Listing on Skillshare's existing marketplace, rather than driving his own traffic, is what got Get Stuff Done Like a Boss in front of its first paying students in 2013.

“I joined Skillshare in 2013 with my first course, and was amazed to discover just how easy it was to get started.”

The same marketplace channel that made launch easy became a liability as the platforms shifted business models and slashed per-sale payouts to instructors.

“I saw my own revenues from Skillshare (now from 2 courses) drop overnight from $25 per sale to less than 25 cents.”

Marketplace-set flash discounting stripped instructors of pricing power entirely.

“both Skillshare and Udemy offer 90%+ discounts on their libraries, which means creators have no control and no pricing power”

Tiago started a blog about a year after his first course and used it as a running experiment: articles that resonated became the seed of new products and courses, and the blog compounded into the main engine of the business.

“The blog became a testing ground where I could experiment with a wide array of ideas”

By his own accounting a few years later, nearly all traffic to his course landing page was organic, arriving through the blog, forums, social shares, email, and search rather than any paid channel.

“almost 100% of which is organic traffic clicking on links in blog posts, online forums, social media, or emails, as well as search”

He ran several small, disconnected Facebook ad experiments over the years rather than one sustained campaign.

“I've done several experiments with Facebook ads.”

The experiments never ran long enough or consistently enough to produce a usable signal.

“None of these experiments had the consistency or longevity to draw any firm conclusions.”

From early 2018 he paid a small agency to help with course marketing (trailer video, simplified site, lead-magnet tipsheets).

“Starting at the beginning of 2018, I hired a small social media marketing agency to help with the marketing of the course.”

He concluded course marketing for a solo-founder business can't be fully delegated, even though the work itself was decent.

“Marketing is not a specialized, cut-and-paste activity that you can just hand off to someone.”