The Arithmetic of Online Schools

A course business fails for reasons that have nothing to do with the course.

The median online course sells for $110. The median cost of acquiring a single lead in the education category is $77.48. Put those two numbers side by side and a large part of this industry stops making sense.

That is not a marketing problem. It is arithmetic, and no amount of funnel optimization fixes it.

Eugene Suslov has spent six years building the software that online schools run on. This book is what he learned watching the operational layer of the business from underneath, combined with something almost absent from this field: published research you can actually check.

Inside:

• Why paid acquisition is mathematically impossible below a certain price point, and the three ways out
• What a study of 5.63 million learners reveals about completion rates, and why it has almost nothing to do with content quality
• The 6.5% monthly churn rate that quietly destroys subscription-based schools
• Why behavioral interventions that work on 200 students collapse at scale, according to a study of 250,000
• What the numbers say about pricing, and why the median and the average tell opposite stories

Every figure in this book carries a source, a sample size, and a date. Where the evidence does not exist, the book says so rather than filling the gap with something plausible.

This is not a system with five steps and a ninety-day promise. It is an accurate map of where the money actually goes.

For course creators, online school owners, and anyone selling what they know.