Physical therapist Greg Todd turned 6 months of course-building into 6 hours. Here's the one-problem framework private practice owners need to hear first.
Six months. That's how long Greg Todd spent building his first online course before he had a single paying customer. Nine out of ten people he offered it to, at a discount, said no.
Same program. Three and a half years later. $500,000 in a single weekend.
The product didn't change. The proof of concept did. And if you're a clinician sitting on expertise you think could become a course, that distinction is the only thing standing between you and a very expensive hobby.
Most private practice owners who try to create a digital product start with what feels good to them, not what the market will actually pay for. They design a comprehensive curriculum, spend months refining it, and then launch it into silence.
The second mistake is related: they want to help everyone. As Greg said on the Private Practice Survival Guide podcast, clinicians will list out 75 different populations they serve, 45 different problems they solve, and somehow expect that breadth to be a selling point online.
It isn't. The framework that actually works is narrower than most clinicians are comfortable with.
One audience. One problem. One solution. One framework.
That's the whole architecture. Not because the clinician isn't capable of more, but because the person buying online needs to see themselves in your offer instantly. If they have to figure out whether your course applies to them, they're already gone.
This is the part where most people push back. The idea of charging someone for something that doesn't exist yet feels wrong, especially to clinicians trained in the ethics of do-no-harm.
But Greg's point is the opposite of reckless. It's the most responsible thing you can do with your time and your audience's trust.
Here's how he actually runs it. He has conversations with people he intends to help. He listens for the specific problem that's keeping them up at night. Then he asks one direct question: if I can solve this for you, will you pay me this amount?
If they say no, he moves on. If they say yes, he enrolls them as a founding participant, builds the course with them as a real-time feedback loop, and delivers a result. The founding member gets more access than anyone who buys later. Greg gets a validated, optimized product instead of a six-month guess.
This approach eliminates duds. Not reduces them. Eliminates them. Because you've already confirmed the market will pay before you've spent a single hour on production.
Practice Resources from ASHA reinforce something that applies equally here: effective practice management requires evidence before investment, whether you're making clinical decisions or business ones.
Once you have a paying founding member and a validated problem to solve, the build process is shorter than you think.
Greg's actual workflow in 2026:
For video delivery, Greg points to HeyGen, which builds an AI avatar from a few minutes of footage so you're not recording every module yourself. For audio-first audiences, 11 Labs clones your voice from a short sample and reads your script with your cadence, your tone, your inflection, and statistically fewer errors than you'd make live. For written delivery, Canva takes your transcript-turned-framework and gives it a design format worth reading.
The point isn't any specific tool. The point is that production friction is no longer a real objection. A course that took six months in 2015 takes six hours now. The only thing that should stop you is not having validated the idea first.
This is where the Netflix example Greg shared lands hardest. Netflix launched at $6.99 a month when Blockbuster was charging that per rental. Low enough to feel like almost no risk. High enough to create commitment.
Today, Netflix charges $27.99 for their premium tier. Same company, same promise, massively expanded proof of concept.
If you've been practicing for 20 years and charge $300 an hour clinically, pricing a new digital product at $497 to a cold audience that has never bought anything from you before is ego-driven math, not market-driven math. The audience doesn't know your clinical track record. They don't feel the weight of your credentials the way your existing patients do.
Start where the risk feels low enough for someone who doesn't know you to say yes. Build proof. Raise the price as that proof accumulates. The program you sell for $25 this year could be the program you sell for $2,500 next year, if it actually delivers.
Brandon made the same point from his own experience: his coaching rate started at $50 an hour. It's $500 an hour now. The work didn't change. The reputation behind it did.
One of the sharpest observations in the conversation was about buyer mindset. A pain point and a purchase decision are not the same thing.
Someone might genuinely struggle with a problem and still not be motivated enough to pay to solve it. The sock analogy Greg used is a simple way to test this. Some people will walk around all day with a bunched-up sock and not think twice. Others can't take three steps. Same sock. Completely different urgency.
Your job before building anything is to figure out which one your audience is. Not by assuming, but by asking directly: if I can get you this result, will you pay me this amount? The answer tells you everything you need to know about whether to move forward.
If you run a speech therapy practice, an occupational therapy practice, or any other specialty clinic, the logic here applies directly to how you grow. Sustainable revenue doesn't come from doing more of the same thing harder. It comes from building systems that generate value while you sleep, whether that's a digital product, a billing operation that runs without you in it, or a team structure that scales without constant supervision.
The clinicians who figure out how to stop trading every dollar of revenue for an hour of their time are the ones who build practices that last. Everything Greg described, validating before building, pricing for the market not your ego, deploying your expertise through systems, is the same thinking that separates a practice owner from a clinician who owns a job.
If the back end of your practice, billing, HR, operations, is consuming the time you could be using to build something like this, that's worth a conversation. Book a Discovery Call and let's see if we're the right fit to take that off your plate.
Or if you're ready to look at the full picture of how your practice grows, the Growth Code Conference is where those conversations happen in person.
