Side Hustles · Products and e-commerce
Building and selling an online course
Packaging something you can teach into recorded lessons sold on a course marketplace or from your own site.
The three figures above are this site's editorial assessment of the work, not a survey and not a forecast. Capital is a band describing what has to be bought before anyone pays you; the time is to a first payment rather than to a profit, and says nothing about its size; the passive score is a 1-to-5 description of what happens to the income if you stop for a month. There is no earnings figure on this page, on purpose — a credible one would need a dated geography, a revenue range and a cost breakdown that no honest public source gives.
Effort: A heavy build phase, then marketing and periodic updates.
What it assumes you can do
How it works
The sequence people who run this actually follow.
- Teach the subject live first, to real people, so you learn where they get stuck.
- Structure it as outcomes rather than topics, and record in short focused lessons.
- Choose between a marketplace (traffic, low prices, no customer relationship) and your own platform (higher prices, you supply all the traffic).
- Update it, because a course about software is out of date within a year.
How you get paid
Per enrolment. Marketplaces pay a share, often a small one on sales they generate, on a monthly cycle. Your own platform pays you the full price less processing, but you buy the audience.
Read the three lists below together rather than separately. The first is what has to exist before a first customer, the second is money that keeps going out whether or not anyone buys, and the third is how this work usually stops paying. A hustle looks cheap when only the first list is read, and looks impossible when only the third is — the useful question is whether the running costs and the failure modes are ones you can live with month after month.
What you need first
- Genuine expertise and evidence of it
- Recording and editing setup
- A hosting platform with student access control
- A refund policy and a support channel
What it costs
- Platform fees or marketplace revenue share
- Production time and equipment
- Advertising if you sell it yourself
- Ongoing updates and student support
What makes it fail
- Marketplace discounting that sets the price for you
- A subject that dates faster than you can re-record
- Building the course before confirming anyone will buy it
- Refunds and chargebacks on an expensive self-hosted course
What follows describes how this kind of work is treated under US federal rules. Money reaches you untaxed and unwithheld, so what a platform pays out is not what you keep: self-employment tax sits on top of income tax, expenses come off before either, and state and city rules sit on top of all of it. It is a description of the rules, not tax advice for your situation.
Turning it into an asset
What would have to be true for this to keep paying without you.
This section is the difference between a job you own and an asset. It is not a growth plan and not a promise that the conversion works — it is the list of things that would have to become true before the income survives you, and each one is a different piece of work from the one described above.
The recording is an asset with a shelf life. Converting means a catalogue rather than a course, instructors other than you, and distribution you own. See /digital-income for how course businesses compare with the other digital income models.
The general version of this is on the section page: systems written down, someone other than you doing the work, revenue that recurs by contract, customers who belong to the business, and books a stranger could believe. Until those exist, this is earned income — see the six-mechanism course for how it differs from the income the rest of this site covers.
Community discussion, not verified earnings
Where people running this talk about it. Anecdotes from self-selected posters are not evidence that anything pays, and nothing here has been verified.
No threads stored. The live Reddit layer is switched off until API credentials are configured, so this section stays empty by design.
Community forums, linked as reading. Posts there are unverified personal accounts, frequently from people selling something, and are not endorsements or evidence of income.
Others in products and e-commerce
Print-on-demand products
Uploading designs to a printer that manufactures and ships a shirt, mug or poster only after a customer buys it.
Read →Selling handmade goods online
Making a physical product — jewellery, ceramics, candles, woodwork, textiles — and selling it through a marketplace or your own storefront.
Read →Online reselling and flipping
Buying underpriced goods — thrift, clearance, auctions, estate sales, marketplace listings — and reselling them where buyers pay more.
Read →Self-publishing books
Writing, publishing and marketing your own books through retail platforms that print or deliver on demand.
Read →Selling digital templates and printables
Spreadsheets, planners, resume templates, notion-style workspaces, design assets and printables — made once, downloaded many times.
Read →Primary sources on tax and licensing
- IRS — Self-employment tax ↗ — What self-employment tax is and who owes it.
- IRS — Estimated taxes ↗ — How quarterly payments work and when they are due.
- IRS — Schedule C (Form 1040) ↗ — The form sole proprietors report profit or loss on.
- IRS — Understanding your Form 1099-K ↗ — Why the platform's figure is gross, and how to reconcile it.
- IRS — About Form 1099-NEC ↗ — Non-employee compensation reporting.
- IRS — Publication 334, Tax Guide for Small Business ↗ — The plain-language guide for sole proprietors.
- IRS — Gig economy tax center ↗ — Platform and app-based work, collected in one place.
- SBA — Apply for licenses and permits ↗ — Federal and state licensing starting points.
- FTC — Disclosures 101 for social media influencers ↗ — What has to be disclosed on sponsored and gifted content.
Where this kind of work is found
A freelance marketplace where clients post project work and contractors propose on it, with contracts, escrow and payment handled on the platform.
The platform takes a percentage of each contract
Visit Upwork ↗A marketplace where freelancers publish fixed-scope services at set prices and buyers order them directly without a bidding round.
Visit Fiverr ↗A peer-to-peer car rental marketplace where vehicle owners list their cars to renters and choose a protection plan that sets their share of the price.
Personal auto policies generally exclude commercial rental use
Visit Turo ↗A short-term rental marketplace for listing a home or spare room, with booking, payment and guest messaging handled on the platform.
Short-term letting is restricted or licensed in many US cities
Visit Airbnb ↗Listed for research. A plain link is not a sponsorship, and nothing here is a recommendation to sign up for anything.
Research and general information only. Nothing here is tax, legal, employment or investment advice, and nothing here is a recommendation to start any particular activity. Licensing, permits, insurance requirements and tax treatment vary by state, city and circumstance, and change. Verify with the relevant authority and with your own advisers before acting.