I spent $10,000 on online courses that didn't deliver. So I built the thing that should have existed before I paid.
I want to be clear about something before I start.
This is not a success story. I am not going to show you MRR screenshots or tell you we cracked the code. We are early. Very early. But the reason I built this is a story worth telling, and I think some of you will recognize yourselves in it.
A few years ago I was hungry to level up.
Not in a wanna be X influencer kind of way. I had a specific goal. I wanted to build skills that would let me move faster, earn more, and stop feeling like I was always one step behind. So I did what millions of people do every year.
I went online and started buying courses.
The first one cost me $297. The instructor had a massive following, a website, before-and-after testimonials from people who looked like me, and a price-anchored down from some fake original price. I bought it. I watched it. I got a PDF and about 6 hours of generic content I could have found on YouTube for free.
I told myself I bought the wrong one. I kept looking.
By the time I stopped counting, I had spent over $10,000 across courses, coaching programs, and masterclasses. Some were decent. Most were not. And not once, in any of those purchases, did I have a real way to know the difference before I paid.
There was no neutral place to check. No Yelp. No Trustpilot. Just the creator's own testimonials, which they hand-picked, and random forum threads that were either outdated or impossible to verify.
That is when the idea hit me.
The online education market does hundreds of billions of dollars a year. And it has zero accountability infrastructure.
Think about that. You can go to G2 right now and find out exactly what real users think about any piece of software. You can go to Glassdoor and find out what employees think about a company before you join. You can go to Trustpilot and find out whether a business is legitimate before you hand over your credit card.
But you want to know if a $2,000 course actually delivers what it promises? Good luck. You're on your own.
So I started building AllPros.
The idea is simple. Real verified reviews from real students. A clear score for every program that tells you whether it actually delivers. No affiliates. No paid rankings. No incentive but the truth.
Think of it as what Yelp did for businesses, applied to online education.
Here is what I did not expect when I started building.
I expected pushback from the fake gurus. We got that. Creators who sell mediocre programs do not love the idea of a third party holding them accountable.
What I did not expect was how viscerally students responded when I talked about the problem.
I went into forums, communities, Reddit threads. I described the problem. Every single time, people came out of the woodwork to share their own stories. Someone spent $3,000 on a business coaching program that turned out to be a generic PDF and three Zoom calls. Someone else bought a high-ticket trading course from an instructor with a rented Lamborghini in his thumbnails and got nothing but bad advice.
The pain is real. The market is massive. And the solution did not exist.
That is why we built AllPros.
We are live. We have programs listed. We are accumulating verified reviews. The hardest problem right now is the one every two-sided marketplace faces: the cold start.
You need reviews to attract students. You need students to generate reviews. You need both to convince creators that the platform is worth their time.
We are in the middle of that grind right now.
If you have been burned by an online course, come check the platform. If you run an online program and your students actually get results, I want to hear from you. Creators who deliver deserve more visibility than creators who just market better.
That is the whole point.
The people who are brave enough to invest in themselves deserve to know the truth before they pay.
That is why AllPros exists. And we are just getting started.
Amit Zandberg, co-founder of AllPros (allpros.io)
