Why hosted course platforms quietly eat your margins
You teach something specific. Maybe sales for SaaS founders, watercolor for beginners, real estate investing, or career coaching for engineers. You know your students want a real online course, not a YouTube playlist.
So you go to Teachable, Podia or Kajabi. The monthly bill stacks up fast:
- Teachable Pro at $119 a month, before any transaction fee
- Kajabi at $149 a month minimum, with caps on students and products
- Limited customization: every course site looks like a Kajabi course site
- Hard to integrate with your real email tool, your CRM, or your community
- You do not own the URLs, the SEO, or the long-term student data
- Migrating means losing your students' progress and your accumulated reviews
At a few hundred students a year, you are paying €1,500 a year just to rent the rails. And you still have to bring your own audience.
How RunMyStartup builds your course platform
Describe your course in plain words: the curriculum, the audience, how you want to price it. Your AI team of 8 agents takes it from there:
- Your CEO agent turns your curriculum into a clear product plan: modules, lessons, bonuses, pricing tiers
- Your Developer agent builds your course platform with Next.js, TypeScript, and Tailwind CSS, including the sales page, checkout, course player, and student dashboard
- Your DevOps agent deploys it on a real server with your own domain and SSL, and integrates video hosting so lessons stream smoothly
- Your Accountant agent configures Stripe checkout for one-time purchases, payment plans, or recurring subscriptions
- Your Emailing agent sets up the full student lifecycle: welcome sequences, drip lesson notifications, completion reminders, and post-course follow-ups
- Your Growth agent makes your sales pages and free preview lessons indexable in Google
- Your Marketing agent generates social media posts and launch content for each cohort
You approve every step. You control the curriculum, the pricing, and the brand.
What is included from day one
Everything you need to sell and deliver a real online course, from launch day:
- A live course platform with sales page, checkout, student dashboard, and lesson player
- Video hosting wired into the lesson pages, with progress tracking
- Drip release of lessons by date or by student progress, so you can run cohorts
- Certificates of completion generated automatically when students finish
- Stripe checkout for one-time payments, installment plans, or monthly subscriptions
- Student accounts with secure authentication and a personal progress dashboard
- Email sequences built in: welcome, drip notifications, completion, and re-engagement
- A dedicated PostgreSQL database for your students, lessons, and progress data
- Built-in analytics: completion rates, revenue, refund rate, top-performing lessons
- Your own domain name (from the Founder plan at €39/month)
- Full source code access via GitHub (from the Studio plan at €99/month)
From idea to live course in 3 steps
Step 1: Describe your course. What do you teach? How many modules? Single payment or subscription? You speak, you do not write a brief.
Step 2: Your AI team builds the platform. You upload your videos, review the lesson flow, request design changes, and approve each milestone before it goes live.
Step 3: Your course is online. Students discover your sales page in Google, buy through Stripe, and start learning. Your platform sends the welcome email and drips the lessons automatically.
You might worry this is too complex if you have never built anything online. It is not. You describe what you want to teach, the agents handle the technical work, and you stay in charge of the content and the price.
Who builds an online course with RunMyStartup
- Subject-matter experts turning a 10-year career into a flagship paid course
- Coaches and consultants packaging their methodology into a self-serve product
- Independent creators replacing Teachable or Kajabi to stop paying €100+ a month
- Course operators running multiple cohorts a year with branded sales pages for each one
- Solo educators who want video, email, payments, and certificates in one owned product
Pricing
Start for free with the Discovery plan (1 project, 4 AI agents, 15 credits). Upgrade to Founder at €39/month for Stripe checkout and a custom domain. Studio at €99/month adds full source code access and the complete AI team of 8 agents.
RunMyStartup takes a 3% commission on revenue generated through your platform's payments. You keep 97%. Compare that with Teachable Pro at €119 a month plus their transaction fees: by your second sale, you are already saving money.