I almost enrolled in an MBA I would have regretted. Eight years later I shipped a toolkit for the decision I had to make instead.
I came to Canada from China in my mid-thirties after more than ten years in advertising. Middle management, real salary, a career that had taken years to build. The advertising background was what got me through immigration. So when I started thinking about going back to school, an MBA looked like the obvious next step.
I spent six months and over a thousand dollars preparing for the GMAT. My wife took on most of the housework and our young child while I studied. When the offer came in from one of Canada's top business schools, it felt like the point where all of that had paid off.
Then I started imagining the actual work. The coursework. The job on the other side. And the harder question: if I graduated into a Canadian marketing role with no local industry experience and a second-language disadvantage, what would I actually bring?
I turned the offer down.
The program I eventually chose was a Programming and Analysis diploma at an Ontario college. Three years, two co-op terms. It didn't extend my old career — it replaced it. Eight years later I'm a functional lead on a tech team in Canada, earning more than I did at my peak before immigrating.
That decision — which program, and why — is what I've been building into a toolkit.
What I built
Before You Enrol is a decision toolkit for newcomers in Canada (year 0-2, no prior tech credentials) choosing which Canadian tech program to enrol in. The buyer is someone comparing two to five specific programs, uncertain which to pick. The brochures all sound similar. The Reddit threads contradict each other. The immigration consultants have an interest in selling something. The cost of choosing wrong is a year or two of their life and tens of thousands of dollars they can't get back.
The toolkit is five short parts: a pre-decision check, a program decision framework built around the criteria that actually predict job outcomes, a shortlist analyzer (a Claude Project the buyer pastes their situation into), a warnings section on the specific traps that cause people to enrol in programs that look right but don't translate to work, and a short bridge to the first actions that matter once the decision is made.
It's selling on Gumroad at $29 USD pre-sale through May 31, then $59 at standard launch. No face, no real name — I write under a pen name to keep my professional and personal life separate. Trust has to come from the content itself, and from a 30-day no-questions refund policy.
Where I am
Pre-sale is live. Part 1 is shipping now. Parts 2 through 5, the scorecard, the funding calculator, and the shortlist analyzer are being built over the next four weeks and delivered to the same Gumroad link as they're finished.
I'm posting here partly to find buyers, partly because building something real in public is useful discipline.
If you've shipped something to newcomers or immigrants as an anonymous creator, I'd be interested in what you learned.
