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Now it's easier than ever to build tools for your info-products/communities. As info becomes more accessible I do think a great way to build a MOAT is by tools that do the things your course teaches.

Here’s something I think is true that nobody says out loud.

And that opens up something that wasn't possible before. You can have a conversation with your market and act on it right away. Someone says, “I wish this tool did X”? You can have it built by tomorrow.

That speed creates a totally different relationship with your customers. They don’t feel like they’re buying a product that’s finished. They feel like they’re part of something that’s growing with them. That’s how you get people to stick around. That’s how you get them to tell their friends. And you get all of that just by moving fast.

And I want to be clear. My dev is good. He built some hard stuff for me over the years. Systems for thousands of users, payment stuff, API connections. All kinds of technical problems that were genuinely difficult. I’m not saying AI can do all of that. What I’m saying is that for most of the tools that course creators need, you don’t need that level of skill. You need something that works, is easy to use, and solves one problem. And AI can definitely build that. Especially if you’re willing to tweak it.

I think about this with my own business. How many ideas did I not try over the years because I couldn’t afford to build them? Or because I couldn’t explain them well enough to a developer? Or because I didn’t want to deal with managing a project? Probably dozens. Maybe hundreds. And now all of those ideas are possible again. Some of them are probably still bad ideas. But some of them might have been really good, and I just couldn’t do it before. I was missing out on a huge opportunity and I didn’t even know it until it was gone.

And when I say transformation-as-a-service, I mean you’re essentially becoming your customer’s operating system for that domain of their life. They’re not just learning about marketing from you, they’re running their entire marketing operation through your tools. They’re not just learning about fitness, they’re managing their entire fitness journey through your platform. You become infrastructure in their life, not just content they consume. And once you’re infrastructure, you’re sticky. People don’t switch infrastructure on a whim. The switching costs are too high.

This is why I think the next generation of successful education businesses are going to look more like SaaS companies than traditional course creators. Because the economics are completely different. A course is a one-time transaction. Maybe you get some renewals or upsells, but fundamentally it’s transactional. SaaS is relational. It’s ongoing. It’s compounding. And the lifetime value of a customer who’s paying you $100 a month for three years is exponentially higher than a customer who bought your $2,000 course once.

Because let’s be honest about what the launch model does to people psychologically. You spend three months building up to a launch. You push hard for a week. You make a bunch of money. Then you crash. And then you start thinking about the next launch. It’s exhausting. And it incentivizes short-term thinking. You’re not focused on what’s going to keep people successful for years, you’re focused on what’s going to convert right now. That’s not good for you or your customers.

And here’s the really wild part. The tools are getting BETTER while you’re waiting. Which sounds like a good reason to wait, except it’s not. Because yes, the tools improve. But the opportunity cost of not building compounds faster than the tools improve. A mediocre tool built with today’s AI that’s already in market and generating revenue and feedback is infinitely more valuable than a perfect tool built with next year’s AI that doesn’t exist yet. Perfect is the enemy of done. And done is the only thing that matters.