LMScast with Chris Badgett · By WordPress LMS Elearning Expert Chris Badgett and Entrepreneur & Online Marketing Business Strategy Expert Chris Badgett on Teaching, Education, WordPress Development & Online Business.

How to Deal with the Failed Online Course Business

·47 min·3 clips

Kurt says he wants to fail as quickly as possible, then learn from it and optimize for future growth.

Failure gets treated as useful evidence, not a final verdict. Chris opens by saying failed online course projects are not always as simple as they look. Kurt returns as the practical guest, and the conversation starts with a Lifter LMS team habit: talk about failures out loud instead of making them dramatic. The money question comes up first. Kurt wants builders to calculate what they actually need from a project, including expenses, commuting costs, and realistic goals. That pulls the conversation out of fantasy pretty quickly. A project that brings in 50 grand or 60 grand may already be doing its job. Bigger wins can happen, but they are not the baseline. Scale also messes with people's heads. Kurt talks about agency clients with thousands of students, where migrating or building around 3,600 users can make the revenue picture look huge from the outside. Startups are in a different room. For a new $49 course, the first paying student matters. So does the fifth. So do the first ten. Ten students can be traction, not a punchline. Kurt keeps circling back to the gap between marketing promises and the slower work of building something with staying power. Chris adds the founder-side caution: when the creator is the subject matter expert, a newer online presence usually needs time for trust to build. The episode does not promise zero failure. It points toward better math, clearer expectations, audience work, and validation. Chris closes by saying the next conversation will focus on validation as a way to reduce the likelihood and severity of failure. A struggling course may need patience and cleaner numbers before anyone calls it dead.

As heard by us

A grounded reset for course creators who need better expectations, not hype.

This episode treats a failed online course project like a real business question: what was built, what was expected, and what kind of return would actually make sense.

Read the full review in PlayNext →

Why you'd press play

If your course launch stalled, this gives you a cleaner way to read the failure.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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