Show HN: Just launched my online learning startup (3 years solo indie hacking)

7 points by vfc1 5 years ago | 4 comments

Hello everyone, I just launched my bootstrapped (no funding) online learning startup, after 3 years of solo development part-time (2 to 3 days a week) - https://onlinecoursehost.com

I would love for you guys to go through the landing page and give me your feedback on the page itself, the idea, the pricing model, any feedback would be much appreciated.

About the product, it's an online course hosting platform. Online instructors upload their video courses, integrate with Stripe, set a price, create a course landing page and website home page (there is a website builder component to it), maybe create some discounts and start selling courses.

The main added value is that the user experience is better than usual, here is an example of the course player where students can navigate through the course, search for answers and ask questions - https://tests.onlinecoursehost.com/courses/introduction-to-javascript/1/lessons/1

Besides that, the price is much lower than usual. Normally, it takes about $100 a month in order to get an equivalent set of features, while in our platform you can start for free in the growth plan (5% fees on any sales made, no recurring charges).

Then later you can upgrade to a subscription which costs less than half of what is available elsewhere.

The target audience are online instructors, which create video courses on an educational topic, with or without a pre-existing audience. It's tough for instructors just starting out until they can become profitable, so the goal is to give them all the information that they need for free, plus a growth plan to get things started.

Let me know what you think of the idea, and if you have any suggestions or noticed something wrong with the business model, the page, etc.

In general, I would love to hear your thoughts on this project. Thanks & Regards

brudgers 5 years ago |

Free is not a viable business model. If the going rate is $100/month, make something that is worth $400/month.

The problem is that free simply isn't worth it to anyone with a money making business. Because your platform is a dependency, a sustainable business model is important to business customers. If they are making money and have a following, your platform staying in business is worth a few thousand dollars a year.

Good luck.

logikblok 5 years ago |

Hey vfc1 great work. Couple of thoughts just on the landing page / proposal: 1 - It's an extensive landing page with a lot of scroll, I guess this might be because you're trying to talk about all the things you can do / will do which is extensive and great but I wonder if you can shrink the page to make the core points and drive to the call to action as a pose to scroll and depart.

2 - I suspect you'll have fairly long sales cycles right? It takes time for people to build their materials, gather resources, polish their words. I wonder if you can make them start with an initial step that builds ownership, e.g. upload a logo or something along that line that get's users along the way.

3 - It maybe apparent to users that you are new. Being new comes with advantages but people may feel the risk of you disappearing and or going bust. Is there a way you can communicate trust / long term support? Sometimes people do this with testimonials or perhaps some kind of of guarantee, maybe a lower priority one for consideration.

vfc1 5 years ago | |

Hello, thank you for the suggestions. About the page, it's for a product so I thought the best way was to show pictures of what the product looks, so that people know what it looks on the other side after signing in.

We were trying to engage people in scrolling through the story, so they understand what the product is. Do you know of a great example of a product page that does not require so much scrolling?

I guess we could condense everything to 3 or 4 cards max, many of them are probably not necessary. That is a great point.

2 - It will take months to build courses, but I didn't want people to have to pay upfront while they are building courses. Maybe the free plan is not such a great idea?

I think I will leave it for a while to build more users and get feedback, but quickly require a minimum amount. I suspect that there will be a lot of users that never publish anything, but this is just getting started.

3 - You're right, this is a new product but I'm not sure how to tackle that, there is a chicken and egg component to it.

I think we will have to get our first 100 users one at a time, build trust with them and then after that network effect would kick in. Do you have any ideas how to handle that?

Thank you for the feedback, I super appretiate it! Cheers

stackchips 5 years ago |

I wish you success. Have you ran numbers on your pricing? I would shift around the pricing moving the highest tier plan to the left and the $0 on the right. Conversions of the annual plan aren't really realistic until you have an established platform but you can have an expensive tier on the left as an anchor price and incentivize the middle tier plan.