Latest / The Comeback Career Podcast with Fexingo: Returning After a Gap, Stay-at-Home Re-Entry / How a Career Gap Can Help You Build an Online Course
Transcript
- Lucas: So you take three years off to raise twins. Your last role was marketing manager at a mid-size CPG company. You left in early 2023. Now it's mid-2026 and you want back in — but you also don't want to start from zero salary-wise. Luna: That's a pretty specific picture. Do you have someone in mind? Lucas: I do. Sarah Chen. She's a former guest on a sister show, and her story is probably the cleanest example I've seen of turning a career gap into a new income stream that also doubles as a re-entry credential. While she was home, she built an online course about social media strategy for small businesses — and it now generates about twelve thousand dollars a month. That number is from her own reporting, by the way, not a guess. Luna: Twelve grand a month. That's not a side hustle — that's a whole salary. How'd she do it? Lucas: She started with an audit of her own expertise. Before the gap, she'd spent six years managing social campaigns for a consumer brand. She knew Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn organic — the whole stack. But she didn't just say 'I'll teach what I know.' She went out and talked to fifteen small business owners in her local moms' group and asked them one question: what's the hardest part about posting on social media? Luna: So she validated the demand before building anything. That's smart. What did she hear? Lucas: Overwhelmingly, the answer was consistency. They knew they should post three times a week, but they couldn't sustain it because they had no system. So Sarah didn't build a course about 'social media strategy' broadly. She built a course about 'how to batch-create a week of content in two hours.' Very specific. Very solve-one-problem. Luna: I love that. And she tested it with a pilot cohort before launching? Lucas: Exactly. She recruited five of those business owners and said, 'I'll teach you this framework for free over four weeks, and in exchange, I want your honest feedback.' She recorded the sessions on Zoom, took notes on what confused them, what excited them. At the end, three of the five said they'd pay for a polished version. That was her signal. Luna: So she had product-market fit — or at least a strong hint of it — before she ever touched a course platform. What platform did she end up using? Lucas: Teachable. She looked at Thinkific too, but she liked Teachable's built-in email marketing and the fact that it handles sales tax automatically. She priced the course at a hundred and ninety-seven dollars — which felt high to her at first, but the pilot cohort told her that if it saved them ten hours a month, it was a no-brainer. Luna: And twelve thousand a month... at that price, that's about sixty students a month. That's not trivial. How did she find them? Lucas: She didn't spend a dime on ads. She used two channels: LinkedIn and an email list she started from scratch. On LinkedIn, she posted short, value-heavy content — 'Here's how I batch-create a week of content in 90 minutes.' She'd tag small business owners she knew. That drove about forty percent of her early signups. The rest came from an email newsletter she started called 'The Content Batch,' where she'd send one actionable tip every Tuesday. Luna: So she was essentially building an audience while building the course. And that audience became her re-entry story too. I mean, when she applies for a marketing job now, she's not just 'Sarah who took three years off.' She's 'Sarah who built a course that sixty people pay for every month.' Lucas: That's exactly right. And that's the part I think most people miss. An online course isn't just passive income — it's a credential that signals expertise in a way that a traditional resume gap can't. When Sarah interviews, she can say 'I know how to teach this stuff to small business owners, which means I really understand the fundamentals.' An employer hears that and thinks 'she's not rusty, she's teaching.' Luna: If someone's listening and thinking 'okay, I want to do this, where do I start?' — what's the first step, besides the auditing we talked about? Lucas: Pick a narrow enough topic that you could teach it in a weekend workshop. The biggest mistake is trying to build 'The Complete Guide to X.' That's a hundred hours of production and you'll never finish. Sarah's course is seven modules, each with a ten-minute video and a worksheet. That's about three hours of content total. She filmed it on her iPhone with a lapel mic. Good enough. Luna: Yeah, I think the perfectionism trap is real. People want to have a fancy studio and edited graphics. But the market rewards solving a problem, not production value. Lucas: Exactly. And the other common pitfall is under-pricing. If you charge twenty-nine dollars, you need a lot of students to make meaningful money. And you attract people who aren't committed. Sarah told me she initially planned to charge seventy-nine dollars. Her pilot cohort pushed her higher because they valued the time savings so much. That was a lesson. Luna: I want to come back to something you said earlier — about the course being a re-entry credential. Because I think a lot of people worry that if they build something like this, potential employers will see it as a distraction, not an asset. How do you frame it in an interview? Lucas: You lead with it. You don't apologize for the gap. You say 'During my time away from full-time work, I identified a need in the market, built a product, and generated revenue.' That's a business story, not a gap story. And if the interviewer seems skeptical, you pull out your phone and show them the course landing page. That's more concrete than any resume bullet. Luna: I think that's a really empowering reframe. A gap doesn't have to be empty space — it can be a launchpad. And you don't need a huge audience or a fancy setup. You just need one specific problem and the willingness to test it. Lucas: If we've helped you think through a career move or decision — maybe you've even started planning your own course based on something we said — that's exactly why we make this show. And if you've gotten value from it, the best way to keep it going is listener support. You can buy us a coffee — literally — at buy me a coffee dot com slash fexingo. It's what keeps the show ad-free and allows us to dig into stories like Sarah's. No pressure, just a simple way to say 'this matters to me.' Luna: Yeah, and it really does make a difference. We're not a big network — it's just the two of us and a small team. So thank you to anyone who's ever chipped in. Lucas: So back to the practical side. Let's talk about how long this whole process took Sarah. From the initial idea to the first paying student — seven months. And that's with two toddlers at home. She worked in nap times and after bedtime. The first month she made seven hundred dollars. By month four, it was three thousand. By month seven, twelve. Luna: That's a realistic timeline. Not overnight, but not years either. And now she has an asset that keeps paying even when she's not actively working on it. Lucas: Right. And importantly, she didn't have to choose between the course and a job. She actually started applying for full-time roles in month six, and she got two offers. She took a senior marketing manager role at a tech startup — and she kept the course running on the side. The course now takes her about five hours a month in updates and community management. Luna: So the course became her safety net. If the job doesn't work out, she's got income. If she wants to leave, she can scale the course. It gives her leverage. Lucas: Exactly. And that's the ultimate point. A gap doesn't have to be a hole you climb out of. It can be a foundation you build on. Sarah's story is one path — but the principles apply across industries. Whether you were an accountant, a nurse, a teacher, or a software developer — you have expertise that someone will pay to learn. Luna: And you can start today. Audit your expertise, talk to five people, and record one pilot session. That's all it takes to begin. Lucas: I think that's a good note to end on. Next episode, we're going to look at how to use a career gap to build a professional certification — not through a bootcamp, but by creating your own credential. That should be an interesting one. Luna: Looking forward to it. Thanks for listening. Lucas: See you next time.