Most course creators on Gumroad, Teachable, Thinkific, and Udemy are selling to maybe 5% of the people who'd actually buy from them.
Not because their content is bad. Not because the price is wrong. Because the course is in English, and most of the world isn't.
If you've built something worth selling, this post is about why selling courses globally still feels out of reach for most creators — and what you can realistically do about it.
The Real Reason Course Creators Stay in English-Only Markets
It's not laziness. It's a combination of things that each feel reasonable on their own:
"My audience is English-speaking."
Maybe — but that's partially a self-fulfilling prophecy. If your sales page is in English and your course is in English, you're not going to attract Portuguese speakers from Brazil or Spanish speakers from Mexico. You've filtered them out before they ever found you.
"Translation is expensive."
It can be. Professional human translation for a 60-page course PDF runs hundreds to thousands of dollars depending on language and provider. That's a real barrier for a bootstrapped creator.
"I don't know how to handle international payments or support."
Fair. But platforms like Gumroad, Teachable, and Thinkific already handle currency conversion and international payments. The infrastructure exists. The content barrier is what's actually stopping you.
What the Global Course Market Actually Looks Like
Here are some numbers worth knowing:
- Brazil is one of Udemy's largest markets. Portuguese-language courses consistently outperform their English equivalents in Brazilian search results.
- Spanish is spoken by 500+ million people, with a fast-growing middle class actively spending on online education in Mexico, Colombia, Argentina, and Spain.
- Hindi, Indonesian, German, French — every one of these represents a market of tens of millions of people.
The demand exists. The question is whether your course content is accessible to those buyers.
How to Start Selling Courses Globally: A Practical Path
1. Start with One Language, Not All of Them
Pick one market. Check your Gumroad or Teachable analytics. Are you getting purchases from Brazil, Germany, or Mexico despite not targeting those countries? That's a signal. Start there.
2. Translate Your Course PDF (Text, Images, Layout — All of It)
A course isn't just a document — it's a designed PDF with text inside images, callout boxes, branded layouts, and visual hierarchy. To properly translate course content, you need a solution that preserves the original layout and formatting. When the layout breaks, the product looks unprofessional.
3. Update Your Sales Page
A translated course needs a translated sales page to match. Most platforms support multiple product listings, so you can have an English version and a Spanish version as separate products with separate URLs.
4. Price for the Market
Purchasing power varies significantly across countries. Platforms like Gumroad and Teachable support purchasing power parity or manual regional pricing. Use it.
5. Promote Where Your New Audience Actually Is
Facebook groups, local YouTube channels, regional Reddit communities, and domestic influencers in your target market are often far less saturated than English-language equivalents.
The Compounding Effect of Going Global
- Existing content earns in new markets without being recreated
- Reviews and testimonials from international buyers increase social proof
- SEO builds in a new language, compounding over time
- Revenue diversifies across currencies and economic conditions
You built the course once. Going global is about making that asset work harder — not building again from scratch.
Common Mistakes to Avoid
Don't use machine translation on a public-facing product without review.
Auto-translation has improved dramatically, but idiomatic errors still happen — especially in instructional content where clarity is everything.
Don't ignore your existing international buyers.
If people are already buying from you in other countries, they're telling you something. Survey them. Ask what they'd want in their language.
Don't wait until your course is "finished."
Courses are never finished. If you have a version people are buying in English, that's the version to translate.
A Note on Tools
Until recently, the workflow for translating a course PDF looked like this: export to Word, paste into a translator, lose all the formatting, hire someone to reformat it, realise the images still have English text in them, give up.
That's why most course creators never bothered.
CourseLingo is built specifically for this problem — it translates course PDFs with the text, images, and layout intact. You upload your PDF, choose a target language, and get back a translated version that's ready to sell.
The market for your course is bigger than English. The only question is how soon you start reaching it.