How Cody Garrett Pre-Sold a $120,000 Course Before Writing a Single Lesson
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Learning how to pre-sell an online course before building it is one of the most counterintuitive moves in the creator playbook. Cody Garrett didn't just learn it. In August 2022, he collected $120,000 from 300 people for a course that didn't exist yet. The Kajabi membership site he sent them to had one page. It said: what's coming.
No content. No curriculum. No lessons recorded. Just a financial planner from Pearland, Texas, who had spent the last year turning down 20 people a week because he could only serve 20 clients a year, and a theory that the right people would pay to learn what he knew before he'd built a single thing to teach them.
He was right.
That single month changed everything. Cody had been making $45,000 a year as a planner. One pre-sale on Kajabi paid him more than twice that before he'd written a word of the course.
What he built next, live, in real time, with those 300 members watching, would eventually generate over $1 million in revenue, fund $150,000 in scholarships, and run itself in about five hours a week.
The Origin
Cody Garrett didn't start in finance. He started at Berklee College of Music.
For ten years after graduating, he made it work as a professional musician, about $75,000 a year, wearing every hat available. Full-time church music director by day. Rehearsals, wedding gigs, Broadway shows, and tour dates filling everything else. He was good at it. He was busy.
He was also never home for dinner.
In 2018, Cody made a decision that sounds simple and wasn't: he wanted to eat dinner with his wife every single day. So he left music overnight. Last rehearsal one day, financial planning firm the next. He earned his CFP in about two and a half years, then launched his own advice-only firm in 2021.
The firm was different from the start. Cody doesn't manage investments or sell financial products. He teaches people to manage their own money.
"Like a plumber who comes over and teaches you which things to turn, and you turn them with their guidance."
It's a model used by roughly 0.2% of advisors. Cody built a following around it fast.
Too fast. Within months of launching, 20 people a week were asking to work with him. His target was 20 clients for the entire year.
He needed a different way to scale.
The Decision
Cody found Kajabi through FinCon, a conference for financial content creators. A few speakers there used it, and the guidance he took away was simple: if you want to build a course, there are cheaper places to start. If you want to build a platform, use Kajabi.
He chose Kajabi from day one. Not because it was the cheapest option for what he needed right then, but because he didn't want to build something and have to migrate it later. He was thinking about where he wanted to be in five years, not just what he needed to launch. He even acknowledges he probably overpaid at the start.
That kind of thinking would define everything that came next.
The Mechanism
How to Pre-Sell an Online Course: The Method Cody Used
Here's what Cody actually did, and why it works.
Rather than spending a year building a course in isolation and hoping people would buy it, he flipped the sequence. He listed an 8-hour video course on Kajabi at $349 a year, told his audience what it would cover, and asked them to commit before a single lesson existed.
300 people said yes. $120,000 landed in one month.
For someone who had been making $45,000 a year as a planner, that number was clarifying. "Wow," he said. "This is real."
Then he built the course live, from August 2022 through March 2023, with those members watching, asking questions, and shaping what he made in real time. He knew exactly what they needed because they were telling him as he built it. No guessing. No building in a vacuum. The feedback loop was baked in from day one because the people giving feedback had already paid for what they were helping create.
The course covers the practical application of financial planning concepts, built around the same methods Cody uses in his own firm. Advisors get templates, frameworks, and step-by-step video instruction. The curriculum has expanded from the original 8 hours to over 120 hours of content, and 70% of new members today are career changers entering the financial planning profession for the first time.
The pricing model was just as deliberate. Annual subscriptions only, no monthly option. Cody wanted members who were committed, not browsers. His reasoning: immediate access to everything, no drip-locked content, full transparency from day one. If you're in, you're in.
He called his original 300 members the OPs, Original Planners, and locked them at their founding rate of $349 for life. Every year since, he's raised the price by about $100. It's now $649 a year. Seventy percent of the OPs are still members.
It's not a discount strategy. It's a loyalty lock. If an OP cancels and tries to rejoin later, they pay the current rate. The incentive to stay is built into the structure. Cody never offered a discount and never needed to. The founding price became the reward for those who believed early.
He also built a 90-day trial into the model, a preview of the full membership at $249 for 90 days, giving prospective members a lower-commitment entry point before moving to the annual subscription.
"Everybody wants to work the five hours but they don't want to work the forty that it takes to build the five-hour week."
The mechanism Cody built took real work to construct. But once it was running, it ran.
The Result
Measure Twice Planners now generates around $350,000 a year in gross revenue. His operating costs run less than $10,000 a year. Kajabi is his primary business expense. He works about five hours a week.
"Five years ago, we had $50,000 in investments. Right now, we have $850,000."
That's not the business revenue. That's his personal investment portfolio, built by consistently putting $100,000-plus a year into investments while running a business with almost nothing in overhead.
He has 750 members today, 500 on annual subscriptions and 250 on a 90-day trial at $249. The course that launched as 8 hours of video now runs to over 120 hours. Total GMV has crossed $1 million.
And then there's this: a $49 add-on fee built into the membership has funded over $150,000 in full-tuition CFP scholarships for people who couldn't afford the certification program. Those scholars are now practicing advisors. Measure Twice Planners has helped facilitate over 260,000 CFP experience hours through Kajabi. University programs now enroll students directly into the course.
One platform. One expert. Generational impact.
Their Advice
"Pre-sell your course before building it. Use the platform as a Kickstarter and co-create with your members in real time so you know it fits before you spend a year building something that might not be marketable."
— Cody Garrett, CFP
Cody built a million-dollar education business on a platform that costs less than $10,000 a year to run. He chose Kajabi before he had anything to put on it, because he was building for where he wanted to go, not just where he was starting.
If you're ready to do the same, see what Kajabi can do for your business.