5. Consulting and Online Learning

I used to wonder: an hour of consulting is more expensive than an online course, so why is consulting still such a good business?

Later, I understood. Their starting points and goals are fundamentally different, making them impossible to compare directly. Especially as I broke away from my old mindset and learned to see the world from a broader perspective, I realized that the amount of detours a good consultation can save you is beyond imagination.

For example, when learning an instrument, we hire a teacher; when working out, we get a personal trainer; when exploring a new field, we seek out someone in that industry. Even though it costs more upfront, in the long run, it saves you from wandering down the wrong paths.

In many cases, your problems can indeed be solved with tutorials on the internet or ChatGPT, and I even recommend searching online or asking ChatGPT before booking a consultation. However, there is one thing that is very hard to find online: experience and insight.

When you have decades of experience in an industry and have handled enough real-world cases, you have an edge over others—you possess both the macro perspective and the granular, practical know-how.

Take setting up a server, for instance. With so many providers on the market and hundreds of services across AWS and GCP, how do you choose? If you want to launch a service at the lowest possible cost, what architecture or tech stack should you pick? What are the pros and cons of managed services? Does it support SSH access? How are backups handled?

For these questions, online articles and tutorials often only offer pricing and spec comparisons. But specific configurations, development workflows, and trade-offs require accumulated experience to distill into meaningful insights. Choosing something just because it’s cheap might come back to bite you elsewhere, or you might waste money on features you never end up using—burning cash before your product even turns a profit.

Charging for one’s own experience makes complete sense and is often far more valuable than an ordinary online course. You can find many online course materials freely on the web, but the kind of hard-earned experience mentioned above can only come from spending years in the trenches.

Looking at it from another angle, another approach is to break online course content down into bite-sized pieces and focus on highly specific niches—like how to set up a Stripe account from scratch, how to choose your website builder, or how to start an e-commerce business (further broken down by product category). These courses may have a smaller audience, but for those who need them, the demand is urgent and the value delivered is substantial.

I also love online courses. Rather than just the knowledge itself, I look forward to seeing the instructor’s perspective: how they help students absorb knowledge, how they break down concepts, and what I consider a crucial element—the community.

Lastly, if you’re interested in a consultation, feel free to check here. If there’s anything I can help you with, let’s chat! I’ve tried to lay out my background and experience as clearly as possible so that you have plenty of context before booking—reach out only if you truly need it.