Why You Keep Buying Courses
I bought nine courses in fourteen months.
Called it research.
Here’s what was actually happening.
The systems are designed to feel almost right.
Not wrong enough to get a refund. Not right enough to actually work.
Just incomplete enough that the next one seems like the missing piece.
The mechanics of the course-buying loop.
You buy course one.
You go through it. You understand it. You get motivated.
You start implementing.
Two weeks in, you hit a wall.
Something doesn’t work.
You’re not sure why.
Is it you? Is it the method? Is it the timing? You don’t know.
So you keep the course. And you look for what’s missing.
Course two is positioned as the missing piece.
It addresses exactly the problem you just hit.
Of course it does.
The sales page was written by someone who knows where people hit walls.
This is not cynical.
This is product design.
Finding the friction point and offering a solution at exactly that moment is good marketing.
The problem is when the “solution” creates the next friction point. And the next course is positioned to solve that one. And so on.
Fourteen months. Nine courses. Zero products built.
Here’s the lie at the center of the loop.
The gap between “understanding what to do” and “doing it and making money” is not a knowledge problem.
It’s an execution problem.
No course fixes an execution problem.
Executing fixes an execution problem.
Why buying a course feels like progress.
It is progress. Of a kind. You moved money. You received something. You took an action.
The brain registers this as forward motion. It releases the chemicals that reward forward motion.
You feel productive.
You haven’t built anything.
But you feel like you have.
This is the most seductive thing about the course industry. You can feel like you’re building without doing any of the hard parts.
The hard parts.
Making something and offering it to someone who might say no.
Showing up when nobody’s watching yet. Posting into silence.
Writing the thing and not knowing if it’s good enough.
Pricing something and having no idea if anyone will pay it.
None of those feelings are available in a course.
The course simulates progress. The market gives you real data.
How to break the loop.
Not by stopping learning.
By being specific about what you need to learn before you can take the next step.
Before buying anything, ask: what specifically am I missing right now that’s preventing me from moving forward?
If the answer is vague — “I need to understand the whole thing better” — the problem isn’t knowledge.
If the answer is specific — “I don’t know how to set up payment processing” — the problem is knowledge. And it can probably be solved for free.
What I did after course nine.
Built the ugly version. No more courses. No more research.
Just: what’s the most basic version of this that I can put in front of a person?
Made that. Put it in front of people. Got data. Fixed what the data told me to fix.
That was more useful than all nine courses combined.
Not because the courses were bad. Because executing with bad information is more useful than researching with good information.
Want the guide I WISH I had before I started?
How to determine your first product
How to make it with AI
Yeah… Grab it here
