56 Most Successful Online Course Creators [2023]

I’m Lidiya, a full-time blogger, course creator, and the founder of Let’s Reach Success. With the content I publish on the blog and the courses I create, I help people start a side hustle and earn passive income so they can pay off debt, quit their job and live their best life.

My signature program - Financial Freedom Through Blogging - is the formula for starting a blog, growing it to 100K page views and $5,000/month, and living life on your terms. Inside it, you’ll find answers to all your questions about becoming a full-time blogger, behind-the-scenes content, real ways to make money and build blog traffic, a ton of video tutorials, how-to guides, and bonuses.

We are Christian and Rasmus Mikkelsen, also known as the Mikkelsen Twins online. We run an online education company where we help people to build an online book publishing business. The reason why we teach what seems like a random/kinda weird online business model is because it’s what changed our lives almost 3 years ago and freed us from the life path we were heading down (were in the middle of a business degree in community college and there was absolutely no hope for a truly happy and fulfilled life if we had continued to take that path in life).

Fast forward to today, our company is making over 6-figures in profit every month which is almost unbelievable for two 24-year-old (ambitious) idiots with just a laptop, wifi connection and a small team.

Hi! I’m Jorden Makelle. I started online as a freelance writer, and now, I run Writing Revolt, which is a blog and YouTube channel that helps freelance writers learn how to make money online, even with no experience and no college degree.

My online business now brings in multiple six figures, and just as importantly, I’ve been able to build an incredible online community and help thousands of writers succeed and live their dream life!

My name is Alex Nerney. My business partner Lauren McManus and I started an online blog, two of them actually, that we were able to make a full time income from. We started out with building a health and fitness blog Avocadu. It seemed like a reasonable first niche to start in as I was a personal trainer at the time. After growing that blog to six figures a year Lauren and I decided to start Create and Go to teach others exactly how we did it and share our journey as professional bloggers with them.

The freedom we have experienced is indescribable, Lauren has been full time traveling for over a year, fulfilling her desires to travel the world. While I have been living my best life, marking things off my bucket list one by one. Including getting a motorcycle license, traveling to every state in the U S of A, and finally being able to eat strictly organic food and watch all the football games I can in a single weekend. We have had adventures and experiences we never imagined we would have.

Hello! My name is Caitlin Pyle, and I start Proofread Anywhere back in 2014. I help proofreaders earn extra income from anywhere in the world… even if you’re starting from scratch! I have two different courses: Transcript Proofreading, which teaches students how to proofread legal transcripts for court reporters. My second course is General Proofreading.

Before I started Proofread Anywhere, I was making $4,000 a month as a proofreader and I was convinced that was the most money I would ever make. Today I make an average of $200K a month! I wasn’t looking to just “make more money.” I simply focused on my passion of helping others find work-at-home freedom. Find a way to help others and your own business will grow also!

Hey! We are Kelan and Brittany Kline the founders and co-owners of the popular personal finance blog The Savvy Couple.

We are currently on pace to make over $250,000 this year alone with our personal finance blog!

Hello! I’m Matt Studdert, and I’m the founder of Frontend Mentor. We are an online learning community that helps people improve their front-end coding skills by building projects. Instead of providing learning tutorials, we provide professionally designed challenges to help our community gain real-life experience building websites and web apps.

Today, we have over 200,000 members on the platform and grow at over 16,000 new members per month. Of those 200,000+ members, we have 1,500+ paid subscribers generating over $15,000 MRR.

Hi, I'm Stuart Draper and I'm the founder and CEO of Stukent. I am the co-author of Digital Marketing Essentials, the bestselling text in higher education of its kind. I gained valuable experience doing internet marketing for companies that range from mom and pop shops to Fortune 500 companies.

My work in education has taken me all over the globe. I have been to Romania, Mexico, China, Puerto Rico, Germany, and India to speak to audiences ranging from ten to north of 1,500 people about entrepreneurship and digital marketing that will be used by over 100,000 students this year.

In the year 2016, we had negligible revenue from the blog but the blog has grown substantially since then. Our average revenue is about $17K per month. Our gross profit margin is about 80% since we maintain a very small team and there are no physical products. Our target is to achieve 100% revenue growth by the end of next year.

Hello, I’m Gabriel Kramer, a co-founder and the CEO of SI Certs. We sell online test prep courses to construction inspectors who want to pass important certification exams. Our courses include custom tutoring support through Intercom chat.

We made around $45,000/month in revenue last year. Based on first quarter revenue, we’re probably going to make around or more than $60,000/month this year.

Hi! My name is Diego and two years ago I launched a blog called Markeko. I help people prepare, study and pass the Facebook Blueprint Certification exams through free study guides and paid practice questions.

I do have a full-time job at another company and am currently in the process of transitioning to Markeko full time.

My name is Adam Tal, I’m a high school drop out and an ex-musician, and I started an online education business in Israel, which has turned into a movement and which I’m now considering taking worldwide.

We have over 100,000 active subscribers and followers, as well as just over 7,000 students who took at least one online course. In the past 5 years, we’ve generated over 21,000,000ILS, which is roughly 6 million dollars, with profit as high as 45% in some of those years.

Hello! 👋 My name is Bram Kanstein, I’m the creator of a course called No-Code MVP. In this course, I teach people the mindset, process, and tools they can use to build and validate their startup and business ideas without knowing or learning how to code.

18 months later the course was almost done, and with 2 of 42 videos (5.5 hours in total) left to edit, I decided to run a pre-sale. In 3 weeks I made $8000, and the course is on track to do about $6000/month, so I’m super happy with my start and the reviews I’ve already gathered! I’ve also gotten a lot of support from people who are rooting for me and my mission to show and teach people they don’t have to know or learn how to code to start working on their business ideas.

Hi! My name is Steve Appelbaum and I started a vocational school called Animal Behavior College (ABC). Having trained dogs for years and seeing how dramatically the pet industry was (and still is) growing, I wanted to create something that would allow passionate animal lovers a real chance to earn a living helping animals.

Revenue varies but $1,000,000. per month is pretty typical. Our biggest month ever was $3.2 million but that only happened once. The COVID-19 pandemic has proven to be a challenge but we are open for business and are actually seeing an increase in enrollments. While revenue is one metric of determining the success of a business, the biggest perk for me is that over the years we have helped tens of thousands of people fulfill their dreams. What’s more, our platform puts us in a position to make a real difference in the lives of literally hundreds of thousands of dogs and cats.

I’m Austin L. Church, a writer and brand strategist. My wife and I live with our three professional mistake makers in Knoxville, Tennessee, near the Great Smoky Mountains. After getting laid off during the recession back in 2009, I accidentally started my own freelance writing business, which eventually took me into selling an array of creative services, then developing iOS apps, then co-founding a tech startup, and then starting a branding and marketing studio called Balernum.

AustinLChurch.com where I started sharing what I have learned. My new course, Freelance Cake, is a business growth course for freelancers and consultants who want to make more money and enjoy more freedom at the same time. The launch in December went well, and this year, I plan to focus on scaling up sales from around $1,000 per month to $3,000.

Hello hustlers! My name is Keyul and I’m the maker of Coursesity. I started the website more than two years ago in order to create a search engine to find the best online courses on the internet.

Coursesity is also a platform for instructors and creators to launch their courses. Any creators or instructors can publish their courses and promote their courses to thousands of learners for free. This makes easy for creators to build their audience.

Hello, I'm Radoslaw Fabisiak, and together with Anna Danilec, I'm the co-founder of Duomly e-learning company. We started our ideas to give people a better learning experience about two years ago.

Three months ago, we gave our clients the possibility of paying by credit cards and started selling first accounts. Now we have sales of around $1200/month.

I’m Jure Pučko and I’m the co-founder and CEO of Doctrina - a global educational platform for healthcare professionals (HCPs). We are reaching over 1M HCPs with knowledge about RX and OTC medicines and medical devices, disease awareness, and other health-related topics, using our video platform. Our clients are pharma companies who want to get their messages to HCPs.

With our technology and team efforts, we helped over 60 companies worldwide to grow since 2013.

We are Mandarin Monkey. We are Mandarin/Chinese content creators made up of myself (Tom) and my wife (Ula) Cain. We have produced 250+ videos on YouTube and as of writing this, 62 podcast episodes where we discuss various topics using both English and Chinese throughout. We also sell a phrase and grammar eBook, conversation packs (for Chinese study), T-shirts, accessories and Audiobooks. Oh and Teach in both group hangouts and private 1on1’s online.

Currently, our main product is our ‘hangouts’ where we facilitate group language exchanges using Google’s streaming video platform. As mentioned above we also package up and sell a bunch of other mainly digital products to help people learn. Currently searching for sponsors for the podcast and considering various pivots for the business.

Hey doers, I'm Lucas Chevillard. I currently work full time at home.ht as growth marketer. Before that, I was at Airbnb for 5 years. But the story today is about what I create on the side.

It’s also my project that has been seen by the most people. Until now, more than 1050 persons took the course to help them learn how to increase sales with powerful email marketing and automation.

The business has been around since 2015 and in that time we have more doubled our revenue and profits year on year. In 2019 we are on track for $1.1 million in sales.

My name is Graham Cochrane and I’m the founder of Recording Revolution, an online education company that teaches musicians how to record and produce their music to a professional level in a bedroom or home studio.

Right now I’m generating about $1.2M a year in revenue with virtually no ad spend and in working only 5 hours a week.

Greetings, my name is Roy Kiessling, founder of EMDR Consulting, an international training organization specializing in teaching the EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing) psychotherapy to master's level and above mental health professionals.

What started as a one-person training organization in 2013, has now grown to administrative staff of 5. a training team of over 20 trainers and 150 coaches. EMDR Consulting is now one of the largest EMDR training organizations in the United States, annually conducting over 150 EMDR basic training courses a year, teaching over 1500 mental health professionals how to integrate EMDR into their clinical practice.

Hi, I’m Gina [waving]. I started a Virtual Assistant business on the side of my full-time job (in personal finance), in the spring of 2014 to “test the waters” for a potential career change.

And, my most recent “win” has been being tapped to teach a course on becoming a Virtual Assistant in an accredited university program – something I’d never dreamed would be possible back in the day!

My name is Erin Mooney and I run MadeUrban, a blog for small business owners selling handmade products. My audience sells their crafts through craft shows, Etsy, a website, and/or retailers. I provide them with advice for each step they must take along the way. And I like to do so in an easy-to-understand and easy-to-follow way, with outside-the-box concepts they haven’t already read about on hundreds of other blogs.

As events start to open back up in 2021, and with a slight pivot to my strategy, I’m almost back to what my average monthly revenue was pre-Covid, and I currently earn between $5000 - $8000 per month.

My name is Max. I am the CEO of HYLS, a donation-based online course platform. We use the “pay what you want to model,” which means that you can pay any amount for HYLS online courses on topics on Productivity, Healthy lifestyle, Yoga, Meditation, Digital Detox, Minimalism, and more are coming soon.

Our customers are mainly representatives of the working population, but all ages are welcome to participate. Our average revenue is $40k per month. All in all, we attracted $1M+ of donations from 90K students.

My name is Ian Lunn and I am one of the Founding Directors of Product Focus, a leading global provider of product management courses in the UK, US, and Europe.

We provide training for product managers and product management teams, teaching them skills and providing the tools to excel in product management. We also review the product management roles and processes in companies to help them understand how to improve performance. We’re all about helping individuals and businesses deliver world-class product management. Over the past 15 years, we’ve trained thousands of product people and are now the European leaders in product management training running multiple courses every week.

Hey, I’m Ellen Yin, founder/CEO of Ellen Yin Media and creator of Cubicle to CEO, our consumer brand consisting of our digital programs and a chart-topping podcast, the Cubicle to CEO Podcast, that has been downloaded in over 100 countries worldwide. To date, I have worked with over 7,500 customers through my online courses and marketing agency services, with clientele ranging from startups to Fortune 500 brands. My signature program is an online membership that helps coaches and service providers make their first $10K month - without a large audience or posting every day.

In the 3 years since I started my business, I’ve profitably bootstrapped our growth from an initial $300 client project into 7 figures in lifetime revenue (and on track to hit one million dollars in annual revenue in 2021); a milestone of only 2% of female founders achieve, and one that feels especially momentous to me as a first-generation Asian American.

Hey, I'm Griff, and I'm the founder of MindEasy. We create meditation courses and content designed to help people find their way into mindfulness and meditation in a personal way.

This is the problem I wanted to solve with MindEasy. Help people discover what they want to achieve with meditation and then help them approach it in a relevant and meaningful way.

I am David Buchanan, a professional chef, and owner of Chefs-Resources.com, a website geared towards providing professional chefs with free detailed culinary info (seasonality, flavor profiles, etc.) about fresh fish, oysters, and cuts of meat, as well as tons of free kitchen management articles. Paid subscribers get access to our premium kitchen management resources such as Excel sheets (prep sheets, recipe templates, ordering guides, etc.), video tutorials, and kitchen management articles.

The site is not about recipes, but I am a Chef, so here is one of my favorite personal creations...seared scallops, spring pea puree, lemon beurre blanc, fingerling potatoes, golden beets, asparagus, corn kernels.

In 2009, Sal Khan walked away from a high-paying job to start a business that had no way of making money. His idea to launch a non-profit teaching platform was ignited five years earlier when he was helping his young cousins do math homework over the computer. They loved his clear explanations and soon he was posting free tutorials on Youtube, where they started to attract the attention of thousands of users around the world. Sal realized he could help democratize learning by building a free platform to teach math, science, and the humanities. Today, Khan Academy offers hundreds of free recorded tutorials in dozens of languages. During the pandemic, its popularity surged to 30 million users a month. Order the How I Built This book at: https://smarturl.it/HowIBuiltThis

Read the full story on npr.org ➜

Hello, I'm Dominika Paciorkowska, Managing Director and Board Member at ClickMeeting – a platform for webinars and online meetings. ClickMeeting was launched in 2010 and has been performing as an independent company since 2016.

This time I would like to focus mainly on the development of ClickMeeting: an innovative platform that focuses on intuitiveness and providing a real-life experience in the virtual world.

Hello! My name is Zack Hall. I’m a software developer, and I’m the founder of SketchUp For Woodworkers, an online course teaching woodworkers how to use 3D design software. This was a project that grew from scratching my itch. In my spare time, I joined a makerspace near my home in the suburbs of Boston to start woodworking.

Fast-forward and I ended up acquiring an old website and setting out to build the woodworking design tutorials and resources I wish I’d had when I was getting started. After launch, it is currently earning about $1k/month.

• Parker Walbeck is the creator of Course Creator Pro. The company supports the professional growth of course creators across various domains to achieve rapid growth and generate more sales.
• He creates online video course tutorials for course creators from various backgrounds such as photography, music, gaming, videography, filmmaking, and so on.
• His students are proof that his practical knowledge and solutions about marketing help them generate thousands in revenue in less than 24 hours.

Watch the full video on youtube.com ➜

• LaTisha is a marketing pro & a high achievers' mentor and she also founded a company named You've Got Clients.
• She assists business owners in removing subconscious barriers so they can increase their rates & build an organized marketing system to generate sizable profits.
• In 2021, she earned $314k from selling digital goods without investing any money in advertisements.

Read the full story on medium.com ➜

• Trey Cockrum is the founder of the Trey Cockrum coaching business. He helps people to start and grow profitable consulting businesses.
• He started "The Trey Cockrum Podcast" for an online course to help students go from $0 to over $20k with their online course.
• His 3-step online coaching business help people discover what expertise they have and what type of products or services they can sell.
• Trey made $5.6k in his first 20 DAYS selling online courses.

Watch the full video on youtube.com ➜

My name is Alexandra Exeter and I’m the CEO and owner of Your Lessons Now LLC.

Our company currently earns around 1.2 million dollars a year. Our growth rate has been both consistent and rapidly growing. We’ve acquired 52% more users since last year.

Hi everyone! I’m Nicole Hudson, the Strategic Transformation Advisor behind Simply Hudson.

By designing streamlined, semi-automated processes, the company estimated an annual savings of over 800 manual work hours and $80,000 in annual overhead costs while supporting a fully remote, globally distributed workforce. Wow!

Hi! I’m Jacques Hopkins, creator of Piano In 21 Days. My online piano course helps adults of all ages learn to play piano as fast as possible. Most of my students are people who never had the time or failed piano lessons before. Some are retirees who are excited about a new hobby but don’t want to wait years for results. Others are busy parents or professionals who need a low-pressure, flexible learning schedule.

My business brings in five figures every month, and I built everything from the ground up. I knew I had a unique take on piano lessons, but I had to learn everything about digital entrepreneurship and marketing in real time. It took a lot of effort, but it worked: I quit my engineering job and have been supporting my family this way for over eight years now.

Sustain Academy is an online sustainability academy for professionals wishing to enhance their sustainability journey. We offer a 10-week LIVE online sustainability course followed by 1:1 mentorship, taught by the world’s best field experts.

So far, more than 100 companies from more than 10 different countries have trained their employees with us.

• Matt Giovanisci started working in the pool industry at age 13.
• He used to work as a stock boy and water tester for a local pool store on the weekends.
• Matt continued working in the same industry and later moved to other bigger pool and spa companies.

Every year, Matt was helping out thousands of pool and hot tub owners every year. This has made him a pro in the pool and spa maintenance field and he wanted to share everything he knew about pools with the world.

That is how the idea to launch Swim University was born in 2004 - where shares his knowledge through informative articles with a larger scale of audience.

He also offers interactive video courses about pool and hot tub care.

Read the full story on nichepursuits.com ➜

Building assets you can sell over and over again -- that’s the passive income dream, right?

Rachel Jones at MoneyHackingMama.com is making this dream a reality by creating and selling downloadable printables on Etsy.

Apart from selling on Etsy, Rachel also sells courses to help women achieve success and happiness in their personal & professional lives.

You can read her full story plus listen to her podcast on sidehustlenation.com ➜

• Jeff started Elite Chess in 2012 to teach chess to young minds.
• Running his own camps allowed him to earn five times as much as when he was teaching children how to play chess while working in summer camp chess programs for $17 an hour.
• He then transitioned to an online recurring membership model, in part due to the pandemic to keep his business afloat.
• Right now he provides both virtual and in-person classes and organizes special summer and chess tournaments. His mission is to teach young minds this beautiful game of chess and help them develop chess skills & life skills from a young age.

Read the full article on sidehustlenation.com ➜

Dickie Bush and his partner Nicolas Cole have built a cohort-based online platform to teach students about the fundamentals of writing on the internet.

Their course helps students create 30 pieces of written content each day and publish it. To date, they have taught over 4000+ students the basics of writing online, offered them a new perspective, and managed to build a lifelong relationship with them.

Ship 30 for 30 has gone from zero to almost 50k followers in just 12 months and has turned this side hustle into a six-figure business. The interesting thing is they have used Twitter as their main marketing channel and have attracted the maximum number of students from there.

Listen to the full podcast on sidehustlenation.libsyn.com ➜

Ahoy! My name is Ron Stefanski and I’ve created dozens of websites, but I’m best known for my popular online business site OneHourProfessor.com where I teach people how to create and grow online businesses.

Since 2014, I’ve made over $1 million in profit from my online business and currently make around $30-$40k/month. One thing very unique about me is I’ve documented my progress with blog income reports every month since I started.

I’m Joe Previte, I’m an Open Source TypeScript Engineer and teach a course on TypeScript.

I have over 1,500 subscribers and have taught the content as full-day workshops at conferences like RenderATL and local meetups like Phoenix ReactJS. I have high ambitions and know this course will be a million-dollar course joining the ranks of other successful courses such as Epic React and CSS for JS.

My name is Cary Jack and I’m a lifestyle entrepreneur, founder & author of The Happy Hustle, top .5% globally ranked podcast host, international keynote speaker, professional actor/model, biohacker, eco-outdoorsman, and humanitarian striving to make a positive impact on this planet.

As founder of The Happy Hustle, my mission is to help fellow purpose-driven entrepreneurs avoid burnout and achieve blissful balance in their personal and professional life while putting the Happy in their everyday Hustle!

Hey! I’m Marie Poulin, and in 2014 I teamed up with my husband Ben Borowski under the brand Oki Doki to deliver consulting, design, and digital strategy services. Previously we’d both been running our freelance operations for several years, and our skillset had such a complementary overlap that we decided to unify our services together under one company.

Today we are 4 full-time team members, and the majority of our revenue and efforts come from our signature course, Notion Mastery. This course now generates an average of about $40k/month for the company.

I’m Bobby Hoyt, former band director turned personal finance blogger and course creator. I teach millennials how to make more money, save more money, and pay off debt. I started my site, Millennial Money Man, while I was still teaching and paying off my student loan debt.

Last year we broke the seven-figure revenue mark through course sales, monthly recurring subscriptions from our coaching group, and affiliate sales.

Hi, I’m Peyton! My full name is Arlie Peyton, but I go by the last name. I am the creator of a freelance writing program that teaches intermediate-level writers how to command $1,000 - $3,000 per article. I just have a coaching program so far, but I’m working on an online course as we speak. I love what I do because I get to teach and talk about business all the time.

I realize that many writers make well over six figures a year. However, what might be interesting is that I wrote for two years to practice my craft and made nothing. It’s not because it wasn’t good, it’s just that I never charged anyone. The first time I did charge a client, I invoiced them for $1,000 and I’ve never looked back.

I’m Hugo Huijer, and I run Tracking Happiness, an online media company that publishes helpful content surrounding mental health topics. We’ve published hundreds of articles on happiness, journaling, mindfulness, and self-awareness.

Tracking Happiness generates around $3,000 per month, of which 80% comes from display ads.

Hi! I am Pau and I am the guy behind Una Vida Online. I started this website in 2018 as a side gig to share my experience and knowledge in blogging and affiliate marketing, and since then it has grown to become a business that also employs a full-time assistant and many other freelancers who help me in content creation and customer service.

This long journey has allowed us to become digital nomads. We have been traveling around the world for quite a long time (until the pandemic came), which was the reason why I started this project in the first place. Freedom is my main motivation.

My Name is Valentin Decker, I am 30 this year and started Sauce Writing just before the pandemic, in 2020.

A few figures about the business: Sauce Writing helps 100+ students every year, and will do between 120K€ and 150K€ in revenue in 2023 with an emailing list of 5K people.

(If you’re completely sold on the magic of EntryLevel already, you’ll LOVE our Growth Marketing course. The marketing course teaches you how to grow your business - from Pirate Metrics to A/B testing. Use code STARTERSTORY at EntryLevel for 10% off!)