There’s something seductive about the idea of packaging your knowledge into a course. You’ve learned valuable skills, you’ve overcome challenges, and now you want to help others do the same. The mechanics seem straightforward enough: record some videos, create a few worksheets, set up a payment page, and start collecting revenue while you sleep. But here’s the uncomfortable truth that most aspiring course creators discover too late: if you build a course without proof of concept, you’re setting yourself up for a very specific kind of public humiliation.
At some point, someone will call you a fraud. Not might call you a fraud. Will call you a fraud. And when that moment comes, you’ll either have evidence to back up your claims or you won’t.
Let me be clear about what I mean by proof of concept. I’m not talking about having credentials or certifications, though those can help. I’m talking about demonstrable results that you’ve actually achieved using the methods you’re teaching. If you’re creating a course on building a freelance writing business, the proof of concept is that you’ve built a successful freelance writing business yourself. If you’re teaching people how to gain their first thousand Instagram followers, you need to have done exactly that, preferably multiple times and in a way that’s documented.
Without this proof, you’re essentially asking people to pay you for theoretical knowledge. You’re saying “here’s what I think would work” rather than “here’s what actually worked for me.” The internet has a finely tuned radar for detecting this distinction, and it’s merciless when it finds a gap between what you claim and what you’ve done.
The fraud accusation doesn’t always come immediately. Sometimes your course launches to modest success. You get a handful of students who are willing to take a chance on you. Maybe they even get some results, though those results are often despite your teaching rather than because of it. But then something shifts. Maybe one student doesn’t get the results they expected and starts asking pointed questions about your own achievements. Maybe a competitor points out that your business is newer than the course you’re selling. Maybe someone simply asks you to share your own numbers, and you realize you can’t because they’re not impressive enough to justify charging money to teach others.This is when the house of cards collapses. Once one person publicly questions your credibility, others pile on. Screenshots get shared. Your sales page gets scrutinized for misleading claims. Every testimonial gets questioned. The reputation damage isn’t just to this one course, it’s to your entire personal brand. Coming back from being labeled a scammer or a fraud is exponentially harder than building credibility in the first place.
The cruel irony is that many people create courses specifically because they haven’t achieved the success they’re teaching about. They see course creation as the path to success itself rather than as a way to share success they’ve already achieved. They notice that prominent course creators make substantial income from teaching, and they think “I could do that too.” What they miss is that those successful course creators typically spent years building their proof of concept before they ever sold a single lesson.
Consider the trajectory of someone doing it right. They spend months or years mastering a skill and achieving real results. They document their journey publicly, sharing wins and lessons along the way. They help a few people for free and get testimonials that aren’t incentivized or manufactured. They refine their methods based on what actually works in practice, not just what sounds good in theory. Only then, when they have an undeniable track record, do they consider packaging their knowledge into a paid course. By that point, the course almost sells itself because the proof of concept does the heavy lifting.
Compare that to someone who decides to create a course first and figure out the results later. They might have read extensively about a topic or completed someone else’s course on it. They compile secondhand information into their own training program. They craft marketing copy that carefully avoids making specific claims about their own achievements. When someone asks about their results, they deflect with statements about how everyone’s journey is different or how they’ve “helped clients achieve” certain outcomes without clarifying that those clients got results through other means.
This approach might work temporarily, but it’s fundamentally unsustainable. You can’t fake proof of concept indefinitely. Eventually, someone will ask the right questions, and you won’t have good answers. The students who don’t get results will start wondering why. The more experienced people in your field will notice the discrepancies. Your own conscience will likely nag at you, creating stress that undermines your ability to show up confidently for your students.
There’s also a deeper ethical dimension here. When you sell a course without proof of concept, you’re not just risking your reputation, you’re potentially wasting other people’s time and money. Your students trust that you’ve done what you’re teaching them to do. They’re investing their resources based on the implicit promise that your methods work because they worked for you. If that promise is hollow, you’re taking their money under false pretenses, regardless of how well-intentioned you might be.
Some people argue that teaching can be separate from doing, that you can be a great coach without being a great player. There’s truth to that in certain contexts. A football coach doesn’t need to be able to play at a professional level to effectively coach professionals. But here’s the critical difference: that coach has deep experience in the game, has studied countless players and strategies, and has a track record of coaching success. They have proof of concept for their coaching ability, even if they’re not proving it on the field themselves. In the course creation world, if you haven’t achieved what you’re teaching and you haven’t successfully coached multiple others to achieve it, you simply don’t have proof of concept yet.
The path forward if you want to create a course but don’t yet have proof of concept is actually straightforward, though it requires patience. Go achieve the thing you want to teach about. Document your journey thoroughly. Share your process publicly without asking for money. Help a few people get results using your methods. Build a body of evidence that demonstrates you know what you’re talking about because you’ve lived it. Then, and only then, package that proven knowledge into a course.
This approach takes longer. It’s less immediately profitable. It requires you to do the hard work of actually mastering something before you can teach it. But it’s the only path that doesn’t end with you frantically defending yourself against fraud accusations in Facebook comments or Reddit threads. It’s the only path that lets you show up with full confidence, knowing that when someone questions your credibility, you can point to concrete evidence of your own success.
The course creation industry has normalized the idea of “teaching what you’re learning,” of building in public and monetizing your journey even before you’ve reached your destination. While there’s value in transparency and sharing your process, there’s a clear line between documenting your learning journey and charging people significant money for incomplete or unproven methods. Cross that line, and you’re gambling with your reputation in a bet you’ll almost certainly lose.
If you genuinely have valuable knowledge to share, the proof of concept isn’t an obstacle to overcome, it’s the foundation that makes everything else possible. It’s what transforms you from someone trying to make money teaching into someone who has earned the right to teach. That distinction might seem subtle, but it’s everything when someone inevitably questions whether you’re the real deal or just another internet fraud.
