Why I Changed My Mind About Tiny Courses

For the past few years, I’ve heard business coaches claim that people aren’t buying online courses anymore, particularly self‑study ones. That in the age of AI, information is not valuable, and unless you’re holding people’s hands through implementation, courses simply won’t sell.

I listened to the reasoning. followed the advice and made big changes to my business model. And then, based on lived experience rather than hearsay, I changed it all back.

In this article I’m taking you on that journey and what I learnt along the way that made me change my mind about selling online courses

Table of Contents

The Covid Era Course Boom

In November 2020, a month after renting a home on the Greek island of Evia, the second pandemic lockdown came into full force. In Greece, that meant everything was closed apart from supermarkets and chemists for over six months.

During that time, the online world started to feel like a warzone. Lockdowns, masks, vaccines. The polarisation was intense. I found myself spending far too many hours down rabbit holes. Astrology forecasts. Spiritual predictions. Trying to make sense of where everything was headed.

Then, after a particularly disturbing and irresponsible broadcast from someone I respected, I knew it was time to step back. I left the Facebook groups, stopped watching YouTube videos, and avoided the news, all in an effort to protect my nervous system and my peace.

What I did instead was channel my energy into developing some of my former live workshops into small, digestible self‑study courses.

I didn’t realise it at the time, but I was entering the online course market at its absolute peak. People were stuck at home and, like me, were looking for something useful to do with their time.

Six months later, I was earning around $1,800 per month in course sales, largely driven by people discovering my blog articles. By the end of 2021, that number had grown to $10,000 per month.

Something that boosted my course sales a lot is that during this period I decided to change my email list strategy from “anyone can join” to one where only clients and students could subscribe. That meant people could not passively subscribe, and instead they bought one of my tiny courses..

The Big Course Slowdown

Throughout 2022, my courses continued to sell consistently. Then, as life returned to normal in 2023, sales did begin to slow.

At first, I assumed that this was only happening to me. But soon, I started hearing others speak about the same trend. People weren’t buying courses the way they had during the Covid years.

Around the same time I noticed a number of business coaches saying some version of “In the age of AI, people aren’t buying information anymore. They’re buying implementation.”

On the surface, this made sense. If people could ask ChatGPT anything, why would they buy a course?

So, are we competing with AI?

It’s a fair question. If someone can type a prompt into ChatGPT and get a step‑by‑step answer, why would they buy a course?

But what I’ve found is that people aren’t just looking for steps. They’re looking for a way of thinking. A perspective they can trust. A way of approaching something that feels clear and grounded.

AI can give you information. It can even give you structure. But it can’t replace the experience of learning from someone whose work you resonate with, whose approach makes sense to you, and whose thinking you want to apply in your own way.

So, in the spirit of experimentation, I closed enrolment to most of my tiny courses and merged two of them into a live program. It was gamified, included calls, and was designed to encourage accountability, completion, and implementation.

The program sold very well, student engagement was high. But by the end of it, I was exhausted.

Then, after analysing student results, I noticed that they were no better than when I had offered the same material as a self‑study course.

In fact historically, many of my students not only completed my courses, they also obtained the outcome they were seeking — without needing live calls, accountability structures, or ongoing support.

The Emails That Made Me Pivot Back

In the months that followed this ‘live experience’ experiment, I started receiving emails from my audience asking when my self‑study courses would be available again.

These people were not after live calls, community spaces or cheering on. They simply wanted to get on with it without all the extras. They didn’t want to slow down to accommodate group pacing. They trusted themselves to engage with the material in their own way, in their own time.

That feedback just reinforced what I’d been noticing and was the prompt I needed to start winding back the changes I’d made.

Slowly I started reintroducing my tiny courses in their original self‑study format. This time with a some human element that supported implementation without requiring me to be constantly present

And this ‘human element’ also positioned my courses as a service rather than a digital product, which is important because as a seller of digital products I would be required to collect and remit sales tax internationally. This is a topic I cover in more depth inside Create a Tiny Course.

As a result of these changes, my tiny courses started selling again without ongoing effort on my part. That’s because people discovered my courses at the moment they were seeking the outcome my courses offered through my Quiet Marketing ecosystem.

Are People Really Not Buying Courses Anymore?

Not only are my tiny courses still selling, but I continue to buy online courses from others myself. In fact, throughout 2025, I averaged roughly one course purchase per month, and many of them have played a meaningful role in my work and personal life.

What I feel has changed is not people’s willingness to learn through courses, what’s changed is tolerance for noise, pressure, and unnecessary complexity.

Where I am offering support in terms of live calls, learning portal support and feedback on submitted work is with my signature program Build Your Quiet Marketing Ecosystem.

And in 2026 I’m relaunching one of my most popular courses Create a Tiny Course, which came about as a result of people seeing my other tiny courses and wanting to create the same.

So in my world, tiny courses aren’t dead and people are still buying them. They just need to be designed and offered in a way that is sustainable and that clearly communicates outcome they support to your ideal buyer.

Have a question or a takeaway from what I’ve shared here? Let’s chat in the comments ⤵

Danielle Gardner
The Quiet Marketer
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