The Course That Confirmed What I Already Knew

The checkout page said the course was normally $197, but I was catching it at a special price of $47 because the creator was "giving back to the community." I bought it at 11:14 on a Tuesday night while a load of laundry was going and my youngest was asleep on the couch next to me with a tablet on his chest. I knew, somewhere around slide three of the intro module, that I already knew everything in this course. I bought eleven more modules anyway.

The topic was building small digital products and selling them to an audience you grow on short-form video. Which, yes. I've been doing a version of that — badly, inconsistently, with tools I almost ship and reels from a car that mostly go nowhere. The course wasn't going to tell me something I hadn't already tripped over. I knew that. I bought it anyway because forty-seven dollars felt like maybe it contained the one specific thing I was missing, and hope is a powerful and stupid engine.

The laundry finished before module four. I moved it to the dryer and kept watching. That's the whole story, really, except I'm going to tell it anyway.

How a YouTube Pre-Roll Ad Convinced Me I Had a Gap in My Education

The creator — I'll call him Tanner, because he had Tanner energy — had a channel with about eighty thousand subscribers. His thumbnails were him pointing at a number. His shorts were him saying "I made X this month doing Y, here's the first step" and then cutting before the first step. The full step lived in the course. Classic structure. I have watched enough of these to write the script myself, and I still clicked through.

John had sent me the link, which should have been a warning. John sends me a lot of links.

"This guy's not wrong though," John said. "The fundamentals he's talking about — they're real. The grift is the packaging, not the content."

John is frequently correct about the grift being the packaging. He is also a man who has spent money on a course about reading the hidden messages in municipal water reports, so I try to hold his endorsements loosely. But he wasn't wrong here. That's the annoying part. The fundamentals were real. They were also the same fundamentals I'd read in three free blog posts and one Reddit thread from 2021 that I bookmarked and never finished.

I'd been down this road before — I once paid for a course where the useful advice was available for free if you knew where to look, which I did, which didn't stop me from paying. There's a pattern here. I am aware of the pattern. The pattern continues.

Eleven Modules of Watching Tanner Confirm My Existing Beliefs

The course was structured in what Tanner called a "proven framework," which I mention only because the word "proven" appeared in the course materials fourteen times and I counted, because I was bored and also because I am exactly the kind of person who counts things like that at midnight.

Module one: mindset. It was six minutes about believing in yourself. I skipped to the end.

Module two: finding your niche. Tanner said to pick something you know and that people will pay for. I paused, looked at the ceiling, unpaused.

Module three: building the product. This one was actually fine. He talked about using simple tools, keeping scope small, shipping fast. I know all of this. I also know it and still manage to not ship things, so knowing it clearly isn't the bottleneck. The bottleneck is that I have a day job, two kids, a DoorDash habit for grocery money, and approximately forty-five minutes of creative energy left after 9 PM on a good night. Tanner did not address this. Tanner appeared to work from a very clean desk in what looked like a converted garage, and he did not appear to have small humans asking him about Roblox at the exact moment he was trying to think.

Modules four through nine were variations on "make content about your product." Module ten was about email lists, which — fine, yes, I know, I still don't have one. Module eleven was a "bonus" about the creator's own journey, which was a retelling of his origin story I'd already seen in three YouTube videos for free. This is the thing about the guy selling the course — sometimes he has done the job, he's just also now fully in the business of selling the course, and those are two different jobs.

I finished at 1:07 AM. The laundry was still in the dryer, slightly wrinkled.

Forty-Seven Dollars and About Two Hours I Was Never Getting Back

The forty-seven dollars is the easy part to name. It came out of the same mental budget I use for things that are technically optional but feel necessary in the moment — a promo code I didn't apply, a convenience fee I paid because I was tired. I don't feel great about it. I've done worse math. I once did an entire evening of DoorDash and cleared less than that after gas, which at least involved leaving the house.

The two hours is the part that actually stings. Not because I don't waste two hours — I absolutely waste two hours, regularly, with no educational content attached. It's that I wasted them with a low hum of justification running underneath, like I was doing something productive, when what I was actually doing was paying a man in a clean garage to repeat things I knew back to me in a slightly different order.

The real cost was the confirmation of something I already suspected about myself: I buy courses the way some people buy running shoes. The shoe doesn't make you run. The course doesn't make you ship. I already knew that. I have a rule about not starting things I can't actually sustain, and I broke it the moment I hit checkout on a Tuesday night because the timer in the corner said the discount expired in eighteen minutes.

I do not know if the timer was real. I did not test it. That is also part of the story.

The One Slide I Didn't Already Have, and What I Did With It (Nothing, So Far)

Here is where I am supposed to tell you it was all worth it because of one gem buried in module seven. And there was something, actually. Not a gem — more like a moderately useful pebble.

Tanner had a slide about "validation before build" that was more specific than anything I'd seen framed that way. The idea wasn't new — you ask if people want the thing before you make the thing — but the way he broke down the exact conversation to have, the specific question to ask, the place to ask it: that part was useful. Concrete. Not something I'd seen laid out quite that way in a Reddit thread.

I took a screenshot. It's in a folder on my desktop called "ideas" that also contains a half-finished spec for a tool I was going to ship in February and a photo of a whiteboard from a night I had a really good idea that I can no longer read because I wrote it small and sideways.

I haven't used the slide. I've thought about using it. I opened the screenshot twice. Once I had a follow-up thought and wrote it in a Notepad file, which is where my good intentions go to become archaeology.

The kids asked me what I was watching that night and I said "a class." My oldest said "for your job?" and I said "kind of" and she nodded like that made sense, and I appreciated that she didn't push it.

The course is still in my account. I could rewatch it. I probably won't. The screenshot is still on my desktop. I might use it. The folder is still called "ideas," and there are thirty-one other things in it, and at least two of them are probably fine.

Note: Everyday Hustle Jeff is the written side of a digital series. These accounts are composite and dramatized. Any figures are what they were on the day, for one person, and are not a projection, a track record, or advice.