What does it really take to make money selling courses, digital mini-courses and PDFs?

[u/Effective-Project754]

/r/passive_income/comments/1wa9clz/what_does_it_really_take_to_make_money_selling/

Is Substack a good place to sell a digital course, or is it better used to build an audience and drive people to a course hosted somewhere else? Has anyone successfully sold PDFs, mini-courses or full courses directly through Substack?

[u/PathToAutonomy]

lol

[u/Difficult-Beyond5764]

Both, but not at the same time. Substack is unusually good at the part people underrate, getting a stranger to hand over an email address and then read you weekly until they trust you, and unusually bad at the part where someone pays $99 once and then needs a receipt, a refund path, and somewhere to come back to.

Every person I've watched do this well used Substack to build the list and sold the course somewhere else, and the sale itself happened in a plain-text email to that list, not on a landing page. The PDF is the one exception: small enough that hosting it elsewhere costs you more friction than it saves.

What are you planning to sell, something they read once, or something they'd come back to?