Customer Story
He built a $200K cyber academy.
In 11 months, as a solo founder.
Tyler Ramsbey had an audience and a decade of offensive security experience. What he didn't have was a way to put 9,000 students inside real Active Directory networks without becoming a full-time cloud engineer. That's where CourseStack stepped in.
Today, his Hack Smarter community is also a cyber academy with $128K a year in recurring revenue on top of lifetime access course sales.
- $200K
- Earned to date
- $128K
- Run-rate ARR
- 9,065
- Students enrolled
- 44,036
- Lab machines launched
one-time + recurring sales
939 active paying members
from zero, in 11 months
108,438 hours of hands-on time
Platform data, August 2025 – July 2026.
- Academy
- Hack Smarter Labs
- Founder
- Tyler Ramsbey
- Focus
- Offensive security training
- Public launch
- August 2025
- Team
- One full-time person
- Plan
- CourseStack Scale
The challenge
Turning a loyal community into a reliable income.
Tyler had done the hard part most creators never manage: a Discord community and social following past 15,000 people, built on genuinely good hands-on content. The open question was how to turn that goodwill into a business that could pay the bills, without asking his audience to pay for something thinner than what they got for free.
In offensive security, what people will actually pay for is a box to break into. You don't learn it by watching; you learn it by getting a shell, losing it, and getting it back. But delivering real labs at scale runs straight into a wall: infrastructure. A single Active Directory environment means a domain controller, joined workstations, a routed network, and per-student isolation so one learner's rampage doesn't ruin another's. Multiply that by thousands of students on demand, around the clock, and you are no longer running a training business. You're running a cloud provider, badly and at a loss.
The alternative most creators settle for is a video course with a homework assignment: “go set up this lab yourself.” Completion rates collapse, and so does the subscription that depends on them.
The solution
He focused on content & community. We handled the infrastructure.
Tyler and his community members still design every machine, attack path, and lesson. They just never have to worry about provisioning VMs, managing cloud accounts, or securely isolating student environments.
- 1,799 custom lab images
Tyler builds and versions his own vulnerable machines (Windows, Linux, Active Directory) directly in CourseStack. No image pipeline to maintain, no hypervisor to babysit.
- Multi-machine networks on demand
Not just single boxes. Tyler authors routed AD environments and refines them constantly, and CourseStack has deployed nearly 900 private copies for students. Each averages 8 machines across multiple subnets, some as large as 30, isolated per student automatically.
- 44,036 machines launched on demand
Every student gets isolated, disposable infrastructure in the browser. 4,271 students have launched a lab, averaging 10.3 machines each.
- 46 CTF events, 3,220 registrations
Recurring competitions with per-player infrastructure and dynamic flags, run on the same platform as the courses. His largest single CTF drew 389 players.
- Memberships and course sales, together
The "Hack Smarter All Access" membership at $39.99/mo carries 583 active subscribers. Tyler has earned nearly $80K more from one-off course sales to students who just want a single topic, all through the same CourseStack checkout.
- 10,559 certificates issued
Branded, verifiable completion certificates issued automatically. Students actually post them to LinkedIn, which feeds the next cohort.
The results
Successful students. Reliable revenue.
Hack Smarter Labs opened to the public in August 2025. Both enrollment and lab usage have climbed every quarter since. This shows the quality and consistency of the content Tyler and the Hack Smarter community produce.
Students enrolled
Cumulative, Aug 2025 – Jun 2026. 9,065 students enrolled.
Lab machines launched
Per month. 10× growth from 675 in September to 6,835 in June.
Hands-on labs improve student outcomes
Free online courses are notorious for 5–15% completion rates1,2. Hack Smarter's video courses land right in that band. Put the same students in a hands-on lab and completion nearly triples, and its toughest challenge labs achieve 37–51% completion.
And these completions are earned, not clicked: 96% of students answered 80% or more of a lab's tasks correctly.
- 139,800
- Lessons completed
- 10,559
- Certificates issued
- 105
- Courses published
- 583
- All Access subscribers
“Using CourseStack is almost like having an entire dev team.”
You already have the expertise. Skip the data center.
Tyler went from zero to 9,065 students and nearly $200K in sales in under a year, with no infrastructure team. Build your first hands-on course free, with no credit card and no DevOps.