You sit down with your notebook, your favourite pen, maybe a warm drink.
Todayâs the day youâre finally going to validate that course idea youâve been thinking about for months.
You start doing the searching, the market research.
And then you see it...
A course that looks a whole lot like what youâve been planning.
The title feels uncomfortably close to whatâs in your Google Doc, the creator has a bigger audience, their branding looks polished, they have testimonials, case studies, maybe even a big ad campaign behind them.
And very quickly, the story in your head shifts from:
âI think this could really help people." to "Great. Iâm too late. Someone already did it.â
Most people stop right there.
They close the tabs.They tell themselves theyâre being ârealistic.âThey quietly downgrade the idea from âpotential offerâ to ânever mind.â
But hereâs what I want you to sit with:
Seeing someone else teaching what you want to teach is not, by itself, evidence that you shouldnât create your course.
It might actually be one of the strongest indicators that youâre onto something valuable.
In this weekâs episode of The ART of Online Course Creation, Iâm digging into that moment:
- Whatâs really going on when you find âyourâ course already out there
- How to look at competitors without spiraling into self-doubt
- The difference between âit already existsâ and âthereâs no room for meâ
- A behind-the-scenes story about how I navigated this when I saw a very big, very visible creator teaching something that looked a lot like what I do
Iâm also sharing why some of the popular âvalidation shortcutsâ (like quizzes that tell you if your idea is profitable, or AI tools that promise to do all your market research for you) can leave you more confused, and what to do instead.
If you have:
- a course idea in your notebook
- a half-finished outline in a Google Doc
- or just a topic you canât stop thinking aboutâŚ
âŚbut you keep seeing other people doing something similar and using that as a reason to hesitate, this episode is for you.
And when youâre done listening, Iâd love to hear in the comments:
Have you ever found âyourâ course already out there?What story did you start telling yourself in that moment, and how are you choosing to see it now?