The Man Who Taught the Teachers

The Creatrepreneur Chronicles — A Tribute, by Kevin J. Barrett

June 15, 2026

First published on LinkedIn, June 15, 2026.

A long-overdue thank-you to Corey Rudl — one of the uncredited fathers of internet marketing.

Most of the names you know in internet marketing learned from someone. And a surprising number of them — whether they say so or not — learned, directly or one step removed, from a young man who started a business in 1994 with twenty-five dollars and was gone eleven years later at thirty-four.

His name was Corey Rudl. You have probably never heard it. I think that's worth correcting.

The volumes on my shelf

I still have them. All of them. Corey Rudl's volumes from marketingtips.com — The Internet Marketing Center — sitting on my shelf after all these years, spines worn from a decade of being pulled down and opened again. When people ask me where I learned the practical, in-the-trenches application of marketing — not the theory, the application, the part that actually moves a business — the honest answer is: a lot of it came from those volumes, and from the man who wrote them.

I met him once, when he came to Australia in the late 1990s. He was already a phenomenon in a world most people didn't yet know existed. The internet was still dial-up and skepticism; the idea that you could build a real business online, measure it, systematize it, and scale it was something most "serious" businesspeople laughed at. Corey wasn't laughing. He was doing it, and — this was the rare part — he was teaching everyone else how, in plain language, with the numbers shown.

What he actually did

Let me put it plainly, because the record deserves it.

In 1994, Corey Rudl started his first online business with twenty-five dollars of startup capital and turned it into a multi-million-dollar company by pioneering the results-driven internet marketing strategies the entire industry would later treat as obvious. He shared stages with marketing legends. He spoke across Australia, the UK, Asia, and North America. He built marketingtips.com into one of the most-trafficked marketing destinations on the early web. He wrote Insider Secrets to Marketing Your Business on the Internet — a course that taught a generation of entrepreneurs that the door to a business was no longer guarded by capital or pedigree, only by willingness to learn.

He was, in the truest sense, a pioneer. Not a guru who packaged other people's ideas — an actual originator, working things out in real time when there was no one ahead of him to copy.

And then, on June 2, 2005, he died in a racing accident at the California Speedway. He was thirty-four years old.

Why you don't know his name

Here is the part that has always sat wrong with me.

When Corey died, the company passed to capable hands and grew on — to reported revenues that dwarfed what he'd built alone. The industry he helped invent exploded into the multi-billion-dollar machine it is today. The strategies he pioneered became the unquestioned foundation under everyone's feet. And the names that became famous — the ones on the conference banners and the bestseller lists now — built their houses on ground he cleared.

But Corey didn't live to be credited. He was gone before the industry was old enough to look back and ask who'd been there first. So the foundation stayed, and the name on it faded. Walk into any internet marketing conversation today and you'll hear a dozen names. His won't be among them. The man who taught the teachers got written out of the lesson.

I don't think that's malice. I think it's just what happens when someone leaves too early to defend their own legacy, in a field moving too fast to keep its own history. But "it's just what happens" has never been a good enough reason to let a debt go unpaid.

A debt I can pay

I've spent a lot of this season of my life thinking about provenance — about the difference between credit (your name on a thing) and lineage (the honest chain of who made what possible). I've been careful to establish the roots of my own work, going back decades, because the people downstream deserve to be able to trace ideas to their source.

And when I traced my own roots back honestly, they didn't stop at me. They ran back through a 2008 diagnostic I built, back through years of practice, and they kept going — until they arrived at a worn set of volumes and a young Canadian who came to Australia and showed a room full of us that the future had already started and we were invited.

So this is me paying a debt. Not because anyone asked, and not for any return. Because it's true, and it's owed, and I'm one of the few still around who actually met him and kept his work close enough to know exactly how much of what I do began with him.

Corey, if there's a version of you that gets to see this: thank you. For the twenty-five dollars and the nerve. For showing us the door before anyone else knew it was there. For teaching plainly when you could have hoarded the secret. A lot of us built lives on what you taught, and too few of us ever said your name out loud.

I'm saying it now. Corey Rudl. One of the ones who started it all.

The mystic he pointed to

There's a part of this story almost no one knows, and it makes Corey's eye for talent even more remarkable.

Corey once referenced a figure he found almost mysterious — a man the marketing world came to call "Mr. H," the mysterious one, because he was quietly out-marketing the marketers with one well-crafted long-form sales letter. What made it strange, to Corey, was who this man was. He wasn't a marketer by trade. He was a meditation-technology man — Bill Harris of Centerpointe Research Institute, the creator of Holosync, a sound-based meditation technology built on the binaural-beat principle, which Centerpointe says has been used by more than two million people in nearly two hundred countries.

The marketer pointed at the mystic. And the mystic, it turned out, was quietly using the marketer's own techniques better than most of the marketers were. Two worlds that everyone keeps in separate rooms — the world of selling and the world of inner transformation — were, in these two men, already touching.

I know this because both of them shaped me, on opposite sides of my own work. Corey taught me the outer craft: how a message finds a market. And Bill Harris's binaural-beat technology runs underneath the inner craft I've practiced ever since — the accelerated learning I used to help my own son, the training I built for thousands of displaced workers, the meditation that still anchors my mornings. The marketer and the mystic. The outer technology and the inner one. I spent a career walking those two rooms back and forth, and only now, tracing it all the way back, do I see that my two teachers were already standing in the doorway between them.

That is what I do, it turns out. I walk things that belong together into the same room. I learned it, in part, from a young man who saw a meditation guru out-selling the sales gurus and thought it was the most fascinating thing in the world.

Saying the name

I'm saying it now, fully. Corey Rudl. One of the ones who started it all — and one of the few with an eye sharp enough to spot the mystic hiding among the marketers.

Rest easy. The work outlived you. It's long past time the name did too.

If you learned from Corey Rudl, or from someone who learned from him, I'd be honored if you'd say so — here, or anywhere. Some debts are only paid by being spoken. — KJB