Things I Wish I Knew Before Building My Tech Courses
- Mobile Users
India is a large market and 99.99% use phones. Design your course content mobile-first because of 50% of your market will be from India on phones
- Be Embarrassed and Ship
Don't waste months perfecting your course, once you have a draft version, ship it, be embarrassed and get feedback.
- Let Go of Hate
You can't change where people consume content. I hate Udemy and ignored it and built my own platform, and to my own fault it allowed two minor competitors to fill
that gap and they make 1000x revenue than I do. I can't even compete on Udemy, my content is better but their voices are louder.
Accept that you need to deliver on multiple channels and needs to comprise to capture that audience
- 25% Product 75% Marketing
I launched a course, nobody bought, my content went stale and I'd have to reshoot my content. You have to know how you're going to distribute your content and it is going to be 3x effort than making your course.
Make a mini-course a find these distribution channels. You can't just do one big launch.
- Reputation
People weren't buying because they didn't trust whether my content worked, and my competitors' content is awful but they have a feedback loop of positive reviews enough so that they have 100 for every 1 positive review I have.
So think about how to engineer feedback
- Make A Toy Course and Find the Kinks
There is a problem with your course content creating process, and the best way to find out is to publish to various mediums. Udemy, Educative, FreeCodeCamp, YouTube, Micro-content on Twitter etc...
As a former course creator: Udemy revenue is probably nowhere near what you project it to be. Back when I sold courses on the site, crazy discounts were common and Udemy took 85% cuts of revenue from traffic they took credit for. End result: $15 revenue on a $300 course. If it feels bad to see someone else on Udemy, know that that creator probably feels even worse.
I agree, when I was on Udemy the math for me turned out to be $2-5 per subscription.
I haven't returned back to the community because I found a new large distribution channel that works for me and doesn't comprise my values or feels anti-consumer/anti-creator.
Well what is it?!
As someone thinking about launching a course, this is super helpful. I was wondering if you have any thoughts about how much of a reputation is necessary. I've been building my platform for about 6 months now growing my twitter following (close to 1K at the moment), about 1K visitors to my blog a month (and a lot more views of my posts from cross-posting to Hackernoon and codeburst.io). I also wrote a short book about breaking into the industry that's been out since November and has 17 positive reviews.
I was thinking my next step is to make a course but I wasn't sure when it makes sense to make the jump in terms of where my reputation should be at.
It's not about follower count, its about engagement.
Similar to how it's not about how many signups, its about active users.
I don't care about my follower count at all, because it means nothing.
## Direct Engagement
My buddy has 140K LinkedIn Followers, My engagement in 20x when I make posts vs when he does.
## Spill-Over Engagement
My other buddy who has 40K twitter followers and then they do a twitch live-stream trying to carry over their twitter followers there are only 2-3 people watching. I have less than 1K twitter followers my spill-over is 30-50 watching my live-stream.
## Audience Isn't Everything
My other buddy has over 1M youtube followers, and he ended looking for a part-time job because he couldn't get people to buy his Udemy course. I didn't have the heart to tell him that his course just was of poor quality. He's a good entertainer, but not great at packaging his content, and I'm not talking about graphics and copy, I just mean the Table of Content did not feel valuable and he didn't engage with his first-time buyers.
The best thing has helped me, is to help other content creators and help my competitors.
Everybody has their little pool of engagement, and 4-5 content creators who are your friends with their < 2K followers on twitter are much more valuable than you having a 20K twitter followers.
P.S. sorry for the late reply, I didn't know I had any replies on this post here.
Thanks for this insightful response! I often hear that 1K loyal fans is a lot better than 100K passive followers, and it makes sense for sure. I recently hit 2K twitter followers but a lot of them are passive so I am hesitant to treat it as a serious milestone. Will spend more time monitoring engagement rather than fixating on those vanity metrics.