Ask HN: Anyone making money with online courses?

31 points by xenopticon 5 years ago | 22 comments

I have spent the past couple of years trying to build and launch products (yeah, the "Indie Hacker" path) and never made a single dollar. Recently I've been considering building online courses focused on the technologies I already know and work with. I worked with teaching before getting into software, so I know a thing or two.

- Are you building educational content on the web? (courses, 1:1 lessons, e-books, anything)

- How do you publish/sell your product? (YouTube, Fiverr, Udemy, Gumroad?)

- General advice for people looking to start?

soulchild37 5 years ago |

Yes but not much, I earned $5k+ over the course of two and half years.

1. Yes, I am selling ebooks related to iOS development 2. I sell on Gumroad 3. You might have heard this before, but I will repeat it again, build trust with your audience first before selling them stuff, so they know you are actually skilled in your trade and your product is actually worth the money. eg: if your product is for python dev, then your audience is python dev.

To build trust, help people in public, like answering question in reddit (eg: r/python), stackoverflow, write technical blog post that answers common questions etc, I have been doing this for 2.5 years. Then put a newsletter sign up box below each blog post, this way you can reach your audience who is interested on your content directly, very useful when you want to launch product to them, make sure you use it to regularly send useful information to them too, not just use it to launch product.

My iOS blog : https://fluffy.es , I have stopped writing on the blog as I no longer work as iOS dev now, but I still get a few sales each month.

xenopticon 5 years ago | |

#3 is actually a great advice, I was thinking of jumping immediately into publishing content to a platform like Udemy but your advice made me rethink that a bit!

AlchemistCamp 5 years ago | |

Your books and copy look great! Why don't you prices a bit?

codegeek 5 years ago |

I don't sell courses myself but our clients do (SAAS LMS business). I can give you some tips:

- There are lot of online course sellers these days. A lot of the content is mediocre and not worth paying for especially when you can find tons of free stuff on youtube, google etc these days. So you need to create real quality content of tremendous value.

- Don't do broad courses. Pick a niche. Specific niche. Don't teach programming languages. Teach Python (for example).

- Marketing. marketing. marketing. If you canot market your courses, you won't do much. You need to think about this.

- Plenty of good platforms to start with. Look at teachable, thinkific, learnworld, podia and a few others. The problem with these platforms is that you have to figure out marketing yourself even though they give you a more branded platform (your own logo, website etc). You may be better off starting with a marketplace platform like udemy.com where you are just a number like others but you may be able to get a few eyeballs on your courses (even though udemy courses are too cheap mostly for my liking and I feel like authors are forced to heavily discount).

- Did I say figure out your marketing strategy/tactics ? If you have no idea, you need to think about it. If you build it, they won't come but you already know that.

- Don't create long content (e.g. a 45 min single video). Better to create smaller consumable content (split that 45 min video into 3-4 10-15 min videos). Student attention span for online content/courses is too short.

- Create a feedback system and ask your students if your courses helped them. Offer tons of free resources.

- Do tons of content marketing. Best way to gain audience especially for online courses.

- Setup Upsell by offering FREE courses and then provide premium content. This will work if your content is good quality.

Good luck!!

AlchemistCamp 5 years ago |

I started with just YouTube screencasts. After I had a couple hundred subs, I made a video asking if people were interested in additional premium content and shared a link to a survey. About 70 people saw the video, 22 filled out the survey with their emails and seven paid when I offered an earlybird discount.

After that, I built a "real" but very minimal site and created a subscription business. I've put very little effort into marketing other than the fact that most my videos are free.

I probably picked too small of a niche but it's what I was into. It may be hitting its growth limits, but it's in the 4 figures / month MRR range.

My main advice is to focus on being helpful over UI, business models, growth hacks, etc. The first step is to provide value. After you can do that, then start worrying about how to capture it.

lmiller1990 5 years ago |

I started making paid content this year. I have made around 7k USD so far.

My take-aways:

- Pick a niche you know really well. A lot of sales come through reputation, since there is always going to be other competing products out there. My niche is Vue.js (not that niche).

- It is a lot of work. I'd estimate my profits around 5 USD / hour after it's all said and done?

- You need to build a brand! Start using Twitter and Reddit, interacting with your community. I am NOT a twitter or reddit guy normally, I do it for my professional image and content primarily.

- Build an audience first. I collected emails starting in Jan (day I decided to make a course). Around 500 ppl left their email before my launch, which was in June. Majority of my traffic from from my free ebook [0].

- Practice screencasting before you make a course. I did by posting free screencasts on my course website to get my skills up and show my content was worth $. [1]

- I rolled my own platform, hard to say if it was worth it. I posted my content on both my own platform and Udemy. I made around 5k from my platform, 2k from Udemy, but sold way more courses on Udemy (since they take a cut and they reduce the price based on country.

- Rolling your own platform has costs. Dev time, hosting videos (vimeo) hosting content (digital ocean), domain (namecheap) and the overhead of maintaining your stack.

- Udemy, while they take a cut, do a lot of marketing for you. Since I have put less time into marketing, sales on my personal site dropped, but Udemy is consistent (around $500 a month - I only spend around 3h answering questions a month).

I am now writing a book and will sell on Gumroad. Easy to set up, and they handle payments etc.

I will write a more detailed blog post soon on this topic.

[0] https://lmiller1990.github.io/vue-testing-handbook/

[1] https://vuejs-course.com/screencasts

walkingriver 5 years ago |

Udemy has been a bust for me. In fact, I went on a mini-rant on Twitter this morning about it (https://twitter.com/walkingriver/status/1325772355449344001).

I've had decent success with Gumroad selling directly (https://walkingriver.gumroad.com).

I also sell book versions of the same content on Gumroad and Amazon (https://amazon.com/author/mcallaghan).

I think you should shoot for an hour or two of valuable content onto Gumroad, set a fair price for it, maybe even give away all or part of your first course. Build an audience to give you some fans to sell the second course to. See how it goes.

Good luck!

xenopticon 5 years ago | |

Wow, so on Udemy you cannot reach your students on an ad-hoc basis? That's both clever and evil.

walkingriver 5 years ago | | |

You have no visibility to your courses' students or their contact info.

You can send a couple of "marketing emails" per month for each course. Inside those emails you may only have links that go back to Udemy, so they are used primarily to market your other courses on Udemy. If you try to include a non-Udemy URL, the system detects it and won't let you send.

Plus, someone on Twitter just pointed out that every one of my Udemy courses is available on multiple pirate sites. So, at this point, I think I'm just going to shut those courses down. I certainly won't be expanding them anymore.

jventura 5 years ago |

I do have a Python course at educative.io [1] which nets me around 100€/month. I was approached by one of the founders because of an ebook I did and shown here on HN [2]. I do have a personal blog [3] where I have some articles on Python and related things but I think I don't have an "audience". I'm also working as a teacher btw.

Next year as my current contract gets downgraded (no more exclusivity - less salary), I'm thinking about providing 1:1 lessons and make other courses.

Although I do have some things to show, I do not have any actionable advice to share, I am as "lost" as you! :)

  [1] https://www.educative.io/courses/full-speed-python
  [2] https://github.com/joaoventura/fullspeedpython
  [3] https://joaoventura.net/

xenopticon 5 years ago | |

Thanks for the input anyway João! I didn't know about educative.io, how hard was it to publish a text-based course there?

jventura 5 years ago | | |

They made me two proposals! On one of them, they would build the course themselves from my materials (30% cut for me, 70% cut for them). On the other I would have to build it and handle all the marketing myself. (70% for me, 30% for them).

I chose the first one..

rasz 5 years ago |

My "How to make money with online courses" course is all sold out.

tinus_hn 5 years ago | |

And all it contains is the old joke: ‘just start your own course on making money on courses’

quickthrower2 5 years ago | | |

On the old warrior forum there were WSOs (aka info products sold on a special thread) about how to sell WSOs. Since WSOs themselves are about how to make money, they were selling a book on how to make money by selling books on how to make money!

asicsp 5 years ago |

I write ebooks, which is currently my sole source of income (which is not for everybody as my living style in this part of the world needs about $150 a month).

I use leanpub/gumroad to sell them. I'm not good at marketing and find it difficult to adapt advice from articles I've read on that topic. Whenever I publish a new book, I put them up for free for a few days and I still get paid as both leanpub/gumroad allows paying more than the price set.

I post about my books on reddit/hn/twitter and other social sites. Getting attention is hit/miss, for example my recent book had good response on https://www.reddit.com/r/perl/comments/jognf5/i_wrote_a_cook... but not much here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25006829

I'm active on stackoverflow and reddit subs related to programming. I've had readers thanking me for the help and some have mentioned that they found out my books from my profile. And I learn a lot too from trying to answer questions.

Based on my experience, the biggest lesson I'd say is not giving up.

secfirstmd 5 years ago |

We build free online courses for human rights defenders, journalists and activists. The thing I would say first is that building for online courses is tricky and you have to approach it very differently to offline classroom teaching. Trying to shift directly from offline to online usually results in things not working well - as many are finding during Covid. In many ways building an online course, especially if you are using video, is more like being a producer than a pure teacher/trainer. Especially were you use video, people expect a high standard so that takes a lot of work and one thing you have to keep in mind is that it's very hard to change video once it's up there in many cases - so it can be harder to keep things updated.

inetsee 5 years ago |

This is a sample size of one, but one of the Youtubers I follow is Ali Abdaal. In addition to his Youtube channel he has courses on SkillShare. The combination of Youtube and SkillShare seems to provide him with a very good income.

Update: He uses his Youtube channel to promote his SkillShare courses. Using a combination of educational offerings for cross-promotion is often a good idea.

RocketSyntax 5 years ago |

Not exactly paygated, but you can do patreon and give people that pay $ the option to vote on the next content you produce?

xenopticon 5 years ago | |

It's good for building a loyal audience but I'm not sure about the revenue model. I think a "build once, sell twice" approach would be more sustainable on the long run.

hashtagmarkup 5 years ago |

Lorman[1] is a local company in my city. I've visited and talked with their technical team. I brought up working in education, and they looked at me completely dumbfounded. I soon realized it's pretty much completely a marketing company that exists solely to satisfy bureaucratic regulations. Any educating that occurs is a side effect.

1. https://www.lorman.com/