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A Vietnamese cohort course that has taught 300+ people to write in public — sold entirely on the instructor's earned credibility, which their own survey identified as the deciding factor.
more than 300 students taught in roughly two years · now run full time with a team · the founder says his projections beat what he would earn employed
They surveyed their own buyers on what decides an online course purchase. The answer was not curriculum or price — it was whether you trust the teacher. With no credentials, you build that by writing in public first.
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Halfway through analysing fifty small Western companies, the video's host stops and phones someone in Vietnam, because the obvious question about all these money-making blogs is whether any of it transfers to a market where nobody is paid in American advertising dollars. The person he calls is Tùng, who studied in the United States, came back to Vietnam, declined to take a job, and built a business around writing instead. For nearly two years he has run a class called Writing On The Net, which has taught more than 300 students. He does it full time and he has a team. The course teaches two things. First, getting past the fear of writing on the internet — which he names before any craft skill, and which anyone who has run a writing cohort will recognise as the actual blocker. Second, building a durable content-creation system: storing ideas, consuming ideas, processing them, and distributing them. His assessment of the business he is in is unusually unsentimental for someone selling into it. Blogging monetises far more slowly than video, he says, because the only channel to the reader is text, which he calls flat compared to fifteen minutes of a face and a voice. Making a living from blogging alone is very hard. Making a living from what the blog allows you to sell is a different question, and that is the one he answered.
The audience came before the class, and it came from writing in public for years rather than from any launch. By the time there was a course to sell, there were readers who already knew the work and a reputation inside Vietnam's writing community that a landing page cannot manufacture.
The quick-reference card — acquisition channels, replication playbook, and risk map — is members-only.
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Data credibility: Founder-stated, in a phone interview inside someone else's video. Tùng says Writing On The Net has run for close to two years and taught more than 300 students, that he now does it full time with a team, and that his projections beat what he would earn employed. No revenue figure, price, cohort size or completion rate is given, and it is not stated whether all 300 paid. The survey he cites on why people buy online courses is his own team's, with no sample size or methodology disclosed. The auto-captions garble his full name and the name of his own publication; the class name and the student count are clear. Everything here is one person's account of his own business, unaudited and unverified.
The first money in this line of work arrived before the course did, and from a different mechanism. With a large audience built and no product to sell, brand deals were easy to get — a post or two a week, without pushing hard on price.
The loop runs on one finding, and they went and measured it: they surveyed people about what decides whether they buy an online course, and the most important factor was the credibility of the person teaching it.
He is blunt about the timeline. Blogging and podcasting are long games — at least one to two years, and he calls that the fast version.
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