In the soft glow of a cocktail bar, Brandon—the head bartender of Stupid Bar—carefully demonstrates how to mix a classic cocktail through a livestream. On the other end of the screen, his students follow along intently, practicing the steps at their kitchen counters. Elsewhere, Blair, co-founder of ‘Re Life,’ holds a storage box, explaining how to use categorization and flow design to transform chaotic spaces into clean, harmonious homes.
These professions, once confined to specific venues, are now breaking free from physical boundaries thanks to online courses. This shift isn’t just about sharing their passions; it’s opened up new avenues for side hustles, entrepreneurship, and personal branding.
For many creators, this shift isn’t just about sharing their passions; it’s a new path toward side hustles, entrepreneurship, and building personal brands.
A key enabler behind this transformation is Teachify. It’s more than just a platform for launching courses—it’s a system that empowers creators to take full control of their brand and manage their business independently.
Teachify is Lawrence Lin’s third startup venture. In Taiwan’s startup ecosystem, Lawrence is no stranger. He previously founded the tech media Inside and the recipe-sharing community iCook.
Now, with Teachify, he’s built a platform tailored for knowledge creators—individuals, businesses, and educational institutions—to easily launch online courses and grow their brands. To date, the platform boasts over 840,000 members.
To draw a parallel with e-commerce, Hahow is more akin to B2C platforms where teachers upload courses and students shop from a marketplace. Teachify, on the other hand, is more like Shopify. Rather than being a course marketplace, it provides a set of tools that help creators build their own branded sites, offering an all-in-one solution covering everything from storefront creation and cloud content management to secure content delivery. Creators can build branded course websites, foster learning communities, manage cloud-based content, and deliver seamless streaming to students, regardless of file size or format.
This model significantly lowers the technical and operational barriers for creators, enabling them to truly own their business rather than just participating on someone else’s platform.
Learning Has Changed: Knowledge Is Now an Income Stream, Not Just an Input
The way people learn today is radically different from before. Previously, picking up a new skill meant buying a book, signing up for a physical class, or attending a seminar. But now, the spread of knowledge has gone fully digital.
“People haven’t stopped learning—they’ve just changed how they do it,” Lawrence observes.
“YouTube videos, podcasts, newsletters, social media, and even short-form videos are now dominant learning methods. Online courses are a particularly promising piece of that puzzle.’’
And this shift isn’t just impacting learners—it’s disrupting the entire knowledge economy. In the past, publishing a book required passing through layers of gatekeeping: publishers decided if your ideas deserved to reach the public, how many copies to print, and where to distribute. Now, with the rise of personal branding, creators can bypass these intermediaries and go directly to market, choosing their own themes, formats, and audiences.
As the knowledge economy accelerates, Teachify isn’t just mining for gold—it’s selling the shovels. By equipping creators with the right tools, it helps them monetize their expertise.
This model reflects a broader shift: more people are seeking flexible, diverse income streams. From side hustles to full-on career pivots, financial freedom is top of mind. Unlike physical stores, stocks, or real estate, digital content creation is lower-risk, more flexible, and easy to start. Whether it’s a custom PDF, a mini live class, or a full course, anyone can turn knowledge into income.
And it’s not just individuals riding this wave—businesses are getting on board too. Teachify+—the company’s enterprise solution—offers customizable systems for digital learning. Companies don’t need to build an online store. Instead, they can use Teachify’s infrastructure to manage internal training, content delivery, and talent development.
From Carts to Courses: Teachify Brings E-Commerce Precision to the Creator World
Carving out a place in a competitive market is never easy—and Teachify’s journey was no exception. Throughout its product development process, the team encountered more than a few challenges.
In the early days of Teachify, with limited resources on hand, founder Lawrence Lin and his team focused on a single goal: lower the barrier to entry so more people could start using the product. But after spending time in deep conversation with their users, a more crucial insight surfaced—creators don’t stay just because something is easy to use. They stay if they can make money. That realization became a turning point in the evolution of Teachify’s product strategy.
What does it mean to apply e-commerce thinking? Lawrence explains that the heart of e-commerce isn’t just about completing a transaction—it’s about improving conversion rates, increasing average order value, and boosting customer retention.
These ideas are second nature in the world of online retail, but rarely applied to content monetization. Teachify began rethinking its entire product structure, not only enabling creators to upload and sell courses, but also designing a seamless shopping and learning experience—ensuring that students could continuously use the content they purchased, which in turn, would encourage repurchases and long-term engagement.
“In traditional e-commerce, once a customer receives the product in good condition, the seller’s job is mostly done. But what we’re selling is content,” Lawrence says. “If someone buys a course to prepare for a major national exam, their learning journey might span months or even a full year.”
“From purchase to test day, every step of the journey is on us. Any disruption along the way—we fix it. The learning experience must stay smooth, end to end.”
This means Teachify must manage every stage of the user journey—before the transaction (attracting creators to the platform), during the transaction (ensuring a frictionless purchase and learning experience), and after the transaction (maintaining long-term access to content and encouraging learners to return). Compared to a typical e-commerce platform, it’s a much more complex operation.
“‘To be honest, even I underestimated its complexity,’ Lawrence admits.”
Teachify isn’t just offering a website for creators to host courses—it’s integrating three distinct systems into one product: website building, video streaming, and payment processing. Each of these functions could be a standalone startup on its own. Yet Teachify chose to develop all of them in-house, keeping full control over the core technology to ensure a stable, high-quality user experience.
Cracking the Payment Puzzle: Unlocking the Final Mile of Knowledge Monetization
One of the biggest hurdles Teachify faced was payment processing. After launching their courses, creators often find themselves burdened with administrative tasks like issuing invoices, filing taxes, and dealing with financial compliance. Meanwhile, payment providers are typically wary of “deferred goods” like online courses, which aren’t immediately delivered at the time of purchase.
To address this issue, Teachify implemented a Merchant of Record (MOR) model.
In this setup, Teachify acts as the official seller of record, taking on the financial risks and compliance obligations on behalf of creators. This gives payment processors peace of mind and allows creators to focus solely on course development and community building—without worrying about reserve funds, invoicing, or tax filings.
While this level of system integration brought immense technical challenges, it also gave Teachify a distinct competitive advantage. Some competitors might excel at storefront tools but fall short on payment infrastructure. Others might have the financial side figured out but lack the robust video technology needed to support high-traffic content delivery.
Teachify chose a different path: doing it all. After three years of methodical, ground-up building, the company has accumulated the domain knowledge and technical foundation to support rapid scaling. That period of quiet preparation is now paying off in a big way. In just three years, Teachify’s user base skyrocketed from 50,000 to 840,000. The number of courses published on the platform soared from 480 to over 7,600—an astonishing 15-fold increase.
As more and more knowledge creators enter the space, Teachify has evolved from a simple online course platform into a powerful engine for the knowledge economy. This year, the company’s gross merchandise value (GMV) is projected to surpass NT$1 billion.
From a Boy Who Built Websites to the Architect of a Creator’s Stage
Lawrence Lin’s entrepreneurial journey may have been written in the stars as early as age twelve.
While other kids were glued to their Game Boys, Lawrence was learning how to build websites. “Back in middle school, I was already helping my school and friends set up their own sites so they could publish their content,” he recalls. Even as a child, the idea of being a “webmaster” sparked something in him—not just because of the technical thrill, but because he saw websites as spaces where people could gather, share, and interact.
“Building a website is like being an architect—you’re constructing a skyscraper like Taipei 101. But being a webmaster is more like running Taipei 101. You manage the utilities, the lighting, the flow of people, the shops—it’s about creating a vibrant space full of traffic, commerce, and connection.” That philosophy would later become the cornerstone of Lawrence’s entrepreneurial vision.
His first official startup was Inside, a tech media platform designed to give voice to the tech community and support the growth of Taiwan’s startup scene. He later went on to found iCook, a recipe-sharing platform that empowered home cooks to showcase their culinary creativity. “Inside gave techies a place to speak out. iCook lets food lovers share inspiration. And now, Teachify is helping anyone—literally anyone—share their expertise with the world. We’ve already seen it spread across languages: Japanese, English, Spanish.”
And yet, despite the different domains, the heart of each platform remains the same: to build a stage where creators can shine.
A Stage for the Creator Economy
Teachify isn’t just a platform—it’s a stage where voices rise. On this stage, hobbyists have become professional instructors. Side hustles have transformed into full-time careers, unlocking financial freedom. Even companies are using Teachify to build internal learning systems, helping teams grow smarter and more competitive.
“At Teachify, anyone can launch a course,” Lawrence says. “Whether your audience is five people or five thousand, there’s a space for you in the market.” He’s seen countless creators start from scratch, building their personal brands through Teachify, watching their income and influence rise in tandem. “That journey—watching someone go from unknown to unstoppable—that’s the part that feels most valuable and meaningful to me.”
The boy who once built websites has grown into a new kind of digital architect—one who is shaping the future of education and empowering others to do the same. And through it all, his mission has never changed: to build a real stage, where more people can express their talents and be seen by the world.
This grand production of the knowledge economy? It’s only just begun.
This article has been contributed to Asia Tech Daily.
