excited about drive you. If you feel this excited about something, you're probably onto something. Keep going. Keep doing it, because it's just going to lead you to [the life] that you've always dreamed of." – Amie Tollefsrud, Founder of Rebelle Nutrition and Lazy Millionaire

What to do next

Get Amie's free playbook: Grab The Profitable Course Playbook on Teachable, where Amie walks through how to find the right course idea, validate it, and build something people actually pay for.

Watch the full interview: See Amie tell her complete story on YouTube.

Explore more from Amie: YouTube | Instagram | Teachable School | Website 

Explore more creator stories: Read how other educators are winning on Teachable in our Success Stories collection.

Try Teachable yourself: Amie turned a scrappy first launch into an eight-figure business by selling the shift her students want, validating before building, and refusing to wait for perfect. Start your free Teachable trial and build the course your audience already keeps asking you for.

Kelly McKenna's grandmother was a therapist. Kelly always assumed she would be one too.

She earned a Master of Social Work and an MBA from Florida State University, then spent eight years running programs at a nonprofit, managing over $10 million in federal funding and overseeing housing services for veterans and LGBTQ youth. She was good at the work. She was also exhausted by it.

When she began seeing private therapy clients on the side, she did what she had always done: she worked in the open. She shared candidly about her own anxiety. She celebrated on Instagram when she left insurance panels, filled her caseload, and quit her full-time job.

The account grew because people across the country recognized something in her posts they had never quite seen before: a therapist being a real human. 

By the end of her first full year in private practice, Kelly had earned $250,000. Within four years, her revenue across practice and digital products had crossed $1 million annually.

"Creating a private-pay practice didn't just transform my income, it transformed my life. I became a better therapist, a more present wife and mother, and built a business aligned with the life I actually wanted to live." — Kelly McKenna, LCSW, MBA, Founder of Business of Therapy

Kelly's Teachable story at a glance

From one-on-one to a course that reached 1,000 therapists

When Kelly's Instagram audience started growing, so did the demand for her time. She filled her caseload, and quickly other therapists started asking her for help. 

Therapists booked coaching calls. They asked how she found clients, how she left insurance, how she thought about pricing. She answered the same questions over and over: how to write a bio, how to structure content, how to set up a scheduling system.

She was managing a full therapy caseload at the same time. The math on one-on-one coaching made no sense as a long-term model. The calls were useful, but there was a ceiling baked into the format.

"There was a clear moment when I realized something had to change. I was receiving more inquiries and coaching requests than I could realistically handle alongside my full therapy caseload. It became obvious that continuing to grow demand without changing my delivery model would lead to burnout." — Kelly McKenna, LCSW, MBA, Founder of Business of Therapy

‍

She had already built her first digital product: an anxiety course that mirrored the work she did in session, structured as psychoeducation followed by ten coping strategies with video lessons and downloadable handouts. 

The signal that a course for therapists made sense: therapists kept DMing her asking her for help and booking 1-1 calls. The market had been asking for something before she had built it.

She moved the coaching content into a structured course, kept her therapy clients, and launched what would become the Private Practice Academy Bundle. Teachable was the platform she chose after testing several options. The interface was clean, the pricing was accessible, and the setup was direct enough that she could focus on the curriculum rather than the tech.

"I was drawn to Teachable's strong reputation, clean interface, ease of use, and low prices. After testing the free trial and experiencing how intuitive the setup was, it felt like the right platform to confidently build and scale my digital products." — Kelly McKenna, LCSW, MBA, Founder of Business of Therapy

Kelly's strategies for building a therapy education business

Kelly did not separate her identity as a therapist from her identity as a business owner. The clinical training she had spent years developing turned out to be directly relevant to every part of her marketing work. Her approach to building the business reflected that.

Strategy 1: Build your audience around radical transparency, not polished expertise

Kelly's Instagram accounts grew because she said things other therapists in her position were not saying. She talked about her rates. She talked about leaving insurance panels. She documented the process of building a caseload in real time, including the parts that were uncertain.

This was not a calculated content strategy at the start. It was how she naturally worked. Clinical training taught Kelly about rapport and authenticity. Kelly brought that same instinct to her posts.

"As I built my own business publicly, I shared the real-time process including the wins, the pivots, the fear, and that transparency became a core value of my brand." — Kelly McKenna, LCSW, MBA, Founder of Business of Therapy

The result was that both therapy seekers and therapists who found her account recognized themselves in what she was describing. Kelly eventually started a second Instagram page @businessoftherapy. The posts about money and burnout and how to price sessions landed because they named things the profession tends to avoid naming publicly. Her @businessoftherapy account grew from zero to over 50,000 followers since December 2022. And her therapy-focused account @sitwithkelly has grown to nearly 100,000.

Take action

• Post about the process, not just the outcome. If you're building something, share where you are in it, including the parts that feel unresolved. Audiences build around people they trust to be honest, and trust comes from specificity, not polish.
• Identify the things your industry tends to avoid talking about publicly and write about those directly. Those posts tend to perform best because they fill a gap the audience already knows exists.

Strategy 2: Treat marketing as a clinical skill therapists already have

One of the clearest ideas in Kelly's teaching is that therapists already know how to market themselves. They have just never been told to think of it that way.

"Marketing, at its core, is reflective listening — understanding someone's pain, naming it clearly, and mirroring that back to them. That's exactly what therapists do every single day. When therapists learn how to translate their clinical skills into client-centered messaging, marketing stops feeling salesy and starts feeling aligned." — Kelly McKenna, LCSW, MBA, Founder of Business of Therapy

This reframe is the engine behind everything she teaches. Therapists arrive at her course convinced they have no marketing ability. They leave understanding that the skill they have been practicing in session for years, hearing what someone says, reflecting it back clearly, identifying the underlying need, is exactly the skill that makes marketing work.

The practical effect is that her students do not have to become different people to grow their practices. They apply what they already know in a different context. For many of them, that shift alone changes their relationship to the whole idea of putting themselves out there.

Take action

• Before writing any marketing copy, write down the specific problem your ideal client is experiencing in their own words. Then write a post that names that problem exactly as they would name it, before offering anything. That mirroring is what creates the recognition that drives inquiries.
• Review your last five pieces of content and ask whether they reflect what clients are feeling or what you think they should know. The former performs; the latter educates without converting.

Strategy 3: Price the product to reflect what a caseload change is actually worth

Kelly's first digital product, the anxiety course, was priced as a low-ticket entry point. The Private Practice Academy Bundle went in the opposite direction.

The original presale price was $447. Then $597. When she rebuilt and rebranded the course and added substantial new content, the price moved to $1,397. She runs regular launch pricing at $997, which is still a meaningful investment for most buyers.

"I firmly believe therapists are naturally some of the best marketers but they just don't realize it. Every therapist deserves to make six figures." — Kelly McKenna, LCSW, MBA, Founder of Business of Therapy

The pricing reflects the outcome on offer. A therapist who fills her caseload with private-pay clients at $250 per session and sees 15 clients a week earns over $190,000 a year. A course priced at $997 that delivers that result is not expensive relative to the change it produces. Kelly's students grasp that math, and the student messages in her submitted materials show the results: first condos purchased, debt paid off, babies born without financial anxiety.

She has also been direct about one misunderstanding she pushes back on consistently: the idea that digital products are passive income. The Private Practice Academy Bundle has gone through two major curriculum overhauls and quarterly updates since launch. The 1,000 students it has served received a living product, not a recording that sat untouched.

"The most profitable digital products are the ones that actually get people results. And that requires work. You should constantly be evolving your digital products as you learn more and get feedback from customers. Not necessarily to add more material, but to simplify and speed up what folks need to do to get the desired result." — Kelly McKenna, LCSW, MBA, Founder of Business of Therapy

Take action

• Price your course against the value of the outcome, not the hours of content inside it. A 4-module course that reliably produces a specific financial result is worth more than a 20-module course that covers everything without a clear transformation.
• Schedule a curriculum review every quarter. The goal is not to add more material. The goal is to remove anything that slows a student down before they reach their first result.

Strategy 4: Add a subscription product to sit alongside the flagship course

The Private Practice Academy Bundle is a one-time purchase. The Reels Membership is a recurring subscription that gives therapists a steady stream of content ideas and templates for Instagram.

Kelly launched the membership in January 2021, generating over $413,000 with around 800 active members at any given time. The two products serve different needs without competing with each other. The course teaches the full system. The membership handles the ongoing execution problem that most therapists hit after they understand the strategy but struggle to maintain consistency.

"I'm constantly evolving the PPA Bundle. I see the course as a living resource that adapts alongside the therapists it serves." — Kelly McKenna, LCSW, MBA, Founder of Business of Therapy

Kelly’s ran two 4-day flash sales so far this year. The February 2026 PPA flash added 34 new therapists while the April 2026 Reels Membership flash sale added 51 new members. Running both products creates a flywheel: students who find the course often convert to the membership for ongoing support, and membership subscribers who want the full picture often upgrade to the course.

Take action

• Identify the recurring execution problem your students face after completing your main course, then build a subscription product around solving that specific problem. The subscription should not duplicate the course. It should handle what students need to do every week after they have learned the core material.
• On Teachable, you can run both a one-time course and a subscription membership under the same school. Map out the student journey: which product do they buy first, and what do they need next?

‍How Kelly thinks about scaling without losing the clinical foundation

Kelly holds two credentials that rarely appear together: a clinical social work license and an MBA. For most of her career, those two things lived in separate worlds. The clinical work was about presence and relationship. The business degree was about strategy and systems. Building her practice and then her education business forced her to understand that the division was artificial.

The same skills that make a therapist effective in session, hearing what is actually being said, identifying the real need underneath the presenting problem, creating a feeling of safety, are the skills that make marketing work. She did not just teach this as a concept. She built her own business by treating her Instagram audience the way she would treat a client: with honest attention to what they were actually struggling with.

"My background as a therapist has deeply shaped my teaching style. In clinical work, authenticity and relational safety are everything. People grow when they feel seen, not talked down to. I bring that same philosophy into my content and teachings." — Kelly McKenna, LCSW, MBA, Founder of Business of Therapy

She is also careful about what she promises. Students who move through the course quickly and implement consistently see results within weeks. Students who delay implementation see results that match their pace. She does not dress this up:

"The timeline depends less on the material itself and more on how quickly someone takes action. Those who implement consistently tend to see momentum build quickly." — Kelly McKenna, LCSW, MBA, Founder of Business of Therapy

What students take away

The student messages Kelly shared in her case study application are not about follower counts or viral posts. They are about what financial stability makes possible.

One student wrote: "Since starting my own private practice and having some private pay clients I have been able to buy my first condo and get myself out of credit card debt."

Another shared this: "PPA is the best business investment I've made. It has seriously changed my life and business. I've already doubled my income while remaining part-time so I can spend time with my kids."

A third described finishing her first year in practice: "I used to talk to friends about feeling afraid that as a therapist I'd never be able to afford to pay my student loans and have a baby. I've now had my first baby and was able to do all the home prep and prenatal yoga without being budget-anxious. Kelly's reels membership, PPA, and VIP have been crucial to navigating both the logistics and mindset pieces to make this possible for my first year in business."

"The feedback that has meant the most to me isn't about follower growth or even revenue, it's about how therapists have been able to change their lives. When a therapist tells me they've bought their first home, paid off debt, doubled their income while working part-time, or finally felt financially secure enough to start a family, that's what stays with me." — Kelly McKenna, LCSW, MBA, Founder of Business of Therapy

Looking ahead

Kelly lives in Miami with her husband Tom, their son Aidan, and their dog Jozi. 

The Business of Therapy podcast launched in 2024 and added another channel for reaching therapists who prefer audio and longer-form content. She continues updating the Private Practice Academy Bundle on a quarterly basis at minimum, with major curriculum overhauls when the material needs it. The course is now on its second significant rebuild since the original launch.

Her stated goal is direct: every therapist deserves to make six figures. The financial sustainability she describes is not aspirational framing. It is the specific outcome she has built her entire curriculum to produce, starting from her own first year in private practice when she earned $250,000 without having built anything like this before.

What to do next

Explore Kelly's work:

Visit businessoftherapy.com to access the Private Practice Academy Bundle, the Reels Membership, and Kelly's free training on marketing a therapy practice on Instagram.

Connect with Kelly:

• Instagram: @businessoftherapy
• Instagram: @sitwithkelly
• Podcast: Business of Therapy
• businessoftherapy.com

Try Teachable yourself:

Kelly moved from one-on-one coaching calls to a course that has served over 1,000 therapists. Start your Teachable trial and build the product your audience has been asking for.