Did Someone Already Create "Your" Course or Community? Read This ๐
You sit down with your notebook, your favourite pen, maybe a warm drink. Todayโs the day youโre finally going to validate that course idea youโve been thinking about for months. You start doing the searching, the market research. And then you see it... A course that looks a whole lot like what youโve been planning. The title feels uncomfortably close to whatโs in your Google Doc, the creator has a bigger audience, their branding looks polished, they have testimonials, case studies, maybe even a big ad campaign behind them. And very quickly, the story in your head shifts from: โI think this could really help people." to "Great. Iโm too late. Someone already did it.โ Most people stop right there. They close the tabs.They tell themselves theyโre being โrealistic.โThey quietly downgrade the idea from โpotential offerโ to โnever mind.โ But hereโs what I want you to sit with: Seeing someone else teaching what you want to teach is not, by itself, evidence that you shouldnโt create your course. It might actually be one of the strongest indicators that youโre onto something valuable. In this weekโs episode of The ART of Online Course Creation, Iโm digging into that moment: - Whatโs really going on when you find โyourโ course already out there - How to look at competitors without spiraling into self-doubt - The difference between โit already existsโ and โthereโs no room for meโ - A behind-the-scenes story about how I navigated this when I saw a very big, very visible creator teaching something that looked a lot like what I do Iโm also sharing why some of the popular โvalidation shortcutsโ (like quizzes that tell you if your idea is profitable, or AI tools that promise to do all your market research for you) can leave you more confused, and what to do instead. If you have: - a course idea in your notebook - a half-finished outline in a Google Doc - or just a topic you canโt stop thinking aboutโฆ โฆbut you keep seeing other people doing something similar and using that as a reason to hesitate, this episode is for you.