Where Ethan started
Ethan retired from Amazon with a clear mission: pay forward his good fortune by helping others find career success. He started where most coaches start, with one-on-one work, trading his time for impact. It was meaningful work, but it also had a ceiling.
There were only so many people he could help, and only so many hours in which to help them.
The same question kept coming up across his clients: how do I get from Senior Manager to Director and beyond? Ethan took this repetition as a signal of the potential demand for a course.
The move from coaching to courses
The move from coaching to courses
The first thing Ethan did was go to his audience and tell them he was thinking about building a course. From this, he got enough positive responses to move forward, and that was his validation on what to build. What he found on the other side surprised him.
"I now make far more teaching than I make coaching, and in less time. I help more people in less time while both making more money for myself and charging my students less than they would pay if I were coaching them through the same process one-on-one."
— Ethan Evans, Maven Instructor
Students pay less than they would for individual coaching, and more people get access to the same expertise. The course both replicates the coaching experience at scale and actually improves on it.
When Ethan's expert business became viable
When Ethan's expert business became viable
After the second and third cohorts, each as large or larger than the one before, the viability of his course business became real.
What he hadn't anticipated was how evergreen the demand would be. Every few months, a new cohort fills, driven by people who are newly discovering him or who have been waiting for the timing to be right.
"Certainly it has been the evergreen nature of some courses, where I can fill a cohort every three to six months as new students either discover me or find that the timing is right for them. When I began I was not sure how repeatable courses would be over time."
— Ethan Evans, Maven Instructor
The principles that made it work
The principles that made it work
Repetition in Ethan's coaching let him know a course was waiting to happen
If you are answering the same questions across multiple clients, you have already done the curriculum work...you just haven't packaged it yet. The pattern Ethan noticed, one career transition question showing up again and again, was the clearest possible sign that the there was demand.
He asked before he built
Ethan asked his network directly what they wanted to learn from him. This step takes minutes and removes most of the guesswork about whether a topic will land.
He didn't judge the model after one cohort
The business case for courses isn't visible in a single run. Ethan's conviction came from cohorts two and three, when the pattern repeated. Give yourself enough runway to see whether the flywheel actually turns.
Courses didn't replace his expertise. They multiplied it.
His goal isn't to stop doing deep work. It's to stop doing the same deep work twelve times in twelve separate rooms. A course lets you do it once, well, for many people at the same time.