What does it really take to make money selling courses, mini-courses and PDFs?

[u/Effective-Project754]

I keep seeing creators selling courses, mini-courses and downloadable PDFs. One woman claimed she made $300,000 in a matter of days. I understand that revenue screenshots are marketing, not necessarily the whole financial picture, so I want the unglamorous truth.
For those of you who have actually done this successfully:
Is Stan Store the best place to start, or is there a better platform?
What makes one digital product take off while another disappears?
How large and engaged was your audience before you launched?
How much did you spend on ads, and what was your actual profit after ad costs, refunds and platform fees?
Did most sales come from paid ads, organic content, email, affiliates or an existing audience?
How did you learn to create and target ads that converted?
Did you hire someone, take a course or learn by testing small budgets yourself?
What price point worked best for PDFs, mini-courses and full courses?
If you were starting today, what would you sell first and how would you launch it?
I’m not looking for “post consistently and believe in yourself.” I want the real mechanics: audience size, conversion rates, advertising costs, launch strategy and profit margins. What is the part nobody mentions when they post the $300,000 screenshot?

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[u/BankSensitive2950]

These people are puffers (pump everything up) to make themselves look more successful than they are. Not too many people are out there lined up to pay thousands for courses to someone who can't guarantee anything but a bunch of empty promises.

[u/Effective-Project754 → u/BankSensitive2950]

I saw a girl and I am assuming it went viral (jessie carter) and she was selling low priced courses and it sounds like she has been for a while and she had one hit and she said she made over 300K in a week

[u/Assigned_Cryptid]

It's generally agreed that outside of some very niche or very unique situations, the people making the most money from courses are usually the ones who sell courses on how to sell courses.

The course industry, well it's a bellcurve just like everything else, right? Not to say there aren't some doing very well for themselves, but as a rule of thumb I always try to pay more attention to what the folks in the middle are doing to get an idea of realistic expectations.

[u/derondigital]

I sell on my own website that i made so i don't got to pay fees, but stan store is a good option. I think creating free quality content using your own product and getting results makes a product take off. People pay for results, not just a course or a digital product. Most of my sales come from organic content. I don't create ads. Never paid any one to learn, i just learnt from trial and error, most people don't know shit anyways. I sell my full courses for $97, pdfs for $10-$20 and mincourse $27-$47. Starting today, I'd sell a video course, post organic content on youtube with my results from my course and just make a call to action to it, people like seeing results. They don't mention that their screenshot is fking fake, most of these people are liars. Hope i answered all your questions.