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Dept. Dispatch #012
Filed Under: Courses Are the New Coaching — And That’s the Problem
Status: Light pain. Thunderstorm. Sriracha. Weird friends. Existential tabs open.
👋 YELO! Reader
This dispatch wasn’t supposed to exist.
But then again... neither was my electricity last week.
Severe power outage. No internet. No hotspot. No escape.
Just me, an old notebook, and a mechanical pencil that squeaked like it had trauma from a past life in corporate consulting.
It wasn’t a breakdown.
It was a blackout baptism.
No inbox. No Slack. No dopamine drip.
Just enough silence to hear all the ideas I’d buried under "busy."
In that strange quiet, three truths flickered out of the static:
- My brand was attracting the wrong people — including a famous creator who thought I was a Canva contractor. That one hurt.
- Creator education is going full IKEA — flat-packed, allen-key advice with none of the soul. Refunds are rising because of it.
- I’ve been hoarding a high-leverage asset I never told you about. Until now.
So no, this dispatch wasn’t planned.
But now that it exists, it's yours.
Smell the metaphorical ink. Share it if you survive.
And if it moves you in any way—let me know. I’m lurking on LinkedIn, X, and Instagram. Probably too much.
Have a curious weekend.
— Sudhanshu Pai
📍 Previously in the INFO CREATOR DEPT.
After issue #011, things… shifted.
I started generating buzz and leads—
just not the kind I wanted.
One inquiry in particular broke me:
A well-known creator-slash-entrepreneur (who shall remain unnamed) asked if I could do graphic design and be a creative partner.
That’s when I knew I’d fumbled the bag.
Not the product bag.
The positioning bag.
The signals I was sending weren’t just unclear—
They were coded in the wrong language.
So I pulled the plug.
And with the blackout came clarity.
I used the downtime to run brand diagnostics, rewrite my LinkedIn, rework positioning, and kill 17 old taglines.
(I buried them in a Notion database labeled: "DO NOT RESURRECT")
And most importantly—
I stopped chasing 100% polish.
This version of me ships at 70% clarity,
So I can get to 100% through the field, not the draft.
📂 ICYMI: Filed Reports
Missed this week’s research drops? Here’s what’s bubbling:
- Blueprint 1 → How Thomas Frank accidentally built a million-dollar education business in just 2 years
- Blueprint 2 → Katelyn Bourgoin: The Info Creator, Teaching 280k People “Why We Buy”
- Blueprint 3 → Anne-Laure Le Cunff: The woman who built a 6-fig business by questions and curiosity
All three are case files from the edges of the creator economy.
🧠 Would You Let a Brain Surgeon Who Took an Asynchronous Course Cut You Open?
Let me ask something stupid.
If a brain surgeon walked into the OR and said:
“Don’t worry. I watched a 5-hour self-paced course on this last weekend.”
Would you stay on the table?
Exactly.
Yet the creator education industry is acting like this is normal.
Coaching has been IKEA’d.
- Flat-packed
- Pre-drilled
- Allen-key insights
- Transformation not included
Refunds are up. Completion rates are down. Transformation has flatlined.
Somewhere along the way, we were confused:
- 🔁 Automation for wisdom
- 💸 Scalability for empathy
- 📆 Instructions for interpretation
This week's dispatch breaks it all down:
- The hidden curriculum of the creator economy
- Why self-paced learning triggers the illusion of competence
- What IP Lodges might look like — not programs, but potent, personalized places of transformation
- Why your "passive income" dream left you working more, not less
This isn’t a tweetstorm.
This is a forensic dissection.
📅 Read: Scaling Meaning in a Post-Course World
Are you still selling templates?
Or are you building environments?
🏴☠️ Dept. Internal Memos
Here’s what I didn’t tell you in Dispatch #011:
During my burnout sabbatical, I quietly helped a $100K creator untangle their business.
Not by adding offers.
But by mapping a scalable ecosystem around the one they already had.
And that cracked something open for me.
We don’t have a product problem in the creator economy.
We have a structure problem.
Everyone’s sprinting to sell...
but no one’s building systems that self-compound.
So I went back. Rebuilt my Profit Calibration Call from the ground up.
Ran it through Katelyn Bourgoin’s pitch audit bot.
It passed. Now it’s live.
🎯 The Call That Turns Chaos Into Clarity
This isn’t just another "coaching" call.
It’s a 60-minute co-creation ritual where we:
- Audit your offers, assets, and audience with brutal empathy
- Identify your most leveraged Anchor product (not the one draining your energy)
- Map out a personalized IMPACT Ecosystem to help you scale without solving extra problems
Because scaling isn’t about adding more.
It’s about structuring your existing knowledge into:
1 Offer → 5 Fulfillment Modes:
🧱 Anchor
🎁 Bundles
📦 One-offs
🎣 Free Resources
👥 Peer-level Leverage
You don’t need 10 new ideas.
You need one IP-rich thesis expressed across different price points and contexts — a business that mirrors how your best buyers evolve.
$117.
60 minutes.
One brutal clarity session.
A custom game plan that turns your flagship idea into a full offer ecosystem.
3 spots open this month.
Because sometimes, freedom isn’t found in creating more.
It’s in orchestrating what you already know.
🗣️ Help Me Build This Thing
Let’s not make this newsletter a polite graveyard of scrolls and unopened clicks.
This is a surveillance feed.
From the edge of the IP rebellion.
Every dispatch is an episode—half case study, half fever dream.
And I want you to shape the next ones.
Tell me:
- Should we go deeper into frameworks?
- Break down failures behind the scenes?
- Expose more creator business myths?
Just hit reply. Or DM me. Or send a screenshot of your Notion breakdown.
Let’s build this like an open-world RPG for creator-educators.
🧠 SIGNAL > SCALE.
Stay weird.
Stay asymmetrical.
And remember:
If you're selling templates when the world wants interpretation…
You're just another node in the course matrix.
Burn the prefab. Build the lodge. Brand your Genius.
See you in Dispatch #013.
—Sudhanshu Pai
Day 70 in the Dept.
PS - If you've gotten any value from this newsletter, I'd be honored if you'd leave a testimonial so others know this content is valuable.
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