Before the Monetization Course, Ask Why Customers Pay

What I Wonder About When I See Monetization Courses

On social media, I often come across posts about getting rich with AI, earning ₩10,000,000 (~$7,200) a month from content, or achieving financial freedom through knowledge-based side businesses. Whenever I see the word “monetization,” I tend to take a look myself.

But after reading these income-focused pitches, I often find that the essential details are missing: who needed what, what the seller actually did for them, and why the customer paid again. That process is what I’m curious about. An instructor’s revenue figures alone don’t tell you whether students can achieve the same results.

Wanting to make money is a perfectly natural goal. But if you start by hunting for ways to make money, what you’re actually selling to customers can get lost. You need to first identify whose problem you can solve and how, before you can work out concrete pricing and sales methods.

Every Side Hustle Requires Different Work

If you’re trying to earn extra income while holding a full-time job, your available time is limited. Whatever side hustle you choose, you have to find customers and deliver on your promises within that time. Even among the methods you see most often on social media, what you need to prepare differs case by case.

• To earn ad and affiliate revenue, you need content and distribution channels that people keep coming back to.
• To sell goods online, you need to calculate what’s left after subtracting not just your purchase cost but shipping, returns, and advertising expenses.
• To sell products under your own name, you’re responsible not just for building recognition but for product quality and customer service.
• To sell an e-book or a course, you actually need to be able to teach what the buyer wants to learn.

Mixed in among these are courses that sell a method that worked in the past as if it were still easily reproducible today. If the market has changed but all you’re shown is a screenshot of past revenue, it’s hard for the buyer to judge whether the same conditions apply now.

You also shouldn’t project your side-hustle income from a handful of success stories. In Bankrate’s 2025 U.S. survey, side-hustlers earned an average of $885 a month, with a median of $200. The midpoint where half the respondents fell was far below the average. This isn’t a survey of students from any specific Korean course, but it does show why you shouldn’t treat an average figure or a headline success story as your own expected income. Bankrate’s 2025 survey findings

Look at What You’ll Learn, Not the Number of Lectures

What bothers me about how monetization courses are sold is the way they present the number of lectures as proof of quality. Split the same 12 minutes of material into four short videos, and the lecture count quadruples. Repeat this enough times to build a “100-lecture” course, and the number alone tells you nothing about what it actually teaches.

Splitting lectures into short segments isn’t inherently bad — it can help you learn a concept and practice it right away. The problem is treating the number of lectures as equivalent to the amount of learning, or padding out a table of contents just to justify the price.

Length doesn’t guarantee depth, either. A long lecture can just repeat the same explanation, while a short lesson paired with enough practice and feedback can teach you plenty. To judge a course, look at what you’ll actually be able to do afterward, whether there are hands-on assignments, and what kind of help you get when you’re stuck.

I’m also wary of claims like “what you learn in university is useless — learn this instead and you’ll make money.” Pointing out the shortcomings of traditional education is fair game. But that doesn’t erase the responsibility to show exactly what problem your own course solves.

Even Handing Out Coupons Requires Business Design

This is similar to how I think about GTM strategy. GTM, or go-to-market strategy, is about deciding who you sell a product to, at what price, and through what channel. Even running a single promotional campaign requires you to consider the benefit that flows to the customer alongside each company’s role and cost burden.

Say a foreign SaaS company wants to offer a $20 discount to customers in the Korean market. A local partner could take part by purchasing the coupons at $10 each, distributing them to customers, and billing headquarters for the agreed promotional cost.

Here, the $20 benefit the customer receives, the $10 the partner pays to acquire the coupon, and the promotional fee headquarters reimburses are three separate line items. You need to first map out exactly what money changes hands between headquarters and the partner before you can calculate the real burden. If headquarters agreed to reimburse $10 per coupon, that promotional cost is half of $20 — but the entire coupon-purchase-and-settlement structure doesn’t automatically cut headquarters’ costs in half.

You also shouldn’t equate a coupon’s face-value benefit with the company’s actual cash outlay, since revenue change from the discount, the cost of delivering the service, and the partner settlement amount can all differ. On top of that, you need to check how many of the distributed coupons were actually redeemed, and whether those customers keep paying afterward.

What I want to point out is the value of this kind of design. What matters isn’t the fact that a lot of coupons were handed out, but what role headquarters and the partner each played and how much was spent to acquire each customer. You can only keep the business going once you’ve confirmed that the same approach works on the next customer, too.

Oswarld’s Lens

I’ve experienced both sides — about 10 years as an employee, and several years as a business owner. As a GTM strategy consultant, I’ve helped foreign companies enter the Korean market, and starting out as a one-person company, I eventually came to sign contracts with large global firms.

At first, I’d hear reactions like, “How could a one-person company possibly work with us?” But once I demonstrated the value I could provide and showed I could deliver those results repeatedly, the contract discussions moved forward. Because of this experience, whenever someone talks about revenue, I look first at why the customer is willing to pay.

Among the clients I’ve worked with, some in Korea would readily pay for a monetization course but balk at consulting fees to solve their own specific business problems. Some seemed to think a meal and some friendly advice ought to suffice. By contrast, some overseas clients treated paying an expert to help them enter an unfamiliar market as a perfectly natural cost of doing business.

I think this difference comes down to what each side considers worth paying for. That’s not to say every Korean client and every overseas client falls neatly into these camps. But the difference I felt in practice was real, and it’s worth thinking about if you’re running a business.

Some people need a course, others need consulting. You first need to figure out whether what’s stuck is a concept you haven’t learned yet or a decision about your own business’s pricing or distribution structure. If it’s the latter, I think you’re better off getting specific help from an expert who deals with that exact problem than buying a broad course that promises to make you money.

You need to do what the customer actually needs, and still be able to keep the business running after subtracting your costs from what you’re paid. I call this repeatable value. Even a product you sell only once has meaning if it delivers the utility you promised the customer. But to generate ongoing income, you also need to prepare how you’ll find the next customer and maintain the same quality.

In 2026, I plan to share, through actual projects, the approach I use to design and grow a business. If you have questions, feel free to send me an email — I’ll answer within the scope of what I’ve experienced.

The author is Oswarld (Kwangseob Ahn). Current roles: Adjunct Professor at Sejong University, Strategy Consultant at INLEVEL9. Career, research, books, and recent work are kept current on the About page. Latest · July 2026: HEMA-2: A Consolidation-Aware Tri-Memory Architecture with Multi-Channel Scheduling for Lifelong Conversational AI.