By Tamra Fakhoorian

For most of my life, I’ve been something of a jack-of-all-trades.

I’ve worked in finance, manufacturing, trucking, e-commerce, nonprofits, agriculture and a handful of other things. I’ve started businesses, helped run businesses, sold products, trained people and spent an embarrassing amount of time learning things that seemed terribly important at the time.

And yet if you had asked me, “What do you know that somebody would pay you to teach them?” I probably would have struggled to answer.

The problem is that the things we know best often feel ordinary to us. We’ve known them so long, used them so often, and stopped noticing how much we had to learn to get there.

The Knowledge You Stop Seeing

Years ago, I got deeply involved in duckweed, a tiny floating plant that many people saw as an eyesore, something to skim off a pond and curse as the bane of their existence.

I didn’t just grow it. I researched it, experimented with it, built a business around this overlooked little plant and eventually founded an international association that attracted researchers and professionals from around the world.

Some of these people had PhDs. They ran laboratories. They published research. Some knew far more than I did about one very specific aspect of duckweed, but I had spent years learning about nearly all of it: growing, harvesting, commercial production, wastewater, feed, research, applications and the practical problems that came with actually trying to make the stuff useful.

What I eventually discovered was that expertise doesn’t always come from knowing more than everyone else about one tiny corner of a subject. Sometimes it comes from knowing enough about all the corners to see how they fit together. Over time, that broad knowledge made me one of the people others came to with questions.

You don’t necessarily need to know something nobody else knows. You may just know something in a way nobody else is explaining very well.

That difference matters.

I Actually Tested This Once

About eight years ago, I decided to test whether something I knew could actually help other people.

I chose a rather unusual and somewhat taboo solution to a nearly universal problem for women. I found seven or eight women who had this problem and offered to coach them for free. I wasn’t sure it would work. That was the whole point of the test.

Roughly three-quarters of them improved.

I was thrilled beyond words.

There was clearly something there. I had knowledge, they had a problem, and what I knew appeared to help solve it.

I ultimately decided I did not want to build a public business around that particular subject. I could already imagine explaining at Thanksgiving what I did for a living, and that was enough to send me in another direction.

But the experiment taught me something important.

Knowledge that feels ordinary inside your own head may not be ordinary at all to the person who needs it.

But Would Anybody Actually Pay?

This is where I think a lot of course ideas go off the rails.

Someone says, “That’s a great idea. I would totally buy that.”

Wonderful.

Will you give me $49 for it?

Suddenly things get interesting.

People are very generous with imaginary money.

It is easy to get excited about something you know and spend the next three months creating lessons, worksheets, videos and a beautiful website. Then you ask people to pay for it, and suddenly everybody gets a little quieter.

I would do this backward.

Before building much of anything, I would find people who actually have the problem I think I can solve. I would talk to them. I would help a few of them. Then I would see whether anyone would actually pay for that help.

Not someday. Not theoretically. Now.

That payment does not have to be huge. In fact, I would rather get $25 from a stranger than hear someone tell me they would gladly pay $500 someday.

The $25 tells me something.

Free Information Changes the Game

There is another obvious problem with selling what you know in 2026.

There is an astonishing amount of free information available. YouTube can teach you how to repair a washing machine, build a website, train a dog, grow tomatoes or edit a video. AI can answer questions, compare approaches and organize information in seconds.

So simply knowing facts is not much of an edge anymore.

But information and lived experience are not the same thing.

AI can summarize what hundreds of people have written about a problem. It cannot give someone your 20 years of pattern recognition, tell them what you noticed after making the same mistake six times, or replace the judgment that comes from actually having done the work.

That may be where more of the value is shifting. Not simply knowing facts, but knowing what matters, what usually goes wrong, what to ignore and what you would do differently if you had to start over.

That is a very different product from “I know stuff.”

Is There Actually a Gap?

Before I built anything, I would investigate the idea pretty hard.

Search YouTube. Search Google. Look at Udemy and other course platforms. Read Reddit discussions. Look at books. Ask AI what already exists. Find the people teaching the same thing and see what they are offering.

Then look for the gaps.

Are people still confused after taking the existing courses? Are they complaining that everything is too broad, too theoretical, too expensive or too complicated? Are they asking the same questions over and over?

Maybe there are already 50 courses on your subject. That does not automatically kill the idea. It may simply mean you need a sharper angle.

Perhaps your advantage is that you teach one very specific piece better. Maybe you explain it in plain English. Maybe you have 20 years of practical experience instead of academic knowledge. Maybe you serve a group nobody else seems to be talking to. Or maybe your advantage is the combination of things you know, because you can connect dots that people working inside one narrow specialty never see.

But if there is nothing noticeably different about what you would offer, I would want to know that before spending months creating it.

Make the List

This is probably where I would start.

Sit down and make a list of 10 or 20 things you know how to do unusually well.

Not just impressive things.

Write down problems you have solved repeatedly. Things people ask you for help with. Jobs you have done for years. Mistakes you learned how to avoid. Subjects you have gone unusually deep into. Things that seem so obvious to you that you assume everybody already knows them.

Maybe you spent 30 years managing construction projects and can look at a remodeling estimate and immediately spot where the numbers are going off the rails. Maybe you have grown orchids for 20 years and can look at a struggling plant and quickly figure out what it needs. Maybe you know how to navigate some irritating government process that makes everyone else want to throw their computer out the window.

Do not decide yet whether any of those things should become a course.

Just make the list.

Then investigate the most interesting ones.

Start With the Problem, Not the Course

If I were trying this today, I would not start by asking, “What course should I create?”

I would ask, “What problem can I solve that people are already trying to solve?”

Then I would find those people. I would help a few of them. I would pay attention to what they actually struggle with and which parts of my knowledge make the biggest difference.

And then I would ask someone to pay.

Only after that would I start worrying about course platforms, cameras, logos, websites and all the other things that can make us feel like we are building a business before we have actually proven there is one.

That is something I need to remember with Pin Money too.

Right now, these articles are part of the test. We are publishing them before we know exactly what readers will respond to. The difference is that publishing an article is a fairly cheap experiment. If nobody reads a topic, shares it or comes back for more, that tells us something before we build a much bigger business around it.

The same principle applies to almost anything you want to teach.

Test cheaply first.

The Bottom Line

I do not think everybody should create an online course. And I certainly do not think uploading a few videos automatically turns what you know into passive income.

But I do think a lot of us are sitting on knowledge we have stopped recognizing as valuable because we have known it for so long.

That is the part I would investigate first.

Make the list. Look for the gaps. Find the people who already have the problem. See whether what you know actually helps.

Then ask the question that matters:

What do I know that solves a problem somebody might pay to have solved?

Then:

There’s only one way to find out whether they actually will.

Test it.