I bought a $400 online course on 'passive income' that was just a guy reading slides.

Looking back, I wish I'd just apologized to my savings account for that waste and moved on, but I guess the real apology letter is this post to warn anyone else about those shiny promises.

4 comments

4 Comments

ray3562mo ago

Honestly, what did you expect for that price? A full course with slides is still more structured than most free info out there. Sometimes you're just paying for someone to organize the basics for you.

sandraf982mo ago

Reminds me of when my friend paid for a fancy meal prep guide last year. She got all excited about the PDFs and shopping lists. Turns out it was just basic recipes you could find anywhere, just put in a nice order. She was mostly paying for the layout and not having to search through a million blogs. Sometimes the structure really is the whole product.

the_wesley2mo ago

My sister paid $80 for a digital cookbook last month that was just repackaged Pinterest recipes. Ray356 has a point about paying for structure, but sometimes the price doesn't match the work put in. If you're selling a basic guide for a high price, you should at least add some original tips or templates. Otherwise it feels like you're just selling a fancy table of contents for info everyone already has.

the_harper1mo ago

Do you think your sister would have felt better about the $80 if the cookbook had a bunch of original recipe twists or video walkthroughs, or is it more about the fact that she could find the same info for free with just a little effort? Like, I get that structure and packaging have value, but when the content is literally just a retype of something you can get on a blog in 5 minutes, it starts to feel like a scam, you know? My buddy bought a $50 "productivity system" once and it was basically bullet journal layouts and a list of apps, nothing new at all lol. I think the line is when you're charging a premium for stuff that's not even curated or improved, just copied and pasted in a nicer font.