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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.
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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.
A cohort-based class, run in Vietnamese, that has taught more than 300 students over roughly two years. The syllabus, as he describes it, has two halves. The first is psychological: getting over the fear of writing on the internet. He names it first, ahead of any technique, which tells you what actually stops people. The second is a system for making content sustainably, taught as a pipeline — storing ideas, consuming ideas, processing them into something, then distributing. That framing is the differentiator. It is not a course about sentences; it is a course about not running dry, aimed at people who intend to publish for years. Our read: the pipeline framing is why this sells to a broader audience than writers. Anyone who has to produce content regularly — a founder, a marketer, a consultant building a reputation — has the same problem, which is not that they cannot write a paragraph but that they cannot keep going. Positioning a writing course as an output-system course widens the market considerably without changing what you teach. The cohort format is doing the other half of the work. The stated blocker is fear, and fear is not solved by a video library. It is solved by a deadline, a group and someone reading what you wrote.
Course fees, paid by more than 300 students over about two years. That is the only revenue mechanism described, and no price or total is given. He lays out the two monetisation routes available to anyone making content, and he has chosen the second. Route one is selling access to your audience: brands book you to write posts that sell their product or raise their profile. Route two is productising yourself — books, courses, merchandise. He notes that books are common among bloggers specifically. His own experience of route one is the reason he sits in route two. With a large audience, brand deals came easily and he did not push hard on volume or price. The verdict was that it is nice to have and does not change your life. Our read: the arithmetic behind that verdict is why so many creators end up here. Brand deals price your audience once and pay a fraction of what reaching that audience is worth to the buyer. A course prices your knowledge and can be sold to the same audience repeatedly, at a margin you set. The trade is that route one requires nothing but reach, and route two requires you to build, deliver and support a thing — which is the moment it stops being a side project and becomes a company with a team, which is exactly what happened here.
Not discussed in the interview. This is our estimate. Our read: a cohort course is a high-margin, low-capital business with one expensive input, which is the instructor's live hours. Tooling costs are trivial — a payment processor, a community space, a video call tool, a place to host lesson material — and would run to low hundreds of dollars a month at this size. The real cost is teaching and feedback, and it does not scale the way software does. Reading three hundred people's writing is three hundred people's writing. That is presumably why there is a team rather than a solo operator, and it is also the structural reason he talks about the pressure of having to sustain that team: fixed payroll against revenue that arrives in lumps at the start of each cohort. The cash-flow shape is unusually good, though. Students pay before delivery, so each cohort funds its own teaching, and there is no inventory and no receivables. A business like this needs almost no working capital — which is why it is a realistic thing to start while employed, and why his advice to do exactly that is consistent with how he runs it.
Copy the survey. They asked buyers what decides an online course purchase and got back an answer that reshapes where you spend your time: it is the teacher's credibility, not the curriculum, the price or the platform. That finding tells you to spend the first year publishing rather than building course material, and it is testable in any market in an afternoon. Copy the two-part syllabus. Leading with the fear rather than the craft is what makes a cohort worth more than a recorded library, and it is the honest diagnosis of why most people who want to write never publish. Copy the sequencing advice, which he gives as his main recommendation: high-intensity part-time first, then full-time only when the projections are clear. He follows it himself. Our read: change the language and the market, because that is the opportunity this entry demonstrates. The host called Vietnam precisely to ask whether Western content business models transfer, and the answer he got is that they do, more slowly, with smaller numbers. A cohort course in a language where the English-speaking course industry does not compete has far less competition and a genuinely underserved audience. Change the niche too — 'writing online' is broad; the same class aimed at one profession that must publish to advance would sell at a higher price to a clearer buyer.
The business is the instructor. Buyers are choosing a person, by his own survey's finding, which means reputational damage, burnout or simply wanting to do something else all hit revenue directly. There is no brand here that survives its founder losing interest. Delivery does not scale, and that caps growth in a way software never is. More students means more teaching hours or more teachers, and more teachers dilutes the exact credibility that sells the seats. The pressure risk is the one he raises himself, unprompted: going full time changes creating from something you do when it is enjoyable to the thing your income and your team depend on. He recommends mini experiments before committing precisely because this catches people out. Our read: the live threat to a writing course in 2026 is the obvious one. If a model drafts competently in your language, the perceived value of learning to write drops even where the real value does not. The defensible version of this course is the half he already leads with — having something worth saying, publishing it under your own name, and not running dry — because none of that is what a drafting tool replaces. The vulnerable version is any course that is really about sentence construction.
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