The online education market is on track to become one of the largest categories in the digital economy. Course creators, coaches, and information-product businesses already represent a multi-billion-dollar global industry, with private equity firms, strategic acquirers, and platform operators all paying closer attention than they did even three years ago.
There’s only one issue. The category, despite its size, has barely produced any meaningful exits. Most knowledge businesses get built, generate cash for a few years, and then quietly wind down when the founder loses interest or burns out. Among the small group of founders who have actually sold an online course company to an institutional buyer, only three names appear publicly: Sam Ovens, Alex Hormozi, and William Brown.
Brown, who exited his $16.4 million e-learning company to a US private equity firm in 2023 and now runs Build, Grow and Exit, has made a public case for why the gap exists — and what would have to change for the next decade of the category to look different.
The category was built on the wrong incentives
For most of its history, the online course economy has rewarded volume over durability. The marketing model — paid ads, webinars, launch sequences — favors founders who can convert fast and scale revenue quickly. Almost none of that infrastructure was designed with enterprise value in mind.
The result is a category full of high-revenue, low-asset businesses. A coach generating $200,000 a month with no team, no documented systems, and no transferable customer relationships is producing income, not equity. To a buyer, that business is worth approximately what the founder will personally agree to keep doing — which is to say, not much.
Brown’s argument, which runs through both his bestselling book How To: $10M and his coaching work, is that this is a structural failure of how founders think about their own businesses, not a failure of the category itself. Information businesses can be assets. Most just aren’t built that way.
What changes when you build for the exit
Building with an eventual sale in mind reshapes nearly every operating decision. Customer acquisition becomes a system rather than a personality-driven event. Delivery is documented and increasingly run by team members other than the founder. Financials get cleaned up early, not in a panic six months before due diligence. Niche selection prioritizes
durable demand over trend-of-the-quarter opportunities.
Brown’s prior company hit £819,000 a month with 16 team members and a structured operating model — exactly the kind of footprint a private equity buyer can underwrite. The exit, which closed at roughly 2.6x EBITDA, was the direct outcome of building those decisions in years before the conversation with buyers started.
The wider implication is that founders who treat their information business like a real company — with operating leverage, transferable processes, and reduced key-person risk — can capture an asset value that founders running effectively the same revenue do not.
The buyer side is catching up
Private equity attention on the creator economy and online education has accelerated meaningfully since 2023. Forbes covered Brown’s own acquisition, and the category has since seen more aggregator-style plays, platform consolidation, and mid-market PE interest in education and coaching companies. The buyers are showing up. The supply of sellable companies hasn’t caught up.
For founders, this is both an opportunity and a deadline. The window to be one of the founders who builds a clean, defensible knowledge business in the next five years is wide open. The window to do it without competition won’t stay that way.
The risk Brown points to
The risk in the category, by Brown’s analysis, isn’t competition or market saturation. It’s that founders keep building businesses that look impressive on Instagram and fall apart on a buyer’s spreadsheet.
Online educators, in his framing, need to stop benchmarking themselves against each other’s revenue screenshots and start benchmarking against the standards of every other operating business: gross margin discipline, customer concentration, retention and churn, documented playbooks, and a clear answer to the question of what happens to the company if the founder takes a year off.
Most can’t answer that question. The ones who can are the ones who get acquired.
Where the category goes next
The next decade of online education will probably look less like a thousand individual coaches and more like a layered industry: platform-backed creators at the top, professionalized mid-market education companies in the middle, and a long tail of founder led brands underneath.
Brown’s bet, both as a founder and as a coach to other founders, is that the middle tier —
professionalized, sellable, asset-grade information businesses — is where the real value creation will happen. If he is right, the category’s next wave of exits won’t be three names. It will be three hundred.
