I’m just going to say it: the traditional DIY course model is dying—not dead yet, but definitely on life support. And if you’ve been feeling it, if your launches aren’t hitting like they used to, if your evergreen funnel is barely trickling in sales, if you’re wondering why everything feels so much harder than it did two years ago, you’re not imagining it. Something fundamental has shifted in the online education space, and it’s affecting coaches and course creators across the board.

Here’s What’s Happening

Recently, I was at a retreat with some high-level coaching peers, and between us, we’re collectively coaching over 1,000 course creators and coaches. We spent time comparing notes, troubleshooting together, and trying to identify patterns in who’s struggling and who’s still thriving. What became crystal clear from our conversations is that there’s one specific segment of the market getting hit the hardest right now, and it’s the people whose entire business model relies on selling mid-priced DIY courses—typically anything from $300 to $2,000—and who don’t have either a massive organic following feeding them endless free leads or those unicorn ad campaigns that are still bringing in cheap, high-volume traffic.

Sound familiar? Even the people who do have good volume coming in are seeing their conversion rates slip, their sales slow down, and the whole model just becoming harder and harder to make work profitably. The launches that used to bring in reliable revenue are now requiring more effort for less return, and the evergreen funnels that used to hum along nicely in the background are barely making a dent.

Why? One Word: AI.

Here’s what’s changed, and it’s important to understand this clearly: you used to be competing primarily with Google searches and YouTube videos. When someone wanted to learn how to do something—whether it was running Facebook ads, meal prepping for their family, or setting up their first funnel—they’d go to Google, watch a few YouTube videos, read some blog posts, and try to piece together the information themselves. A huge chunk of people found that process frustrating and fragmented, and they just wanted someone to organize all that information for them, put it in a logical order, and make it easy to follow. That’s where you came in as the course creator, and people were genuinely happy to pay $997 or more for that convenience and structure.

But now they have ChatGPT, and everything has changed. They can get customized, tailored plans in seconds—plans that are specifically designed for their unique situation, not just generic advice. They get real-time answers to their questions without having to wait for the next module to unlock or for you to hop on a Q&A call. They don’t have to pay a $997 price tag for information that’s now essentially free and infinitely customizable. Yes, AI gets things wrong sometimes, and yes, there are definitely limitations and occasional hallucinations in what it produces, but for the vast majority of people, the benefits of speed, customization, and cost (or lack thereof) far outweigh the risks of occasionally getting inaccurate information.

And that’s exactly why DIY-style, information-based courses—the ones where the primary value proposition was organizing and delivering knowledge—are struggling so much right now.

So What’s the Solution?

Here’s the good news: courses aren’t dead, they’re just evolving, and if you understand where they fit in the new landscape, there’s actually more opportunity than ever before. There are two big shifts happening right now that the smartest coaches and course creators are already making, and these shifts are allowing them to not just survive but actually thrive in this new environment.

Shift #1: Courses Become Your Gateway

The first shift is repositioning where your online course sits in your overall offer suite. Instead of being your main profit driver, your course becomes the entry-level offer—the $97 to $497 product that introduces people to your world, your frameworks, and your methodology. It’s the taste-tester, the trust builder, the thing that lets people experience how you think and how you teach before they make a bigger investment. But here’s the crucial part: it’s not your main profit driver anymore, and once you accept that and restructure accordingly, everything else starts to make a lot more sense.

Shift #2: High-Touch Group Programs Are the Goldmine

This is where the real money is, and this is the shift that’s changing everything for the coaches who are making it. Instead of selling a DIY course where people are left to figure things out on their own, you take that same framework, that same methodology, that same expertise you’ve been teaching, and you pivot it into a high-touch group program—typically priced anywhere from $3,000 to $10,000—where you deliver real-time support, accountability, personalized strategy, and genuine community. These are all things that AI fundamentally cannot replicate, no matter how advanced it gets.

You end up working with fewer people overall, but you make way more per person, which means your revenue actually goes up while your workload can stay the same or even decrease. You still have leverage because you’re not doing one-on-one coaching with everyone, you’re working with them in a group format, but you’re also able to deliver significantly better results because you’re actually there with them as they implement, able to troubleshoot in real time, course-correct when needed, and provide the kind of personalized guidance that makes all the difference between someone who buys a course and never finishes it and someone who actually gets the transformation they’re paying for.

The New Model

Here’s what this new model looks like in practice, and it’s simpler than you might think. You have your low-ticket course sitting at the bottom—priced somewhere between $97 and $497, fully automated, running evergreen, doing its job of warming people up to your methodology and introducing them to how you work. Then you have your high-touch group program in the middle—this is where the real transformation happens, where people are paying $3,000 to $10,000 to get direct access to you, to be part of a community of peers who are on the same journey, and to get the accountability and support that actually gets them to the finish line. And optionally, you might have one-on-one coaching or a high-level mastermind at the very top for people who want even more personalized attention.

This model is more profitable because you’re making significantly more per client, it’s more sustainable because you’re not constantly having to launch or spend a fortune on ads just to make your numbers work, and honestly, it’s more fun because you get to actually see people succeed in real time instead of wondering if anyone’s even logging into your course modules.

The Bottom Line

The traditional DIY course model is on its way out, there’s no sugar-coating that reality, but you’re not on your way out with it. You just need to evolve, to understand where courses fit now versus where they fit three years ago, and to restructure your business model accordingly. The good news is that you don’t have to start from scratch, throw out everything you’ve built, or create something entirely new—you just need to take what you already have, the frameworks and expertise and content you’ve already created, and restructure how you package it, deliver it, and sell it.

Want the Full Story?

I dive way deeper into this entire shift in my latest podcast episode, including exactly why this is happening now, what mistakes to avoid when you’re making this pivot, and the specific steps you need to take to make this work for your particular business and audience.

Listen to the full episode here 

P.S. In my next podcast episode, I’m sharing the behind-the-scenes story of how I accidentally built a $5M group program while navigating life with a newborn, and why this model has been the absolute cornerstone of my business ever since. You won’t want to miss it.