Have you noticed the explosion of success stories on LinkedIn promising that anyone can earn hundreds of thousands a year by selling their expertise through courses and webinars?
In recent years, a phenomenon called expert entrepreneurship has emerged — a blend of personal branding, the education business, and social media marketing. The storyline often follows the same script: a young, energetic online personality openly shares their jaw-dropping monthly revenue — tens of thousands of euros — and showcases an endless stream of wins.
They don’t hide their wealth or success. In fact, they’re eager to spread the gospel. They host courses, webinars, business retreats, and offer various coaching programs and packages teaching how anyone can become an expert entrepreneur and achieve the same results. Eventually, the students themselves start selling their own expertise — again in the form of courses, webinars, and coaching — and the cycle repeats.
The reality, however, is that the market is limited — and behind many of these “success stories” is a model built on selling the very same promise of success to newcomers, who then want to sell it to others. It’s no longer just a business — it’s a self-perpetuating loop that continues only as long as people believe in it.
Scratch the surface and you’ll find traits that resemble both multi-level marketing and high-energy revival movements. The expert entrepreneur manifests their own success, and every new client amplifies that expertise to others. Soon, a network — and a bubble — forms, where everyone praises each other’s brilliance and celebrates their wins, knowing that this mutual admiration is exactly what draws in more clients.
I’m not claiming that expert entrepreneurs who boast about their success are frauds — on the contrary, they’ve most likely earned hefty sums through their training programs and reached five-figure monthly billings, and the success story they’ve packaged often holds true and is perfectly legitimate. But the opportunities are limited, and replicating that same concept for clients is nowhere near as easy as social media makes it seem.
The promise is undeniably attractive: you can become a sought-after authority in your field, get media attention, charge premium rates, and live the free-spirited life of an entrepreneur. And best of all — this can all be yours the moment you buy and absorb the program that reveals “the secrets to success.”
When the promise of success is sold to others who want to sell the promise of success, the product is no longer expertise — it’s the story itself.
The rhetoric of expert entrepreneurs leans heavily on “mindset” talk: success depends entirely on how much you believe in yourself and how boldly you price your work. If you fail, it’s not the market, product, or strategy — it’s all in your head. This makes the message both empowering and convenient: if the price seems steep, you too can reach that level — if you don’t, the problem is you, not the program you bought.
The core problem is obvious: not everyone can be a six-figure business coach. When the promise of success is sold to others who want to sell the promise of success, the product is no longer expertise — it’s the story itself. And when the metrics of success are follower counts and revenue screenshots, the stories start to blur together — and disappointment follows quickly if there’s no real substance beneath the glossy image.
This doesn’t mean that expert entrepreneurship itself is suspect. On the contrary — when it’s grounded in genuine expertise, education, experience, and real achievements, it’s both valuable and needed. But is it realistic to think that anyone can hit hundreds of thousands in sales within six months just by buying a course and coaching? Probably not.
The trendy version of expert entrepreneurship often leans more on personal branding and an enticingly packaged success promise than on substance — and that’s what makes it problematic. On social media, surface polish and genuine expertise can end up on the same shelf. Clients may struggle to tell whether they’re paying for real, needed expertise — or just an appealing story. And when someone dares to ask for concrete proof, the answer is often: “You just need to think bigger!” or “You’re just jealous because you haven’t figured out how to sell your own expertise.”
Before you put on the expert’s cloak, stop and ask yourself: am I truly selling my own knowledge — or just trying to replicate a success story that was sold to me — a mere image of having expertise to sell? If the answer is the latter, remember: even the emperor can be dressed in nothing more than a story.