Courtesy of Lance Junck/Udemy
- Lance Junck, 23, earned $35,000 in just three months selling his ChatGPT course on Udemy.
- Junck's has enrolled over 15,000 students in his seven-hour "ChatGPT Masterclass."
- He has no doubt the course will keep selling as people start to recognize "the power of the tool."
Workers are turning to OpenAI's ChatGPT to make their jobs easier — and one guy is raking in tens of thousands of dollars teaching people how.
In late December, Lance Junck, 23, launched an online course on education platform Udemy that teaches people to use ChatGPT. In just three months, Junck has enrolled more than 15,000 students from around the world in his "ChatGPT Masterclass: A Complete ChatGPT Guide for Beginners," raking in $34,913 in profits so far, according to screenshots of his sales dashboard reviewed by Insider.
When the Austin-based, full-time brand strategist first used ChatGPT last November, he was "blown away" by its impressive generative capabilities. Junck said he wanted to make the bot accessible to everyone and saw an opportunity to teach people how to use the tool with an online course.
"There is an incredible learning curve to ChatGPT," he said. "I think people are kind of afraid of ChatGPT, so I tried to make it warm and exciting and approachable."
Junck admits that he's self-taught: He said he spends hours on the bot every day, asking it to do things like write an introduction to a novel or product descriptions for certain foods to better understand how to prompt the bot.
On top of that, he said he consumes "every piece of ChatGPT content" on the internet, including articles and posts on LinkedIn, GitHub, and Reddit.
The 'ChatGPT Masterclass' has enrolled more than 15,000 students globally
The course, which is more than seven hours long and is now priced at $20, includes 50 lectures aimed at beginners and took Junck three weeks to film.
It starts with how to write your first ChatGPT prompt, then moves into specific ChatGPT applications for businesses, students, and programmers. It also includes tutorials on how to make art with AI image generator DALL-E 2, suggestions on the best ChatGPT plug-ins, and even an introduction to GPT-4, OpenAI's newest language model.
Within a week, 90 students enrolled in the course, Junck said. Since then, the course has enrolled between 200 and 250 new students each day. 15,250 students have taken the course as of the time this article was written, according to Udemy.
Students, he said, are anywhere from 20 to 50 years old, and include college students and working professionals. While the majority come from the US, Junck's course has attracted students in India, Japan, and Canada. Students from Venezuela, Russia, and parts of the Middle East — countries where ChatGPT isn't available — have also flocked to the course, he said.
Junck credits the demand for his services, in part, to his expertise in marketing and SEO, which he said is why his course is one of the first to appear amid 1,266 results when searching for ChatGPT on Udemy. He also promoted the course on LinkedIn.
Some students didn't like the course, but the demand continues to rise
While the responses to the course has been mostly positive — it has a 4.5-star rating on Udemy — some students said his course is too surface-level and not any better than free ChatGPT-instruction videos on YouTube, according to course reviews on Udemy.
Still, demand continues to rise, and Junck has even expanded his ChatGPT instruction beyond Udemy to target companies.
He's taught startups like ClearDesk how to implement ChatGPT into their marketing, human resources, and operations teams. He has gotten paid speaking opportunities to teach companies like CEO advisory firm Sage Executive Group and tech news site HPCwire how to use ChatGPT, according to emails reviewed by Insider.
Jerry Rollins, the chairman of Sage, told Insider that Junck's services were "very informative and insightful." Tom Tabor, a spokesperson for HPCwire, told Insider that "Lance has a current grasp of the GPT space and the possibilities of the technology." "We needed his insights of the tech so we could understand how to integrate it into our business processes," Tabor said.
ClearDesk did not respond to Insider's requests for comment.
Junck, who has no formal AI training, admits that he's had doubts around whether the course would sell. He said he's wondered whether there's "some kid at Cornell getting his PhD in large language models" teaching ChatGPT that would "blow me out of the water."
Still, given the meteoric rise of generative AI tools, Junck believes there will be an even greater need for AI courses in the near future.
As of April, Udemy has enrolled 417,212 students across more than 429 ChatGPT classes on the site — an increase of 47% from the previous month, Callie Kaminski, a Udemy spokesperson, told Insider.
Junck, who is running his business on top of his full-time job at an e-commerce company, said he plans to add lectures on how to use other generative AI tools like Microsoft's new Bing and Google's Bard when they are officially launched to the public. He also wants to focus on striking larger deals with companies, he said.
Have you used ChatGPT or other AI chatbots in an interesting way? Email the reporter at amok@insider.com