A Real Problem Isn't Enough. Three Tests Your Course Idea Has to Pass.

Everyone is hungry. Nobody gets rich selling ice cream.

Hunger is a real problem. It is universal, it recurs several times a day, and people act on it without hesitation. An ice cream shop still cannot charge very much, because a problem being real and a problem being valuable are two different things. That gap is where most course ideas quietly die.

The advice that lets everyone through

"Solve a real problem" is the most repeated line in this business, mine included. The trouble is that you cannot fail it.

Every professional who has ever had a course idea believes their problem is real. Nobody sits down, thinks it over carefully, and concludes that their own idea is trivial. So the advice passes everyone through, and people find out eighteen months and one finished course later that what they picked was an ice cream problem — genuinely real, genuinely not worth much.

What you need are questions that can come back no.

Here are three, and you can run all of them in an afternoon.

Can you fill three to four hours explaining the solution?

That is the sweet spot for a professional course — roughly a hundred to a hundred and twenty slides in my experience. Shorter than that and buyers feel it. Much longer and it becomes daunting to someone with a job, unless what you are delivering genuinely earns the time.

So outline it. Not write it — outline it. Break the solution into its actual steps and see how much is there.

If the whole thing is thirty minutes and a checklist, you do not have a course. You may well have a good article, a useful free download, or one module of something larger. You do not have a product somebody pays real money for.

This test is worth running first because it is cheap and it is brutal. You can find out in an afternoon whether an idea you have carried around for a year has four hours in it.

Could you write about it every week, more or less indefinitely?

Free content is what builds the audience that eventually buys the course. Two pieces a week is the working number, and they do not need to be elaborate — five hundred words does the job. But you have to be able to keep it up, which means the problem has to be deep enough to keep it up.

So list twenty things you could write about this problem. Not twenty vague gestures at the topic — twenty actual pieces, each with a point. If you run dry at six, the problem is narrower than a business needs. If you hit twenty and keep going, you have found something with enough surface area to build on.

An idea that supports one course and nothing else is a product. An idea that supports one course and two hundred articles is a business.

How many people specifically have this problem?

Not how many people are in your profession. How many have the particular problem you are solving.

If you are an emergency physician teaching other emergency physicians, the number that matters is emergency physicians, not doctors. If you are targeting labor and delivery nurses, it is not all nurses. The relevant population is almost always smaller than the one that first comes to mind, and being precise about it changes what you can build.

You do not need everyone, and narrow generally beats broad here. But you do need to know the number rather than assume it, because a specialty with two hundred thousand people in it and one with two thousand support very different businesses.

Look it up before you build. It takes ten minutes.

The tests fail in both directions

Here is the counterweight, and it matters as much as the tests themselves.

The most common way a good idea dies is not by failing these questions. It is by never being tested, because the person holding it assumes everyone already knows what they know.

They do not. Never assume a student knows anything you are about to teach — they are taking the course precisely because they do not. What feels elementary to you after fifteen years is not elementary to someone two years out of school. New graduates are starving for what an experienced person in their profession actually knows, as opposed to what school covered, and a great deal of what school covers is not what the job turns out to require.

So if you have already disqualified your idea on instinct rather than on evidence, run the tests anyway. "It is too obvious" is not one of the three.

What the tests are actually measuring

Anyone can build a course out of an idea. Very few people build a business out of one.

The difference is not effort, and it is not production quality. It is whether the problem underneath was large enough to carry everything you are going to stack on top of it — the course, then the content, then the second product, then the audience that buys all three. A problem that supports four hours and nothing more will hold up a course and then quietly stop.

Four hours. Twenty articles. A number you actually looked up.

Clear those and the problem is real and valuable. Fail them and you found out this week, rather than next year.