The origin story most people imagine goes like this: expert builds a massive following, then monetizes it with a course. What actually drives enrollment isn't audience size. It's trust, specificity, and intent.
Here are three instructors who prove the pathways to building a successful course business vary. They each started from a different place and found their success.
When scale is the asset: Shreyas Doshi
When scale is the asset: Shreyas Doshi
Shreyas Doshi spent years as a product leader at Stripe, Twitter, Google, and Yahoo before going independent. He has 400K+ followers across X and LinkedIn. His frameworks for product sense, career strategy, and working with executives have become required reading for PMs at every level.
On Maven, he teaches World-Class Product Sense in Practice and World-Class Product Strategy for Founders and Executives. The courses give students opportunities to work through his frameworks with him directly, ask questions, and apply their learnings in real time.
His audience doesn't just pay for the content. They pay for direct access to Shreyas. The model is straightforward: build a trusted voice at scale, then offer the experience of learning live.
The insight: A large audience is a powerful asset when the trust behind it is real. Scale works when the content has already done the credibility work.
When density beats reach: Emily Kramer
When density beats reach: Emily Kramer
Emily Kramer co-founded MKT1, a newsletter and fund built for B2B startup marketers. Her audience is smaller in raw numbers but extraordinarily concentrated. She grew the MKT1 newsletter to 60,000+ subscribers by writing the marketing playbooks that early-stage startup marketers desperately needed and couldn't find anywhere else. She had been Head of Marketing at Asana and Carta, and the first marketing hire at companies later acquired by Slack and Eventbrite.
Her course Gen Marketer Bootcamp: B2B Startup Marketing for the AI Era was a natural next step.
"I noticed a pattern of founders at early-stage startups who didn't know how to build a marketing team from scratch. Because I was the first marketing hire at a bunch of startups, I was in a unique position to help."
— Emily Kramer, Maven Instructor
She took her most popular frameworks and turned them into live workshops. The newsletter had already done the trust-building work. By the time students enrolled, they weren't evaluating whether to trust her judgment because they already did.
The insight: A smaller, highly engaged audience consistently outperforms a larger, casual one. What Emily had wasn't just reach — it was a pre-qualified group of people with high intent to convert.
When niche credibility is your superpower: Colin Matthews
When niche credibility is your superpower: Colin Matthews
Colin Matthews doesn't have a household name or a famous company on his resume. His pitch is simple: he's a Product Manager who has shipped six+ SaaS products while working full time, and he teaches other PMs to do the same.
His courses AI Prototyping for Product Managers and Vibe Code Production-Ready Side Projects consistently fill cohorts. He built his audience not through a massive platform following, but through documented results, student outcomes, and word of mouth from people who actually shipped products after taking his course.
The insight: Niche credibility scales. Colin's audience was self-selected by intent — PMs who want to build things, not just learn about building things. That specificity, not size, is what drives enrollment and brings students back.
What all three have in common
What all three have in common
Shreyas, Emily, and Colin reached their students through very different paths. What they share is more important than what sets them apart.
Trust precedes the sale. In every case, students arrived with trust for the instructor. The course was the next step in a relationship that had been building through content, frameworks, or results.
Specificity is a feature, not a limitation. None of these courses tried to be for everyone. Each one named a specific person with a specific problem, and that clarity is exactly what made the right people feel like it was built for them.
The content does the credibility work first. Shreyas's threads, Emily's newsletter, and Colin's documented results were all public before the course existed. By the time someone clicked enroll, the hard part of establishing credibility was already done.