random thought: i’m
[2021-12-10 11:25:19 AM] : random thought: i’m kinda baffled by people who choose to e.g. spend several months building a highly-polished course, as their first product attempt, and put a huge effort into building and launching it. adam wathan’s (obviously highly successful) refactoring to collections is one example that i think about a lot. i’ve never been able to reconcile the fact that smart, successful people do this, and yet it seems so incredibly risky.
what occurred to me today is that maybe i’ve mostly only heard about the successes, and maybe this approach goes badly much more often than it goes well, and maybe the people who do it successfully are outliers, and it’s not necessarily a smart strategy people to copy.
1 Reply
[2021-12-10 11:31:12 AM] : I did this. It was due to a number of factors including opportunity, market needs, and timing. Unless those things align, I wouldn't recommend it to others.
[2021-12-10 11:31:47 AM] : what gave you the confidence to believe that it wasn’t an overly risky move?
[2021-12-10 11:34:25 AM] : I did believe it was a risky move. I just also knew that I could break out the content into valuable assets if it all fell apart.
Also, I run a service-based business that was already getting hired for teaching the content 1:1. So I thought it might be valuable in productizing my business and reaching more people.
[2021-12-10 11:35:25 AM] : got it, so if i understand correctly, your perceived “failure scenario” would not have been that much of a loss
[2021-12-10 11:36:36 AM] : Yep! I figured I'd learn more than enough to make it worth plus have created enough content to break into a bunch of mini products if needed
[2021-12-10 11:38:31 AM] : makes sense
[2021-12-10 12:16:37 PM] : > i’ve never been able to reconcile the fact that smart, successful people do this, and yet it seems so incredibly risky
Narrowly, I've seen this kind of thing play out with technical writing (where I have seen some cases that went poorly), so maybe a little different than what you're seeing. This is my theory: people have few models for producing a product (i.e., books, in this case), but one common way individuals get into selling a product is through publishers, and they pattern match badly. Superficially, the work is the same: you toil away for months, putting polish on this big, complex thing. The people doing the risky (self-published) thing see themselves as doing something very traditional and underrate the risk, while the published authors have a very different set of risks thanks to an advance. (Having another model is what drew me to 30x500.)
[2021-12-10 02:11:57 PM] : yeah, interesting point
[2021-12-10 02:24:29 PM] : My first product was a 700 page, 38hr course. Wouldn't recommend starting with something that large, but it worked for me. Preorders and early access helped. I also used the course as a basis for ebombs. Eg in the course we might start defining models and DB tables for our app, and I'd take that content to create a couple "SQL with Go" related ebombs that taught valuable lessons, but weren't building a web app like we did in the course.
[2021-12-10 02:30:33 PM] : I also had safari data to verify that it was a massive pain in the Go community. It came up a ton, and it kept coming up because everyone tried to fix it with small tutorials that were so simplified they lost their value. People really wanted to see something like Michael Hartl's Rails Tutorial, but for Go.
If I did it all over again, I'd start smaller with the intent to build up to the big product. Eg I could have made "Building an Auth System in Go" as a smaller product first, or a "Using SQL with Go" as a smaller product, then turned a few smaller products into a large complete web app course.
[2021-12-10 02:34:29 PM] : Basically, things panned out despite me starting with a product that was too large, not because I started out with one that was too large.
[2021-12-10 03:23:42 PM] : oh wow
[2021-12-10 03:23:56 PM] : how long did it take you to build the course? (like how many months)
[2021-12-10 04:48:38 PM] : A year I think.
[2021-12-10 04:49:14 PM] : Not full time, and I had to make updates as I went, etc. That is one of the downsides to a preorder - you generally give early access and that can slow down things vs just getting a detailed outline and recording/writing everything at once.
[2021-12-10 04:53:40 PM] : I would need to go check. I think 1yr might be including bonus content that I always pitched as coming after the course was completed.
[2021-12-10 04:54:53 PM] : sounds like a lot, any way you slice it
[2021-12-10 04:55:08 PM] : i’m having trouble figuring out how to approach building this rails testing course i’m trying to build
[2021-12-10 04:55:24 PM] : I've found that courses where you build one big app from start to finish are the slowest and hardest to create. I later made courses where it was composed of like 10+ smaller projects and that was way faster for me.
[2021-12-10 04:55:35 PM] : i can’t escape the conclusion that it’s going to have to be pretty huge in order to be genuinely useful
[2021-12-10 04:56:02 PM] : yeah, i’ve kind of learned that lesson too. modularity seems like a good idea
[2021-12-10 04:56:24 PM] : https://testwithgo.com/ - i made that course later on. Happy to chat if it might be helpful.
[2021-12-10 04:56:50 PM] : It is huge, but I know a few ways it could be made smaller or broken into steps.
[2021-12-10 04:57:13 PM] : i’ve identified a chunk of the rails testing course that could be built on its own
[2021-12-10 04:57:42 PM] : basically i realized that if you want to understand the popular rails testing tools, you first have to understand DSLs
[2021-12-10 04:58:20 PM] : so i’m thinking i want to release a DSL course first. or maybe somehow release the DSL content as a first module of the rails testing course. really not sure.
[2021-12-10 04:59:08 PM] : metaprogramming could likely be its own course. I could see how covering that plus testing would get big
[2021-12-10 04:59:30 PM] : And ruby is king of metaprogramming.
[2021-12-10 05:00:12 PM] : the real i felt inclined to do the DSL thing as its own separate course is that it seems of interest to more people than just people who are specifically interested in testing
[2021-12-10 05:00:45 PM] : but it also makes it kinda unclear that the DSL content is relevant to testing
[2021-12-10 05:01:51 PM] : I wonder if you could package it in a way that helped with that. eg have a "just show me how to write tests" purchasing option, then another like "I want to understand how these testing frameworks work" that includes the DSL product.
[2021-12-10 05:02:05 PM] : BUT that maybe doesn’t matter because later the DSL course could easily be bundled with the other rails testing modules
[2021-12-10 05:02:32 PM] : > I wonder if you could package it in a way that helped with that. eg have a “just show me how to write tests” purchasing option
i wish man
[2021-12-10 05:03:11 PM] : every time i try to work on my rails testing course i find myself glossing over things and saying “you probably wonder what this is, but don’t worry about it for now…”
[2021-12-10 05:04:04 PM] : Haha, I understand that. One way I handled that in my first product was to use those things as ebombs, then linked to those ebombs in the course.
[2021-12-10 05:05:00 PM] : that makes sense
[2021-12-10 05:05:07 PM] : shit, maybe i’ll just do that
[2021-12-10 05:05:32 PM] : One example was interfaces - in the course I didn't want to teach them from the ground up because we were learning about web dev, but they needed to be understood so I wrote a few ebombs about interfaces, released them to continue to build an audience while building the course, then in the course it basically just had a sidenote taht said: "Dont understand interfaces? Go read this article I wrote."
[2021-12-10 05:05:41 PM] : to be honest i don’t really WANT to create a course on DSLs
[2021-12-10 05:05:45 PM] : it feels like a distraction
[2021-12-10 05:05:54 PM] : If you can link to other good articles that works too
[2021-12-10 05:06:05 PM] : and plus i KNOW people want a rails testing course, i don’t know that they want a DSL course
[2021-12-10 05:06:21 PM] : yeah, that all makes a lot of sense
[2021-12-10 05:06:31 PM] : ok thanks, this actually helps a lot
[2021-12-10 05:06:41 PM] : :+1: