An info product business should either generate cash at 40-60% margins or acquire customers for something bigger. Everything else, stagnation or IPO dreams, tends to kill it. That is Iman Gadzhi's thesis, illustrated by consulting.com's fall, and examined here with the Michelin Guide as the classic counterexample.
Why an info product business dies, in one answer
An info product business dies when it picks one of two extremes: it freezes its offer while the market gets more sophisticated, or it chases a sellable-company fantasy that its economics cannot support. Iman Gadzhi, a business influencer and owner of the community platform Skool, laid out this argument in a thread in April 2026, and the Brazilian creator Bruno Faggion reacted to it on YouTube, agreeing with the core points.
Gadzhi's cautionary tale is consulting.com, the course company founded by Sam Ovens, who later partnered with Alex Hormozi on Skool. According to Gadzhi's thread, consulting.com accumulated about 80 million dollars in revenue and roughly 12 million dollars in profit, yet the business plus the consulting.com domain sold for only 1.7 million dollars, about 15% of that profit figure. These are the speaker's reported figures, not independently audited numbers.
The lesson both men draw: stop designing a course company for an exit. Design it for cash flow or for customer acquisition.
Extreme 1: boxing the product in
The first killer of an info product business is stagnation. The owner locks in one format, usually a recorded course plus a couple of group calls, and never changes it as buyers grow more demanding.
Gadzhi compares this to staying on the first iPhone while every competitor ships new versions. Faggion's reaction adds a Brazilian timeline: courses sold around 2018 were mostly recorded videos with little support. Over time the market moved toward live sessions, monthly Q&As, mentorships, communities, and even service-like tiers.
Why some niches freeze safely
There are exceptions. Exam-preparation and interview-preparation products change slowly because buyers want stable study material. Faggion reports his own business abroad, which targets interview prep, still works with a largely recorded format. Books show the same pattern: the publishing format stabilized decades ago, which is why early-20th-century titles like Napoleon Hill's still sell. Most online-education niches are younger and less settled, so the offer has to keep moving.
This is also where Brazilian examples fit. Creators such as Gustavo Dev Doido, who sells programming education through the Crazystack Typescript community and the Bootcamp do Dev Doido, operate in a market where buyers now expect a community and evolving content, not a static video pack.
Extreme 2: the IPO delusion
The second killer is what Gadzhi calls delusion: believing a course company can become a sellable, listable corporation. Per his thread, the old owners of consulting.com aimed for 100 million dollars in revenue and a New York Stock Exchange listing. Instead of an IPO, the business declined and Gadzhi bought it.
Faggion extends the point to Brazil. He describes well-known course operators who built large offices and hired hundreds of staff, expecting endless growth, then recently cut 50% to 70% of their teams. His argument: online courses have a demand ceiling, and more people want a university degree, with higher tickets and a longer-proven model, than want an online course.
The death spiral of thin margins
Both extremes feed the same failure loop. The product ages, results drop, word of mouth slows, the company spends more on ads to compensate, and thin margins leave no budget to pay for those ads. Revenue falls, and the cycle repeats.
Gadzhi's numbers from the thread: consulting.com ended with under 10% profit margin, while he argues an info product business should run 40% to 60% margins. At 10%, one bad quarter pushes the company into the red, and because the teacher or founder is the product, a single departure collapses everything. Treat these as the speaker's reported figures.
Why high margins are realistic
Faggion claims his own business, which runs on roughly 99% organic marketing with only small remarketing spend of around 3,000 reais per launch, reaches 80% to 90% margins. That is first-hand speaker experience, not an audited benchmark, but it illustrates the ceiling: without paid traffic there is no traffic manager, ad copywriter, or ad creative editor, and costs stay low. The trade-off is limited scale.
Cash machine or acquisition channel: pick a role
The fix, per Gadzhi, is to stop thinking about selling the company and start thinking about cash flow. Faggion partially agrees and splits the strategy into two workable roles for an info product business.
| Role | Goal | Typical margins | Main trade-off |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cash machine | Generate profit directly from the course | 40-90%, per Gadzhi and Faggion respectively | Limited scale, no equity value |
| Acquisition channel | Buy customers cheaply for a bigger offer | Deliberately thin | Requires a backend product to monetize |
| Exit-oriented company | IPO or sale | Under 10% (consulting.com, per Gadzhi's thread) | Historical failure case in this argument |
The acquisition-channel path
Here the course runs at near-zero margin on purpose. Faggion's example: spend 50 reais to acquire a customer at 60 reais, then upsell that customer into software, an agency service, a mentorship, or a higher-ticket course. Courses are easy to advertise because the promise is simple, while software needs technical explanation. His favorite illustration predates the internet: the Michelin Guide, created by the tire maker in 1900, an information product built to associate the brand with travel and fine dining rather than to make money on its own.
The cash-machine path
If you already have an organic audience, a good course is close to a no-brainer: high margins, automated operations, no dependence on ads. Faggion's caveat matches Gadzhi's: the product has a shelf life. Eventually you refresh it, repackage a recorded course as a live immersion, or retire it. And you accept that the company generates little equity, so it will not make you a billionaire.
Does this apply to the Brazilian market?
Yes, with local texture. Faggion sees the box-in extreme across Brazilian markets that started with recorded courses or ebooks in the late 2010s and had to add live sessions, mentorships, and communities. He also sees a Brazilian version of the delusion: operators who mistook a course business for an education company that could scale like a university.
His summary for Brazilian creators: choose one of the two roles early. Run the info product business as a cash machine with honest margins, or run it as an acquisition front for a mentorship, a community, a service, or a SaaS. Trying to build a sellable corporation around a single teacher is the pattern that killed consulting.com, according to Gadzhi's account of the sale.
FAQ
- What are the two reasons an info product business dies? Freezing the offer while the market evolves, and chasing an IPO or sale that the business model cannot support. Iman Gadzhi named both extremes in his April 2026 thread, using consulting.com as the example.
- What margins should an info product business have? Gadzhi argues for 40% to 60%. Faggion reports 80% to 90% in his own mostly organic business; that figure is his first-hand claim, not an audited result.
- Why did consulting.com sell for so little? According to Gadzhi's thread, roughly 80 million dollars in accumulated revenue and 12 million in profit came with under 10% margins, and the whole business plus domain sold for 1.7 million dollars.
- Can an info product be a customer-acquisition tool? Yes. The Michelin Guide, launched in 1900, is the classic case: information sold or given away to build the brand and travel behavior, not to profit directly.
- Should I build a course company to sell it later? Gadzhi's answer is no: treat it as a cash machine or an acquisition channel, because course companies rarely command acquisition multiples.
Turn your own video lessons into lasting written content
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