May 20, 2021 · 1h 6m · my-first-million
How Course Businesses Work & How Irish Pubs as a Service is Making Millions | My First Million #183
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gold bands on the timeline = statements, start to end. Hover to read, click to jump. CC turns on captions
In this episode of My First Million, hosts Sam Parr and Sean Puri break down the lucrative business models powering online education—ranging from solo creators to billion-dollar enterprise B2B training platforms—while brainstorming real-world opportunities in turnkey physical retail, niche hobbyist subcultures, and commercial real estate arbitrage.
How this conversation actually went
Every chapter scored 0–10 on four independent dynamics. Hover any point for the reasoning behind the score. The hosts hold 99.6% of the talking time here. How this is scored →
The hosts as informed peer 6.1 Guest teaching 3.9 Guest disagreement 2.3 The hosts pushing back 2.0
speaking balance: gold is the hosts, purple is the guest (3 minute bins)
Sharpest disagreement ▶ 17:17 Immediate rejection of the class framing
Shaan forcefully interrupts Sam to reject calling On Deck a class, correcting him that it functions as a modern, unbundled business school built around networking.
Hardest push from the hosts ▶ 54:37 Direct dismissal of clear ice business thesisSam flatly refuses Shaan's trend suggestion, calling clear ice stupid and challenging whether the market size is remotely meaningful.
Biggest teaching moment ▶ 17:34 Reframing cohort programs as career pivotsShaan breaks down the true structure and value proposition of On Deck's cohort tracks, educating Sam on why participants pay for network access over curriculum.
The host holds their own ▶ 37:00 Dissecting Pluralsight's enterprise sales engineSam outlines specific operational details of B2B education giants, citing quota structures, sales tactics, and enterprise L&D procurement habits.
the scores for every segment, with the reasoning behind each
| Chapter | Topic | The hosts as informed peer | Guest teaching | Guest disagreement | The hosts pushing back | Why |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Casual Banter: Outfits, Reading Systems, and Book Budgets | 5 | 2 | 1 | 1 | Sam and Shaan engage in lighthearted banter regarding wardrobe and personal reading habits. Both share their philosophies on skimming many books while mastering only a select few. | |
| Twitter Feud: Jake Paul's Marketing Genius vs. Taylor Lorenz | 6 | 2 | 3 | 1 | Shaan recounts his viral Twitter conflict with NYT reporter Taylor Lorenz over Jake Paul's marketing tactics. Sam validates Shaan's premise that attention generation is independent of moral endorsement. | |
| Debating On Deck: Online Course or Modern Business School? | 6 | 6 | 5 | 4 | Shaan firmly pushes back against Sam labeling On Deck as merely an online course, clarifying that it acts as an unbundled modern business school centered on networking. Sam challenges the scalability of that exact network model. | |
| Course Business Breakdown: Solo Creators and High-Ticket Coaching | 7 | 4 | 1 | 1 | The hosts break down the unit economics of solo creator course businesses, citing examples like Ramit Sethi, Jack Butcher, and high-ticket real estate coaching. They analyze how creators scale from low-ticket info products to five-figure advisory packages. | |
| Mass-Market Education: Masterclass Economics and Completion Rates | 7 | 6 | 3 | 3 | Shaan shares inside numbers on Masterclass production spend and subscription retention, while Sam highlights abysmal industry completion rates. They debate whether completion rates actually matter to revenue sustainability. | |
| The B2B Training Empire: Pluralsight, Salesmanship, and Corporate LMS | 7 | 5 | 2 | 2 | Sam lays out the enterprise sales engine driving B2B training giants like Pluralsight, explaining how they tap into corporate L&D budgets. Shaan compares this top-down corporate procurement model to modern bottom-up SaaS adoption. | |
| Business Idea: Irish Pubs as a Service and Turnkey Retail Concepts | 6 | 4 | 2 | 2 | Shaan introduces the Irish Pub Company's turnkey pub-in-a-box model and brainstorms licensing IP for similar packaged hospitality concepts. Sam questions whether these concepts risk becoming generic franchise models without proper differentiation. | |
| Niche Trend Analysis: Clear Ice and Obsessive DIY Hobbies | 5 | 4 | 4 | 4 | Shaan pitches the trend of high-end clear ice as a niche DIY passion category, but Sam bluntly rejects the premise as too niche and uninteresting to warrant a venture. | |
| San Francisco Real Estate Arbitrage: Repurposing Commercial Vacancies | 6 | 3 | 1 | 1 | The hosts brainstorm arbitrage plays on heavily discounted commercial real estate in San Francisco, discussing cloud kitchens, distributed micro-campuses, and startup incubators taking long-term discounted leases. | |
| The Extended Stay Revolution: Airbnb, Multi-City Living, and Nomad Housing | 6 | 3 | 1 | 1 | Shaan discusses buying Airbnb stock based on the explosive growth of 30-plus day bookings, while Sam outlines the multi-city living playbook and startup competitors tackling medium-term corporate housing. |
Statements from this episode (17)
Sam Parr: Online courses are one of the easiest ways to make $1M/year
“I think it's one of the easiest ways to make a million dollars a year.”
Puri: Taylor Lorenz builds brand by picking Twitter fights with tech founders
“Her brand of self-promoting herself as a journalist is confrontation. She gets in confrontations with Keith Raboi, with Balaji, with Naval, with whoever, right? She just goes and picks fights on Twitter with Marc Andreessen. And so she goes to the biggest name…”
Puri: On Deck is an unbundled, digital modern business school
“OnDeck is basically like a modern day business school. So why do people go to business school? People go to business school because they want to build a network. They want to maybe learn about business and they're looking to kind of like pivot their career in …”
Parr: On Deck cannot scale without raising prices or diluting network
“Well, then in that case, I would say the likelihood that they're going to be quite huge, I think, is actually lower. It would actually be better if they were a course business, because the problem with that is they're either going to have to raise prices to be…”
Parr: Solo course businesses struggle to scale beyond $10M annual revenue
“It's pretty hard. I think to get past ten million dollars a year in revenue on that. Not that like that should be the goal necessarily, but like it definitely caps out relatively low.”
Puri: MasterClass spends over $500,000 per course on production alone
“They spend upwards of half a million dollars per masterclass just on the production value alone. Even their first one was over 500,000 dollars.”
Puri: Lambda School achieved 75%-plus completion with live cohorts and filters
“Lambda School switched to live cohort based. And with a clear, like sort of a high bar for entry. ... And so because of the filter on the front end, plus the format being live and in a peer group, they had like 75% plus completion rates.”
Parr: Multiple B2B corporate training companies generate $300M-$500M annually
“There's actually a bunch of more, a bunch more. And they, there's many of them that do 304 105 hundred million dollars a year in revenue.”
Puri: Most corporate LMS training content sits completely untouched
“The amount of time an employee is going to carve out to just do optional education is so low that I just think that most of the things that live in the what's it called? The learning manager or whatever, like the LMS learning management system inside companies…”
Parr: Companies buy corporate training platforms as recruiting perks, not education
“These courses, the truth is it's not actually about teaching your workers something good. It's about offering it. And if they use it fine, but the fact that you offer it makes you look better and you can hire more people.”
Puri: Irish Pub Company sells turnkey bar kits for $1M-$4M
“The Irish pub company is one of my favorite companies. They charge one to four million dollars for an Irish bar in a box, which basically means it's an Irish bar as a service.”
Parr: Ghostwriting service Book in a Box reached eight figures in revenue
“I had a friend that did book in a box and they would write a book for you. I think it was making eight figures in revenue”
Parr: Unnamed beer-tracking app generates tens of millions in annual revenue
“I interviewed a guy to work at the hustle and he worked at one of these companies and it was like a tens of millions, maybe even close to hundreds of millions of dollar revenue business. And all it was an app where you could track all the beers that you drink.”
Puri: Tech Giants Took Nearly $1B in SF Lease Write-Downs Post-COVID
“There's two hundred million dollars of real estate impairments in the past year since COVID. It's almost a billion if you add in the lease related write downs from large companies like Salesforce, Dropbox, Uber, PayPal, Zendesk, just getting rid of their real …”
Puri: SF Subleasable Office Space Tripled to 10 Million Square Feet
“The amount of vacant and subleasable space was ten million square feet in twenty-twenty-one. In twenty-nineteen, that was three million, right? So it's tripled the amount of available subleasable square square footage.”
Parr: WeWork and similar coworking spaces will make a massive comeback
“I think now it's like this makes sense in a lot of these cities, these, the WeWorks of the world. And not only that, I think that they're just going to come back like crazy, because every employee says the exact same thing. Well, I would love to work from home…”