I built my first online course in 2022 on a topic I thought was too niche. Linux server hardening for small business owners. Not sexy. Not viral. Just genuinely useful to a specific group of people who had real problems and no good resources.
It sold. Not millions. But enough to make me take this seriously.
I have spent the last two years testing different course topics, platforms, pricing models, and marketing approaches. Some worked. Some flopped hard. Here is what I actually know from doing it — not from reading someone else's blog post about it.
Pick a Topic People Are Already Searching For — Not One You Think Is Cool
This is where most technical people go wrong. We get excited about cutting-edge stuff — quantum computing, some new AI framework, whatever just dropped on GitHub — and we build a course around it. Then we wonder why nobody buys it.
The problem is timing and intent. People buy courses to solve a problem they have right now. Not a problem they might have in three years.
Here is how I validate a topic before I spend 40 hours building a course around it:
- Udemy search volume: Search your topic on Udemy. If the top course has under 500 reviews, there is probably not enough demand yet. If the top course has 10,000+ reviews, there is demand — but you need an angle.
- Google Trends: Check 12-month trend data. You want steady or rising, not a spike from two years ago.
- Reddit threads: Go to r/learnprogramming, r/sysadmin, r/webdev, r/datascience. Search your topic. Are people asking for help with it? That is your market telling you they need education.
- Upwork job postings: If employers are hiring for a skill, people want to learn it. Search the skill on Upwork and see how many active job postings exist.
Honestly, the best topics I have seen sell consistently are the ones that sit at the intersection of "employers want this skill" and "it is annoying to learn without a guide." Docker is a perfect example. Everyone needs it. The official documentation is painful. A well-structured course fixes that.
Where to Actually Sell Your Course
You have real choices here and they are not all equal. Let me break down the main platforms I have used or studied closely.
Udemy
The biggest marketplace. Massive built-in audience. The catch is their pricing model. Udemy constantly runs sales that drop your $89 course to $12.99. You do not control this. And their revenue split is 37% to you when a student finds you through Udemy organic search — though if you bring the student yourself, you keep 97%.
I think Udemy is great for getting your first sales and social proof (reviews, enrollment numbers). Not great as a long-term income strategy by itself.
Teachable
You set your own prices. You own your audience. The basic plan starts at $39/month and takes a 5% transaction fee. The Pro plan at $119/month removes that fee. I use Teachable for my main courses now because I control the pricing and I can build an email list from my students — something Udemy does not let you do properly.
Gumroad
Underrated for technical creators. No monthly fee. They take 10% of each sale. Dead simple to set up. I know creators selling PDF guides, mini-courses, and code templates on Gumroad with zero overhead. If you are just starting out and do not want to pay a monthly platform fee, Gumroad is worth looking at seriously.
Thinkific
Similar to Teachable. Free tier exists but limits you to three courses. Paid plans start at $49/month. No transaction fees on any paid plan. Good option if you want to avoid Teachable's transaction fees without committing to the Pro tier immediately.
Your Own Site
WordPress with a plugin like LearnDash ($199/year) or a standalone tool like Podia ($33/month). More work to set up. But zero platform dependency and you keep almost everything. I moved my flagship course to a self-hosted setup after hitting consistent monthly sales because the math just made more sense.
Building the Course: The Part Most People Overthink
I spent way too long trying to make my first course look perfect. Professional intro animations. Color-graded screen recordings. Custom music. It delayed my launch by six weeks and I am not sure it moved the needle at all on sales.
Here is what actually matters in a technical course:
- Clear audio. A Blue Yeti mic is about $129. A Rode NT-USB Mini is $99. Either one is fine. Bad audio kills courses. Bad video does not, nearly as much.
- Screen recording quality. OBS Studio is free and excellent. Loom is great for quick walkthroughs. Camtasia is $299 one-time if you want built-in editing.
- Logical structure. Start with the problem. Build to the solution. Do not assume what students already know.
- Short lessons. I keep mine under 8 minutes per video. People learn better in chunks. This is backed by research from MIT OpenCourseWare's engagement data — videos over 12 minutes see significant drop-off.
One thing I changed on my second course: I added a downloadable resource with every major lesson. A code file, a checklist, a reference sheet. Students love this. It gives them something to keep even if they forget the video content.
How Long Should the Course Be?
Long enough to actually teach the skill. Short enough that people finish it. This sounds obvious but most technical courses fail at both ends — they either miss important context or they pad out to 30 hours of content to feel more "premium."
My best-selling course is about 6 hours of video. That feels right for the depth of the topic. A focused beginner course on Git basics could be 2 hours. An advanced Kubernetes course might genuinely need 15 hours. Let the topic drive the length, not a sense of what seems impressive.
Pricing: What Actually Works
I have tested a lot of price points. Here is my honest read on it.
On a marketplace like Udemy, you have limited control. Set your list price at $89–$129 and accept that most sales will happen during promotions at a lower price. That is the reality of the Udemy model.
On your own platform or Teachable, I have found that $97–$197 is a solid range for a focused technical course that solves a real, specific problem. Courses above $300 need more trust signals — a known name, testimonials, maybe a community component.
"Price communicates value. A $12 course tells people it probably is not worth their full attention. A $97 course tells them this is a real investment in a real skill." — something I had to learn the hard way after underpricing my first three courses.
Do not discount aggressively out of desperation. It trains your audience to wait for sales. If you want to run a launch promotion, set a clear end date and stick to it.
Getting Your First Students Without a Big Audience
Look, most technical creators do not have a massive following. I did not when I launched. Here is what worked for me and what I have seen work for others.
Start With Reddit and Communities
Find the subreddits and Discord servers where your target student hangs out. Do not spam your course link. Spend two to three weeks genuinely answering questions and being helpful. Then when you launch, mention it once, naturally, in context. People remember helpful contributors.
Write Free Content First
Write three or four genuinely good blog posts or tutorials on the same topic as your course. Post them on your site and on platforms like dev.to or Hashnode. These rank on Google over time and send warm traffic — people who already know you know your stuff.
YouTube is Slow But Powerful
A few free tutorial videos on YouTube that relate to your course topic work incredibly well as top-of-funnel content. The video description points to your course. This is a long game but the traffic compounds over time and it is genuinely free.
Email List From Day One
Even before your course is done, collect emails. Offer a free resource — a PDF guide, a code template, a checklist — in exchange for an email address. Use ConvertKit (free up to 1,000 subscribers) or MailerLite (free up to 1,000). When you launch, you have a warm audience ready to hear about it.
Topics That Are Selling Well Right Now (and Going Into 2026)
I am not going to give you a vague list. Here are specific technical topics with real demand signals I have observed in 2024 and early 2025:
- Prompt engineering for developers — Not for general consumers, but specifically building LLM-powered apps and agents. High demand, still relatively few quality courses.
- AWS certifications prep (Solutions Architect, Developer) — Consistently among the top earners on Udemy. Amazon Web Services certifications increase salaries by an average of $15,000–$20,000 according to the 2024 Global Knowledge IT Skills and Salary Survey.
- Python for data analysis with Pandas and Polars — Polars is growing fast as an alternative to Pandas. Early movers on Polars content have very little competition.
- Kubernetes for developers (not just ops teams) — Developers are increasingly expected to understand container orchestration. A course aimed at app developers rather than DevOps engineers has an underserved angle.
- API security fundamentals — With every company building APIs and security breaches dominating headlines, this is a topic with both employer demand and individual learner interest.
- No-code and low-code tool development — Bubble, FlutterFlow, Retool. Especially strong in developing markets where people want to build products without a full engineering team.
The pattern here is not chasing the newest thing. It is finding skills where demand is clear, the existing educational resources are poor, and the skill has real career or income value for the learner.
Honest Reality Check
Teaching online is not a fast path to easy income. My first course took about 80 hours to build including planning, recording, editing, and setting up the platform. For a long time the hourly rate on that initial investment was not great.
What changed the math was compounding. A course you build once can sell for two or three years with minor updates. The effort front-loads and then levels off.
Your results will depend entirely on your topic choice, the quality of your teaching, how actively you market the course, and whether you build an audience over time. Someone in Lagos building a course on Solidity smart contracts for African developers has a real opportunity. Someone in Manila building the 400th generic Python beginner course has an uphill battle. Context matters.
This post is for educational purposes only. Results vary significantly based on individual effort, chosen topic, existing reputation, and market conditions. None of this is financial advice.
The creators I have seen do well with technical courses share one thing: they actually know their subject deeply and they are genuinely trying to help people learn it. That sounds like common sense. But it is less common than you would think. If you start there, you are already ahead of a lot of the competition.