Love the follow up on the success of Vim.so with Slip. Slip looks great!
One thing I would suggest creating as a marketing tool is interactive guides on books that don't have alot of excersices or are more 'text-booky'. Like a no fear shakespear for some technical book.
One of the things that made me think of this is my current rabbithole that is learning the rust programming language. There are generally two answers when you ask someone how to learn rust, "Learn C++ and read The Book, or read The Book". "The Book" is dense... but i found this program called "Rustlings" that makes the experience much more enjoyable.
Rustlings is essentially a list of exercises, tests and quizzes attached onto the rust book and some of the documentation.
With Slip, you could be the genius.com of open source technical books on top of courses. More detailed explanations, quizzes, courses, etc.
Also, Another field that needs to be disrupted is paid webinars. There's alot of people who give talks on topics and get paid per attendee. If you could centralize that, i'm sure it'd be a good business to get into. I have a friend who gives webinars on certain topics and he uses onlyfans lol.
>*Also, Another field that needs to be disrupted is paid webinars. There's alot of people who give talks on topics and get paid per attendee. If you could centralize that, i'm sure it'd be a good business to get into. I have a friend who gives webinars on certain topics and he uses onlyfans lol.*
Most courses online have terrible completion rates but the point is education. No other platform incentives for that KPI.
I have no idea how you'd do this besides Maybe Live courses, or somehow creating a social-dynamic between creator and consumer. This would be an invaluable vibe to cultivate to increase completion. Continuing to just throw ideas out, maybe you could give a % refund if you actually complete the course, or you earn back as you complete the challenges.
cute product! BTW I'm not 100% sure on the "I missed out on an additional ~$1200 in revenue" claim you make though - increasing the price would probably have dropped some users off who would pay $15 but not $25. I'd still guess you left a bit of cash on the table but not the full sum.
I can imagine it's an awesome feeling - congratulations!
As a developer, it'd be great to hear from you (or someone similar who's reading this) about the business side of how you got started. How do you set all that up? Any gotchas?
Yeah, the current situation, with no registered trademark for vim the editor, seems to be great for everyone! Vim is popular enough that it's unlikely to be taken. However, someone is currently trying to claim Screen for a screen sharing product despite a screen sharing tool called screen(1) having been around for decades, so nothing is impossible.
I've seen lots of good things recently about https://microacquire.com/ from other founders. I'm not affiliated with them and have not used their product but from the outside it seems like a better way to transact than paying a fee.
Thanks. It does look though like that site is targeted more at smaller companies than ours. My understanding is that at our scale we would probably want a firm representing our interests.
It makes learning vim fun[0] and it gives an open-source creator $250/mo[1].
Also it helps me out by giving me extra income that has helped pay down debt.
Not sure on using CodeMirror but I’m using Ace on my vim learning tool because it has vim key bindings. It’s been a great tool!
Would like to check out code mirror also though too and see if I like it better.
I'm around the same YoE but some things that I've felt have accelerated my growth:
- build things outside of your comfort zone
- work with smarter people than you
- be intentional about your work. Always have a theme of something you want to improve
And the biggest one:
- Choose to be an excellent developer.
Mindset is important. If you tell yourself you're an above average developer, you're more likely to improve your craft because it's part of your identity.
Building an online course[1] has been one of the easiest ways to make money in my personal experience. Other things I've tried building: SaaS, Trades business, Freelancing business.
I've made over $8k since I launched last month and it's been a great stepping stone into other ideas. The main problem I see going forward is getting consistent traffic. Building the course was the "easy" part and now I'm focusing hard on SEO to keep consistent traffic going to my page. Long term I think I can make $100-$300 a day with it.
I floundered trying to build SaaS and other types of business for years before making some money online. Selling a one time purchase can be a game changer for those looking to go independent. Look at the stairstep approach[2] for reasons why this works so well.
Overall, if you invest a few days and put something out there, I think an online course can be a great way to build some income.
Please correct me if I'm wrong, but you got to the frontpage of HN the first time you posted your site which presumably generated the bulk of that 8k, right?
If you hit the jackpot (I.e. front page of HN) on your first try, yes it's going to feel like it's super easy to make money off building a course.
The frontpage of HN seems to be a sort of 'holy grail' for some HN readers, but you always have to remember that it's only a good thing if "HN readers" are your potential customers. If they're not then it's just a distracting spike in traffic that will do very little for your sales. And HN readers are a pretty diverse bunch (geographically, financially, and as far as interests go) so it's unlikely that many of us are likely to be buying unless your product has a weirdly broad appeal.
It's far better to get 50 page views from potential customers than 50,000 page views from people who aren't truly interested in buying what you're offering.
If you're selling a product related to vim I think HN is probably one of the best places on the internet to advertise your product, don't you?
In practice, I think that if you're posting to HN then HN readers are likely to be in your target audience. Because why would you be posting here if they aren't?
If you're selling a product related to vim I think HN is probably one of the best places on the internet to advertise your product, don't you?
I imagine most HN readers fall in to two groups - those who are greybeards who already know a lot about vim, and those who are much more familiar with VSCode and don't care to learn vim. If I was advertising a vim course I'd target places on the internet where junior sysadmins or Linux devs hang out long before I'd hit HN.
Seems like OP is focused on building a steady traffic source to sell his product. Combination of a good product + marketing focus.
I have a popular Spark blog where I sell Spark books: https://leanpub.com/u/MrPowers. Customers like the product and I have a steady traffic source. It's possible to build side hustles with SEO - don't need to hit the HN jackpot.
Honestly it isn’t too hard to hit the front page with something polished that’s of interest to hn readers.
I have not had anything to market to HN, but I’ve hit the front page with articles of my own a couple of times, with an ask HN once or twice, and with submitted articles at least twice.
The most popular article I wrote here was about how I tried not having home internet for a month (didn’t work, but was interesting). How can an article like that not hit the front page? You see 2-3 articles a day on that theme: wacky personal experiment + earnest well written personal narrative.
Not everyone can do that but it’s hardly some unique alchemy. If I’d done it once I’d say it’s the jackpot but it’s happened often enough without special effort on my part that I think anything reasonably interesting has a fair shot.
Assuming the submitter is a HN user, knows the community, has a track record of writing stuff people like, etc.
I’m pushing back because I think presenting fairly pedestrian accomplishments as jackpot level achievements has the effect of discouraging people from trying.
Obviously not everyone can write well enough to pull that off but most people making a course ought to have that kind of communication skill.
I have thought about making a course on Udemy or Pluralsight. Did you consider those options before building your own? I am curious because I don’t think I have the skills to create something as nice as you did and also would like to know the pros and cons you discovered.
Yeah I did consider those but didn't like the revenue share model. I think if you create a course you should keep the majority of the revenue.
I'm building an alternative for programmers to build and sell interactive courses directly to their audience.[1]
One thing I realized from the vim course was people loved the interactivity part. (you can check out a video of the lesson authoring tool here[2]).
It's currently just a lot of work to build something that looks nice, setup stripe, setup hosting, setup the interactive components, setup remote code execution, etc. I'm abstracting that away so people can focus on content creation and marketing/selling the course instead.
Demand is pretty inelastic for a course, especially if the company is paying for it. I believe that charging at lesat $400 is the sweetspot, volume decreases (so does customer requests) and profits skyrocket.
I use it for my projects (and one project even makes enough revenue that I sponsor Sebastián’s work through GitHub sponsors at $250/mo) and it for sure has increased my development velocity.
It’s an absolute joy to work with. The automated interactive docs are great for iteration. Type hints as first class citizens is an awesome developer experience that I didn’t think I wanted.
Using the auto generated OpenAPI you can even generate client side code and typings to interact with your API.
It feels like flask but with lots of quality of life improvements.
I use the openapi-generator as well, but I write the spec first, then generate both client- and server-side models. Not the client itself so much; I don't like the client-side clients it generates much, and the server-side client is barebones at best. (Server is in Go, client is in Typescript)
This was so cool to read! I had a similar experience with my product[1] hitting the front page last week.
The high level stats for mine were that it sent 18k visitors to my site and generated $1815 the first day it was up.
The following day had 5.8k visitors and generated $1100 of sales.
The coolest part was getting connected with interesting people from cool companies. Got connected with a YC founder, a few folks at big engineering companies, and some fellow indie hackers.
It’s kind of nerve wracking posting a Show HN, but the benefits were great for me. Most of the comments were positive. Got some super valuable feedback as well that will help improve the product.
Thanks for the reply and stats! Yeh I actually just got off a call with a couple people I met because of that post, so that's always fun and different :)
Any plans to make something similar to vim.so but for different platforms?
The next thing I'm working on is a platform[1] that lets other developers create and sell interactive programming courses. At launch it'll have python and JS support. I'd like to add support to allow the ability to teach things like git or shell commands at some point too.
Haha wow I love that idea. The first thing that comes up is that back in the day, I was taught git concepts and commands by a few different people, but it wouldn't "stick". But then I met this one engineer, and his teaching approach worked _super_ well for me.
So I like the idea that a bunch of different people could teach the same material, and you could be the platform to help people discover it.
Off the top of my head, here are some things I'd love help with (sorry if it's too specific haha):
- imagemagick CLI concepts
- Better understanding bash
- Better understanding different types of joins in sql (15 years later, I still can't grock that)
Happy to answer any questions y’all may have.
It’s been a nice feeling finally having an a product that makes some decent revenue!