Online courses are outdated. Experts should stop recording videos and start building their own software that delivers, tracks and executes their method in one place.
Video and audio in Dutch
They worked. Past tense. Filming yourself explaining an exercise, letting people watch and figure it out, then pointing them to a community for questions. That was the model. And the community existed for one reason: because the course couldn't talk back.
Paul's argument in this episode is simple. That whole structure is obsolete. Not because knowledge transfer is dead, but because we now have better tools to do it.
Paul uses a personal trainer preparing clients for a Hyrox event as the through-line. The trainer records exercises, explains the method, adds context. And then, inevitably, sends clients to a heart rate app, a calorie tracker, a weight logging tool, and a community forum where someone will eventually give wrong advice.
That's the fragmentation problem. Your method works when people follow it completely. The moment they pull in training advice from elsewhere, workouts from another coach, or track data in five different places, your method stops working the way you designed it.
The alternative Paul describes isn't complicated:
This isn't high-level engineering. It's taking what you already know and putting it somewhere that can execute it, consistently, without you standing in the room.
Paul closes with the reframe: stop asking how to build a better course, how to give a better webinar, or how to speak to a bigger room. Start asking: how do I put what I know into software? Because once that's built, the people using it get the actual thing you designed, complete, in sequence, with nothing missing.
Video-only courses are. The format where someone watches exercises, gets sent to a community for questions, and tracks progress in three separate apps, that's outdated. The replacement isn't a better video. It's software that delivers the whole method in one place, with tracking, feedback and sequence built in.
No. Paul's point is that this isn't high-level engineering. If you understand your method well enough to teach it in a course, you understand it well enough to describe what the software needs to do. The building part has gotten significantly more accessible.
Because your method works as a system. The sequence, the exercises, the tracking, the timing, it all fits together deliberately. When a client pulls in advice from another trainer or tracks data in a different app, your method stops producing the results you designed it to produce.
It means the videos, exercises, tracking, homework submission and feedback all live in one environment you own. Clients don't get referred to Polar for heart rate or a spreadsheet for weight. Your method runs in your system, complete, from start to finish.
Paul uses the personal trainer example because it's concrete and easy to follow. The same logic applies to any expert with a repeatable method: coaches, consultants, trainers, specialists. If your expertise works because of its sequence and completeness, software protects that integrity in a way a course never could.
Want to learn more or collaborate? Feel free to reach out.
Get in touchThe post makes a strong case for replacing courses with software, but building software is a completely different skill set than teaching. How are you thinking about that gap, and does the argument actually hold for your type of expertise?
