$13,500 From Her First Online Course (Before Creating It)

Janita O’Hara shares in a 15-minute interview how she earned $13,500 from her first online course, without a big audience and before she’d even created the content 😎

Janita had built a business as a wedding photographer – specializing in small weddings and elopements – but when COVID hit and her bookings dried up she decided to launch an online course.

Her first thought was to create a Photography 101 course, but after doing some market research she figured it would be more profitable to teach people how to set up their own photography business 📸

She called her offering the Pursue Photography Course.

Janita only had 50-75 people on her mailing list initially, and grew it to 150 during the course launch. She also had a following on Instagram, but as of right now she has ~3800 followers and I suspect she had more like ~2000 back in 2020 when she launched.

So a pretty small audience.

Sounds like her course was initially priced at about $800 a pop, and Janita was hoping for 10 sales on the first launch.

Instead she ended up with 17 students and $13,500 in the bank 💰

It was only after making those sales that Janita got busy creating most of the course content. Each week for 12 weeks students would get access to new lessons.

Janita’s schedule during that time looked like this…

• Monday and Tuesday: create the lesson scripts and slides
• Wednesday: create bonus materials
• Thursday: record the lessons
• Friday: upload everything for the students

If you want to launch a course of your own, here are two great lessons you can take from Janita’s story 👇

First, build an audience. It doesn’t have to be a big audience – especially if you can justify a high price tag for your course – but active and engaged followers/subscribers are the people most likely to buy from you. The more of them you have before launch, the better.

Second, definitely consider preselling your course like Janita did.

Imagine if she had created 12 weeks of course materials first – 12 solid weeks of work! – then launched and made only 2 sales 😩

Instead, she took the smart approach of testing the market before creating a complete product. If only 2 people had bought, she could have refunded them and gone back to the drawing board.