Business Model Breakdown

I Run 5 Online Businesses — Here's Why Creating & Selling Courses With AI Wins Every Time

I've tried apps, SaaS, clothing brands, and agencies. One model consistently outperforms all of them — and AI has made it easier than ever to start from zero.

By Sander Stage14 min readMarch 2026

I still remember the bus rides to school through Copenhagen as a teenager — watching people in small coffee shops working on their laptops, cup of coffee in hand, no boss in sight. I didn't know what they were doing. I just knew I wanted that life.

Today I run five businesses, almost entirely from a laptop. Some are exciting. Some have cost me money. One has been responsible for over $10 million in net profit and currently generates anywhere from $200K to $600K per month — at roughly three hours of work per day.

That business is selling online courses. And thanks to AI, the barrier to creating and scaling a course has dropped dramatically. In 2026, you can do in a week what used to take months. In this post, I'll show you my full business breakdown — and exactly how to create and sell your first online course using AI.

The Full Picture

My 5 Businesses — The Completely Honest Breakdown

I'm going to show you all five businesses I run, what they earn, and what they cost in time. This contrast is important — because it makes the case for online courses more clearly than any theory ever could.

Two businesses are in the red. One requires a co-founder working full-time to generate $70K/month. And then there's the course business — $200K to $600K per month, three hours a day on average, with profit margins above 80%.

Why the gap? Because an online course is the only business where the product costs almost nothing to deliver at scale. There's no manufacturing, no shipping, no service team, no physical overhead. You create it once and sell it thousands of times. That's what makes it the highest ROI-per-hour model I've ever found — and AI has now made it accessible to anyone.

Why It Wins

Why Online Courses Beat Every Other Online Business Model

The question is never "is there a market for my knowledge?" There are million-dollar courses on wine, jazz, motherhood, and cat care. If you know it, there's a buyer for it.

The AI Advantage

How AI Transforms Online Course Creation in 2026

When I created my first online course six years ago, it took me weeks. I had to plan the curriculum by hand, write every script from scratch, produce all the visuals manually, and figure out the marketing funnel through trial and error. It was a slow, uncertain process.

In 2026, AI changes almost every one of those steps. What used to take months now takes days. Here's specifically what AI does for course creators:

Step by Step

How to Create and Sell Your First Online Course With AI

Here's the streamlined process I'd follow today — with AI integrated at every stage — if I were starting from zero:

Step 1 — Choose Your Topic and Audience

You don't need to be the world's leading expert. You need to be meaningfully ahead of the people you want to teach. A tennis player teaching beginner tennis. A bookkeeper teaching freelancers how to handle their taxes. A photographer teaching smartphone users how to take better photos. The key is specificity: one audience, one problem, one solution. Prompt AI with your topic and ask it to suggest three distinct audience segments you could serve — then pick the one with the clearest pain point.

Step 2 — Pre-Sell Before You Build

Never build first. Sell first. Before recording a single lesson, announce a limited number of early-bird spots at a discounted price. Use AI to write your pre-launch landing page and email sequence in an afternoon. If people pay, you've validated the market. If they don't, you've saved yourself months of wasted production. I sold my first course for $200 per seat to 10 people — $2,000 that confirmed there was real demand before I built a single lesson.

Step 3 — Create the Course With AI Assistance

Aim for 10–15 focused lessons in Version 1. Use AI to generate your outline, then write each lesson script by feeding the AI your key talking points. Record yourself teaching — no fancy equipment required. A decent microphone and screen-recording software are all you need. Students are paying for the transformation, not the production value.

Step 4 — Build a Simple Sales Funnel

Your funnel needs four elements: a strong headline (AI writes this), a 5–10 minute Video Sales Letter (AI writes the script), a clear offer description (AI drafts it), and a checkout page. Use AI to write all the copy, then record the VSSL yourself. A complete, working funnel can go live in less than two hours once your copy is ready.

Step 5 — Drive Traffic With Organic YouTube + AI Content

Post one YouTube video per week targeting the keywords your ideal buyer is searching. Use AI to generate your video outline, script, and SEO description. Each video drives traffic to your funnel. Over time, some videos become slow burners — quietly generating sales month after month without additional effort. I've had single videos generate over $700,000 in course sales. That started with one piece of AI-assisted content and a working funnel.

Step 6 — Scale With Paid Ads When You're Ready

Once your organic funnel is generating consistent revenue (typically at $10K–$20K/month), layer paid ads on top. Your proven organic content becomes your ad creative. AI helps you write ad variations, test headlines, and optimize your targeting. This is when a course business transitions from a side income into a full-scale operation.

The Real Advantage

What No Other Business Model Can Match

I've built a desktop app, a SaaS product, a clothing brand, and multiple other ventures. None of them come close to the economics of a well-run online course business.

The desktop app is currently $50,000 in the red, with a co-founder working 10+ hours a day on it. The clothing brand cost me $30,000 and is paused. The SaaS generates solid monthly recurring revenue — but requires an entire team to maintain and improve. These are all legitimate businesses. But they are far more operationally complex, far less margin-efficient, and far harder to scale without significant capital or headcount.

An online course requires: your knowledge, a camera, a microphone, a simple funnel, and a YouTube channel. With AI, even the hardest parts — the writing, the structuring, the copywriting — are no longer obstacles. The only thing that separates someone reading this from their first $10,000/month course business is execution.

There are seven-figure courses on jazz, fishing, interior design, photography, wine, and cat care. Whatever you know — it can be taught, it can be packaged, and it can be sold. AI just made all of that faster.