I’m the creator of Course in a Box, and a few other online ventures over the last several years. It all started with YouTube. I got serious about making YouTube videos in 2020, sharing tech reviews, audio tutorials, and lifestyle content. I grew my channel to 40,000+ subscribers and millions of total views. I’ve earned tens of thousands of dollars from YouTube ads alone, and tens of thousands more from sponsorships with companies like Disney and Mint Mobile. YouTube showed me it’s possible to turn an online presence into a business.
In 2021, I started offering digital products on Buy Me a Coffee, a leading online storefront. To date, I’ve sold just under 1,500 copies of my digital products. I even worked directly with the company, and you’ll see my face on a series of tutorial videos they released on their YouTube channel. Storefronts like Buy Me a Coffee are good for getting started, but I was thinking bigger than Lightroom presets and PDF downloads.
Creators all intuitively know there’s a difference between storefronts and running your own platform, an independent business. These professional, polished courses perform better than storefronts too. Your average storefront has a sub-1% conversion rate. Exceeding 10-20% is reasonable for a bespoke, polished platform with its own identity. That’s the bitter truth with platforms like Whop and Skool. Anyone can offer a course or community with very little effort, and that’s their downfall. Take a look at their explore pages; they’re AI-slop galore. You’ve probably inferred by this point that I wanted to build my own info product. And indeed, I wanted to create the all-in-one platform for aspiring music artists: the Bedroom Artist Academy.
I’d make it an entire curriculum of video content that would live inside a real member dashboard—no third-party branding, with a secure checkout and login. Beautiful design for the dashboard and the landing page, and extra features like email marketing, robust file handling, and a real Discord integration—not an exclusive link, but a server role that would automatically be removed when members stopped their subscription.
Unfortunately, existing course-hosting platforms didn’t fit these needs. I’ve already addressed the community-focused platforms, but even cheaper course-focused platforms like Teachable, starting at $40/mo, have many drawbacks. Their branding is all over the place, there’s no email marketing, no Discord integration, and features like file uploads and live sessions are severely limited. On the other hand, platforms like Kajabi, starting at $179/mo, will bleed you dry as you get set up and even as you build momentum. That’s on top of being ecosystem-locked.
So I built the stack myself, first for the Bedroom Artist Academy, then into an all-in-one dashboard that could be used for any course. I used Framer for the gorgeous, no-code UI. Cloudflare for video streaming, file storage, and backend logic. And seamless connections with Stripe and Lemon Squeezy as payment providers. Then I built in fleshed-out but optional integrations with Resend and Discord for email marketing and auto-revoking server roles.
And I did the dumbest thing a business owner could do: I removed the ecosystem lock so you can cut recurring fees to $0 a month. $35/mo gives you our white-glove support as we take care of maintenance and the backend ourselves. Bring your own Cloudflare account, and you can cut recurring costs to $0/mo. I think Course in a Box is the best course-hosting platform available. Get started today.
