Online Cooking Classes: Rs 22,000 Monthly from Zoom Students

The message came in mid-class: "sorry didi, kadhi is burning, give me two minutes."

She never came back. Her camera stayed frozen on an empty stove for the rest of the session while I kept teaching to basically no one. That was my first paid class. One student, Rs 120, and a kadhi that never got finished.

Fourteen months later, the number in my tracking spreadsheet for last month reads Rs 20,650. Not a round figure I picked for a headline, it's genuinely what landed across all my students combined.

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Where this actually came from

Cooking was always something I did for family, mostly dishes from my mother's side that trace back to a small town in Karnataka nobody's heard of. During a stretch of unemployment after finishing college, a friend half-joked that I should just teach it online since I clearly wouldn't stop talking about it.

I didn't take it seriously for weeks. Then one slow Tuesday, out of boredom more than ambition, I made a free Zoom account.

I had no idea it capped group calls at 40 minutes. Found that out the hard way, mid-recipe, when the call just ended on its own.

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The disaster of a first real class

Already told you about the kadhi. What I didn't mention is that after she left, I kept cooking anyway, alone, talking to a screen with nobody on it, because I didn't know what else to do with the ingredients I'd already prepped.

Felt genuinely ridiculous. Also, strangely, I finished the dish and it turned out well, so there's that.

The second class had two people and I didn't charge either of them. Confidence was too low to ask for money for something that had just gone so visibly wrong the first time.

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What I got wrong early on

For the first month I tried teaching a brand new recipe every single day. Shopping for fresh ingredients daily, setting up the camera daily, writing out steps daily. Burned out inside two weeks, no exaggeration.

Now I teach three days a week, Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday. The rest of the time goes into planning and actual grocery runs.

The bigger mistake was pricing. Rs 120 a class sounds fine until you count the two hours of prep behind each one. Worked out to less than minimum wage, honestly, once I actually sat down and did the math.

One student told me flatly, "you're underpricing yourself, people will assume it's not worth much." Stung a little to hear. Turned out to be completely correct.

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What a normal week looks like now

Students coordinate through a WhatsApp group. Payment comes via UPI before each session, though someone always forgets and I send a gentle reminder.

I cap each batch around seven or eight people. Any more than that and I can't actually see whether someone's dosa batter looks right on a tiny video tile. Actually, thinking about it, seven still feels slightly too many some days.

There was one class where a student's video froze mid-tempering and she missed the whole mustard seed step, the part that matters most for that dish. I just recorded a short voice note walking her through it afterward. No extra charge for that kind of thing, it's not her fault the wifi glitched.

Around eleven students stick around consistently month to month. New ones join, a few drop off, the number moves but it's stayed roughly in that range for a while now.

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The month almost nothing happened

Around Onam and the festival stretch that follows, most of my regular students went quiet, understandably busy with their own households. Only two people showed up that month. Total income came to Rs 3,180.

I genuinely thought the whole thing might be seasonal and unsustainable, that I'd built something that only worked outside festival months. Then the following month bounced back to thirteen students with barely any extra effort on my part. Turns out that dip was just normal, not a sign anything was actually broken.

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Which recipes people actually pay for

Generic recipes don't sell. Everyone's already seen fifteen YouTube videos on how to make basic dal. What gets bookings is the specific stuff, a grandmother's particular way of tempering a chutney, a regional pickle method nobody's written down properly anywhere online.

That specificity is the whole product, really. It's the same logic behind selling niche digital templates instead of something generic anyone could make. Narrow and personal beats broad and forgettable, in cooking just as much as anywhere else.

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A student asked last week if I'd ever teach baking alongside the regular menu. I don't currently know how to answer that honestly, my baking skills stop somewhere around basic bread. Might figure it out over the next few months. Might just stay in my lane. Haven't decided either way yet.