The Broken Record Method
The questions people won't stop asking you are your course.
- Difficulty
- Starter
- Time to result
- ~weeks to results
- Steps
- 4
- Confidence
- 84%
Jenna Kutcher's method says your best course idea is hiding in the questions people won't stop asking you. Because you're so close to your own genius, you assume everyone already knows what you know — so you dismiss your most valuable knowledge. By coaching a handful of people face to face and noticing which questions and struggles recur across all of them, you find the trends worth teaching. When you feel like a broken record repeating the same answers, that repetition is the signal: that is exactly the content to put into a course.
Origin
Jenna Kutcher, a wedding photographer who scaled to $100K in three years, started mentoring five local photographers in her condo. She realized they all asked the same questions — pricing, marketing, social media — and that she was 'a broken record.' That recognition of recurring trends became the basis of her online course business.
Core principles
- 01You are too close to your own genius to see what's valuable — others reveal it
- 02Recurring questions across multiple people signal a trend worth teaching
- 03Your course idea lives at the intersection of what you know and what people can't stop asking for
- 04Your genius doesn't have to be groundbreaking, just valuable and indispensable
How to run it
- 1
Sit down with real people
Mentor or coach a handful of people face to face, hearing their struggles and walking them through what you know.
Pro tip Face-to-face interaction reveals what you actually do differently that you'd otherwise overlook.
- 2
Watch for repeated questions
Notice when the same questions and struggles surface across everyone you help — the pricing guide, the same walkthroughs, the same answers.
- 3
Name the trends
When you feel like a broken record teaching the same things, identify those recurring trends as distinct teachable topics.
- 4
Turn trends into course content
Package the repeated answers into course modules — branding, social media, pricing, email — one topic per recurring trend.
In the wild
Kutcher coached five local photographers and found they all asked identical questions about pricing, marketing, and social media. She was showing the same pricing guides and giving the same walkthroughs to everyone, which revealed the trends worth teaching at scale.
→ An online course business that let her reach photographers far beyond her tiny Wisconsin village.
Common mistakes
Assuming your knowledge is obvious
Because you're so close to your own genius, you assume everybody already knows it and dismiss your most valuable expertise. The recurring questions of others prove otherwise.
Is it for you?
Best for
Experts who get asked the same questions repeatedly and want to package that into a product.
Not ideal for
People entering a field where they have no track record or audience asking them anything yet.
From the transcript
“All of a sudden I found myself I'm like I am a broken record. I'm teaching them the same things.”
“So often we are so close to our own genius that we think everybody knows this.”
From the episode
The Creator’s Playbook: How Top Entrepreneurs Monetize Their Expertise to Make Millions Online