I want to talk about a pattern I’ve watched play out dozens (hundreds? thousands?) of times in the last few years — and I’m watching it accelerate right now with the rise of the “digital income for moms” niche I happen to operate in.
Someone opens an Instagram account. In 60 days they have 4,000 followers. In 90 days they launch a course. The course is about how to grow an Instagram account and make money selling courses. Their proof that it works is the course.
If you read that and felt a little uncomfortable, good! That discomfort is your instincts working correctly.
I’m writing this because I’m in this space and I think the space has a major credibility problem. I also want to be clear about exactly who I am and what I do (and don’t do) so you can make your own call about whether to trust anything I put out.
First, Let Me Tell You What I Don’t Teach
I don’t teach social media growth. I don’t teach you how to go viral, how to get followers, or how to build an audience on Instagram. I’m not a social media strategist and I’ve never claimed to be. My own account is a few months old. Why would I sell you a course on something I haven’t done at scale myself? I will teach social media strategy, because strategy and growth are not one in the same. I can teach you about hooks, because hooks don’t apply exclusively to Instagram.
I also don’t teach you how to become a coach, how to do UGC, or how to start a dropshipping store. I’m not a generalist who bundles everything into one $97 course called “Make Money Online.”
I spent close to a decade doing growth marketing. Real clients, real campaigns, real budgets. Agency work across SEO strategy, paid advertising, and content. I worked on campaigns for Durex AU, Nurofen, and international Reckitt Benckiser brands. I worked with LexisNexis Global. These are not small businesses with forgiving margins — these are global brands where bad strategy costs real money and nobody lets it slide.
I got laid off in February 2026. It was not because I was bad at my job (in fact, my whole department, one account manger, and the Group Managing Director were all laid off as well), but because the industry consolidated and my role went with it. That’s what pushed me to build something of my own. I now teach moms how to build digital product businesses and use AI to systematize their work. That’s it. That’s the lane. I stay in it.
The reason I’m saying this explicitly is because in this niche, everyone teaches everything. You’ll find the same person selling a course on email marketing, a course on Instagram Reels, a course on Pinterest, a course on how to launch a course, a course on mindset, and a course on passive income — all at once. Without ever having been a professional in any of those areas.
That’s arbitrage, not expertise. They’re one step ahead of you, packaging that step as a product, and calling it a business.
The Course-as-Proof Scam (And How It Actually Works)
Here’s the structure. Pay attention because once you see it, you can’t unsee it.
Step 1: Learn something — maybe from a course, maybe from YouTube, maybe from a book.
Step 2: Make a small amount of money doing the thing. Or don’t. Just talk about the potential.
Step 3: Sell a course about the thing to people who are where you were in Step 1.
Step 4: Use the course revenue as “proof” that the method works.
Step 5: Screenshot the revenue. Post it. Sell more courses.
The problem isn’t that people are making money. The problem is that the thing being sold as “proof” is the sale itself. The income came from teaching — not from doing. And the people buying believe they’re buying access to hard-won expertise when what they’re actually getting is a summary of someone else’s free content, masquerading with a Canva template and a PayPal screenshot.
If someone’s primary source of income is selling a course on how to make income — ask yourself what happens to their students. If the strategy works, there should be students making money outside of selling the course. If the only success stories are other people selling the same course, that’s a closed loop. It’s not a business model. It’s a pyramid with better branding.
The online course market is enormous. The global online learning market reached $203.81 billion in 2025 and is projected to hit $279 billion by 2029 (Statista via Ruzuku). That growth is real and the opportunity for people with genuine expertise is genuinely huge. But it’s also attracted a flood of people who skipped the “develop real expertise” step and went straight to “sell the expertise.”
The Specific Language That Should Make You Pause
There’s a vocabulary that’s been developed specifically to sound credible without committing to anything verifiable. Once you know what to look for, you’ll spot it in about 15 seconds.
- “I’ve helped thousands of women build income online” — How? Doing what exactly? What were the results? Who are they?
- “I went from broke to six figures” — From what? In how long? Doing what specifically? Selling courses about going from broke to six figures?
- “I’ve been in the digital space for years” — The digital space is not a credential. Every person with a smartphone has been in the digital space.
- “I teach moms how to build passive income” — Passive income from what? Built using which skills? That you acquired how?
- “My students are seeing amazing results” — Show me the students. What did they build? What are they earning outside of selling your course?
- “I’m passionate about helping women achieve financial freedom” — Passion is not a qualification. I’m passionate about horses but I shouldn’t be charging you for dressage lessons.
Compare that to what actual expertise sounds like. When I tell you I ran paid campaigns for global CPG brands and watched where the budget actually leaked — that’s specific. That’s something you can push back on. That’s experience with stakes attached.
Vague language isn’t always intentional deception. Sometimes it’s just someone who hasn’t thought hard enough about what they actually know versus what they read once. But either way, vague credentials shouldn’t get your money.
The “I Teach Everything” Problem
This is specific to the moms-building-online-income niche and I want to be direct about it because it affects how you evaluate everyone here, including me.
The dominant pattern is one person, many courses, zero deep expertise in any specific area. You’ll see the same creator selling courses on email marketing, Pinterest strategy, Instagram growth, launching a digital product, using AI, mindset work, and time management. All simultaneously, all positioned as equally authoritative.
That’s not possible. Nobody is a legitimate expert in all of those things. What’s actually happening is that they’re generalists who’ve done surface-level research into each topic, packaged it with good branding, and leaned on the emotional pull of the audience to carry the sale.
When someone teaches everything, their courses on any individual topic are by definition shallow. You might get an overview. You won’t get depth. You won’t get the specifics that come from actually doing something for years inside real organizations. In marketing — the field I worked in — shallow information isn’t just unhelpful. It’s expensive. You act on it, it doesn’t work, and you’ve lost both the course fee and the months you spent executing a strategy that was never going to land.
I teach digital product creation and AI-powered business systems for moms. That’s what I know. I know it because I spent years in growth marketing before I ever thought about selling a course. I can tell you why a funnel breaks at the checkout page. I can tell you what a realistic conversion rate on cold traffic actually looks like. I can tell you which email sequences convert and which ones feel like they were written by a robot with no strategy behind them, because I’ve seen both inside real campaigns.
What I can’t tell you (and won’t pretend to) is how to go viral on TikTok, how to build a coaching business, or how to scale a handmade product on Etsy. Different lane. Different skills. Skills I don’t have. I’ll tell you that directly and point you somewhere else.
What Real Credentials Actually Look Like
They’re not always formal. You don’t need a degree to teach something. But something has to have happened outside of selling the course before the course can be considered credible.
Research on what students actually pay for is consistent: it’s human expertise and demonstrated competence — not production quality or polished branding (Ruzuku State of Online Courses 2026). What that means in practice is that people are trying to buy genuine experience. The problem is they often can’t tell whether they’re getting it.
- A history of doing the thing before teaching it — past work, clients, content that predates the course launch
- Specific failures. Anyone who’s done something for real has failed at it. No failure stories means no real experience.
- Results that live outside their own ecosystem — students making money through means other than selling the same course
- A defined lane. Real experts know what they don’t know and say so out loud.
- Specificity in their background. Not “I’ve worked with big brands” but which brands, doing what, with what results.
The FTC Angle Nobody Talks About
If you’re making income claims — even implied ones — there are rules. The FTC’s updated Endorsement Guides require that testimonials and earnings claims reflect what a typical person can expect to achieve, not cherry-picked outliers (FTC.gov).
When you see a screenshot of $10,000 in a week on someone’s sales page, that screenshot is supposed to come with context. What did they spend on ads? How many years of audience building preceded that week? Is that a typical result or a launch spike? Without that context it’s not just misleading — it may be legally problematic.
The 2025 Influencer Trust Index from BBB National Programs found that 70% of consumers feel deceived when they discover a relationship that wasn’t properly disclosed (BBB National Programs). The same dynamic applies to results. When the success stories on a sales page came from people who got free access or were part of the creator’s inner circle — that context matters. Its absence is a credibility problem whether or not anything illegal occurred.
I’m Not Saying Everyone Is a Scammer
There are real experts in this space teaching real things and getting real results for their students. Some may have started just teaching the course that they purchased and then turned into actual experts. I adore Fran Fields and Maria Wendt. They know a lot of shit and are genuine, knowledgeable, bad ass boss babes. Digital products as a business model are not a scam — the opportunity is legit. The issue is that the low barrier to entry has flooded the niche with people who positioned themselves as experts before they became one.
Some of them are well-intentioned. They believe what they’re selling. They learned something, got excited, and wanted to share it. But enthusiasm without experience has a ceiling — and that ceiling usually appears right when you need the information most.
The people who bothered me most in agency work weren’t the obvious grifters. They were the enthusiastic amateurs charging expert prices. The person who read three articles on SEO and is now selling a $297 SEO course to small business owners who don’t know enough to push back. The person who ran one successful Instagram account and is now selling a “social media mastery” program.
They’re not lying exactly. But there’s a gap between what’s implied and what’s delivered. And I watched that gap cost clients real money — campaigns built on half-understood strategy, SEO work done by people who’d never actually ranked a competitive page, ads run by people who’d only ever boosted posts.
I worked on campaigns for Durex AU, Nurofen, RB brands, and LexisNexis Global. Those organizations don’t hire people who learned something last Tuesday. That standard exists for a reason. It should exist in this space too.
I now live in Cluj-Napoca, Romania with my husband and two boys, building this business without a local network or a ready-made audience. Everything I teach, I built or tested myself first. That’s not remarkable. It’s the baseline. It should be the baseline for everyone in this space. The fact that it isn’t is exactly why I wrote this post.
How to Vet Someone Before You Spend Money on Their Course
- What did they do before the course existed? Search their name. Look for work or content that predates their current brand. If everything starts the same month they launched their first product, that’s information.
- Can they name specific failures? Real experience includes specific failures with specific lessons. No failure stories = no real experience.
- Are their success stories from outside their ecosystem? Students making money through the thing taught — not students who went on to sell the same course.
- Do they stay in one lane? Genuine expertise is narrow. Anyone teaching ten different things is deep in none of them.
- Are income claims contextualized? Timelines, ad spend, prior audience size, whether results are typical — that context should be there.
- Are partnerships and affiliates disclosed? Per FTC guidelines, they’re required to be. If they’re not, that’s a character signal.
The Bottom Line
The online education space is full of people who learned something last Tuesday and are selling a course about it by Friday. Some are harmless. Some will cost you real money and real time. And in a niche specifically targeting moms who are trying to build income (women who are often time-poor, budget-conscious, and doing something genuinely hard) the stakes of buying the wrong course are higher than people acknowledge.
You deserve to know where someone’s knowledge came from before you hand them your money. You deserve specifics, not vibes. You deserve a teacher who stays in their lane and is honest about where the lane ends.
I won’t sell you a social media growth course. I won’t sell you a coaching program. I won’t teach you how to dropship. I teach digital products and AI-powered business systems because that’s what I’ve built and what I know. Most moms building income online are not at the stage where they need to know SEO, GEO, content strategy, or the like. But if you want, I can teach you those things too. Everything else I’ll tell you to find someone else for.
And if the person you find doesn’t have a clear answer to “what did you do before you started teaching this?” — keep looking.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is it wrong to sell a course if you’re still learning?
Not inherently — if you’re transparent about it and price accordingly. The problem is when someone presents themselves as an expert while they’re still a student of the thing they’re teaching. The issue isn’t the knowledge gap. It’s the misrepresentation.
How do I know if income claims on a sales page are real?
Look for context. Real income claims come with timelines, expenses, and an honest statement about whether those results are typical. A screenshot with no context isn’t proof — it’s marketing. Ask what the person spent to generate that revenue and whether it’s happened consistently since.
What if a course is cheap — does that change things?
No. Bad advice at $27 can cost you months of wasted effort, which is worth far more than $27. Evaluate the source the same way regardless of price.
Can someone without formal credentials legitimately teach something?
Yes — formal credentials aren’t the bar. Real-world application is. The question isn’t whether you have a degree. It’s whether you’ve actually done the thing, at scale, in the real world, with stakes attached.
My degree is in biochemistry, not marketing. I taught myself marketing back in the early 2010s and began agency work a few years later.
What if I already bought a course and feel misled?
Request a refund if there’s a guarantee. Leave an honest, factual review. And use it as calibration for what to look for next time. One bad purchase doesn’t mean the model is broken — it means you’ve gotten better at vetting.
How is what you teach different from what you’re describing?
I spent close to a decade in growth marketing and SEO agency work — with clients including Durex AU, Nurofen, RB international brands, and LexisNexis Global — before I built a single digital product. I stay inside one lane and I won’t sell you anything I haven’t built and tested myself first.