There’s a conflict every established online education owner knows. Keep doing what has always worked, or try something new and risk chasing trends. I’ve watched it play out over the last two or three years.
Business as Usual Feels Safe, but Disruption Is Safer Over Time
Some long-standing businesses have faltered significantly. Other businesses of a similar size took a knock, recovered and are now heading up. I’d put StoryLearning in that second group, though for a while I feared it belonged in the first. Around the edges, a third type has appeared: brand-new, AI-native startups run by younger founders, growing fast.
The first group is the one to avoid. The useful question is how to position yourself in the second group: ride out the disruption and survive, even thrive. You do that by keeping the core stable and running a deliberate experimental pocket in one corner of the business before the current model declines.
The core tension is business as usual versus disrupting yourself. Business as usual feels safe because it’s known and still generates money, at least for the short term. It often comes with an attachment to the way you’ve always done things, or just a general weariness after a decade in business.
Disrupting yourself is safer over the long term. The safety of business as usual is short term.
Scary is safe.
Early experiments expand the surface area of opportunity. Most of them won’t work, but one might. If you figure that out early, you’re ahead of the curve.
So what does disruption actually mean?
Self-Disruption Means an Experimental Pocket, Not a New Niche
Some people hear “disruption” and think it means scrapping the whole business. I see entrepreneurs, especially on Twitter, doing exactly that: one month this business, next month that one, then another niche. That’s not disruption. It’s opportunity hunting, and it discards your strongest asset: long-term brand.
The longer you stay in business, the easier it gets in many ways, if you’re building brand and reputation. So you don’t abandon the niche, the customer or the value you provide. You change how you deliver that value.
Think of the business as one stable whole, with an experimental pocket in one corner. The rest of the business stays relatively stable. That pocket is where the disruption happens. It’s proactive, not a crisis response. In fact, the moment your current model is working well is exactly when you should be running those experiments.
This is uncomfortable. It looks like a distraction, and it might cannibalise what you already have. But the alternative is waiting for the market to force the change, which is worse.
Traffic: Small Experiments Early Made SEO’s Decline Survivable
For years, SEO was the rainmaker in StoryLearning, my language education business. I started in 2013, when Google was where the leads came from. I didn’t rely on it alone.
I launched a podcast. I started a YouTube channel. I experimented with ads. At the time I had no idea which, if any, would work. What I was actually doing was disrupting the thing that was already working.
The podcast never broke out. It chugged along, and it still builds trust with a small segment of the audience. Ads cost me a lot of time and probably over a million dollars in total, and they never became the main strategy, however much I wanted them to. YouTube was just somewhere I posted videos for years. Around 2020 or 2021, I started taking it seriously. It became the new main traffic and lead generator.
When SEO got eaten up two or three years ago, I had friends who relied on it and had a very difficult time. Because StoryLearning already had momentum on YouTube, it could lean into that instead. YouTube now generates more traffic and leads than SEO ever did.
Now I’m experimenting with AEO, answer engine optimisation: getting cited in the large language models. Early days, and I don’t know how it will work out. YouTube and the podcast continue. I don’t know how AEO will interact with them. But when that becomes clear, the business will be able to adapt, because it will already have knowledge and experience in that area.
I didn’t know which experiment would pay off. Running them early meant a replacement engine was ready when the old one declined.
Product: The Evolution from Courses to Coaching and Software
Product followed the same pattern. I think the first thing I ever made for sale was an ebook. Shortly after that came an early live cohort, which was ahead of its time. For years, simple one-time courses were the bread and butter of StoryLearning.
I tried a membership. It didn’t last long. I launched a certification, and that didn’t last either. A few years ago, I started offering high-ticket coaching, and it became a relatively important part of the business.
That interacts with the traffic side. With the decline of SEO, I’ve been thinking about how to keep the business sturdy in a lower-traffic environment. If traffic from search and YouTube is no longer guaranteed, selling high-ticket services is the natural answer. Product and traffic start to depend on each other in new ways.
About six months ago, I started developing a new app for StoryLearning. I had avoided software for years because it felt too risky and too expensive. Now one developer plus AI can do the work of a team of ten, so the risk calculation has changed. The app is AI-based, and it disrupts the main product, which is still courses. I can’t rest on the course model just because it works today. I suspect the software could eclipse everything else over the next two or three years, but I don’t know. What matters is that it’s being built now, while the core business is still healthy.
Use the Three Horizons to Keep the Next Engine Building
A useful framework for thinking about this is McKinsey’s three horizons of growth. Picture your main product line over time. It grows, becomes stable, and eventually declines. That might take three, five, twenty, or a hundred years if you’re Coca-Cola.
The shape doesn’t change.
If you know decline is coming, you can start developing a second horizon in the background while the first is still healthy. That second horizon can eventually eclipse the first. When the first declines, the second is ready to replace it. Later, a third horizon sits behind that.
You can work on all of these horizons at the same time, investing certain amounts of time and money and resources into getting the ideas out into the world. You never know when one of them is going to come and potentially save you. That’s what turns an experimental pocket from a distraction into the next product line being built before you need it.
Start Before the Current Model Declines
The wrong time to begin is when your current traffic or product is already falling. By then you’re making decisions from a weak position.
Choose which part of the business should stay stable. That will usually be the brand, the niche and the customer. Then pick one small experimental pocket in traffic or product, and start it now. It doesn’t need to be large. It only needs to run before you need it.
I’ve spent thirteen years doing this, often without knowing which experiment would work. Looking back, that constant experimentation was what kept the business agile. It wasn’t any single channel or product. It was the habit of having something else in motion.
Don’t sit still just because the current model still works.
The next one should already be running.
