I built a premium course and sold zero copies

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Since building in public is about sharing both the wins and losses, here's a loss:<br>TL;DR: I spent months building a polished (if I may say so) course on agentic engineering and launched it to my mailing list and social channels. Not a single person bought it. The core problem: my audience was far too small for a premium launch. The course is now free on YouTube. Full story and learnings below.<br>After leaving Google last October, I started more seriously experimenting with agentic coding. One of my first experiments was an autonomous AI pipeline (built with Python, Pydantic AI, and Gemini API) that generates startup ideas. I had a hypothesis that distilling business signals and market facts from news (~1000 articles per day) would provide high signal for friction points, meta-trends, and the occasional rabbit hole, which would result in compelling and varied startup ideas. And it worked surprisingly well!<br>I bought a domain and hosted (still am!) the daily newsletter on a Ghost CMS site, published directly from my pipeline via the API. I also wrote an architecture breakdown post, which got picked up by the TLDR Data newsletter.<br>That and my LinkedIn posts (I'm fairly well connected there from my 13 years at Google and well over a decade at Silicon Valley startups before that) generated tons of traffic, before it eventually plateaued. I misinterpreted the strong interest in my eng breakdown as signal that there's a market for a course on that topic. That was my first (and probably the main) mistake.<br>So I proceeded to build the course. I decided to primarily focus the course on teaching agentic engineering and use the pipeline as a perfect example to touch on key topics. How to build iteratively with Claude Code or other AI coding tools, how to verify the results, refactor and debug as needed, improve performance using batching and parallel processing, how to use embeddings and vector similarity to ensure we don't publish the same ideas over and over, how to use synthetic data to improve the ranking functions, how to generate a text, images, and a podcast-style audio-overview, and more.<br>In a traditional, tutorial-like course, the results are generally deterministic, so you follow along by typing in the same code. But that wouldn't work in my course, due to the non-deterministic nature of agentic engineering. Students would build their own pipeline alongside me, and their results would be different from mine. I thought this might actually be a feature, not a bug - after all, we had to adapt how we teach in the age of AI somehow.<br>While I wanted to teach how to build a pipeline like mine, I didn't want to distract students with unnecessary infrastructure and production concerns. So I came up with a slightly simplified stack: SQLite3 instead of PostgreSQL, ChromaDB instead of pgvector, and local files instead of publishing to Ghost. Students could either tackle the last mile themselves (if desired), or I might publish a follow-up course that covers the productionization side. To make sure the simplified stack worked as expected, I did a full dry run of re-building my pipeline. I took lots of notes, figured out some rough edges to watch out for, and turned it into a proper script and curriculum.<br>In parallel to this, I had to figure out the business side of marketing and selling the course. I created a "lead magnet" that would hopefully drive conversions to my course via an email funnel. A nice blueprint PDF that outlined the tech stack and included the starter prompts and a CLAUDE.md file. Enough to get started building their first few pipeline steps and decide if they want to go deeper and buy the course - and hopefully useful on its own as well. I created a squeeze page on MailerLite, an email funnel with 6 carefully drafted emails (sent over a 3 week period), and started marketing the blueprint to my Ghost newsletter, LinkedIn, and on X. About 20 people downloaded it right away, and I figured the number would grow significantly, as I would continue to market the blueprint on social media and here on GammaVibe before the course launch.<br>Somewhere around this time, I also made the GammaVibe daily startup idea newsletter free (previously, free users were able to read the high level idea, but only paid users - $10 regular or $5 founder level - had access to the full post, including the business model with go-to-market strategy and revenue models, the proposed tech stack, and more). The subscriber count had plateaued anyway, and I figured the newsletter might serve better as a top-of-funnel to drive conversions for the course. I also added an optional Patreon in case anyone felt like supporting the site, but nobody ended up signing up for a membership yet. But this wasn't something I had banked on, anyway.<br>I recorded the full course over a 2 week period. I was happy with the outcome - both the recordings and the resulting pipeline code. Editing was a...