Less than 24 hours on Udemy as an instructor and I’m close to leaving | Hacker News Reader

Less than 24 hours on Udemy as an instructor and I’m close to leaving

blog.nickjanetakis.com

293 pointsbaobaba37 comments

Wow!

To some people, that article is going to seem like nit-picking, and insofar as it affects most people, it may be.

But my feeling on reading this article is gratitude. Thanks for writing it.

It's good for Udemy. If their business practices end up costing some content creators 87.5% of list price, then it's because the evil and/or lazy forces in the company have gained ground, and this kind of sunshine may weaken them.

It's good for content creators.

It's good for consumers. As a potential customer of courses like yours, I was discouraged at seeing their incentivization of cheaper, spammier courses. Why? Because even if education is turned into a product, it's is still a "buy-it-for-life" product where quality matters, and quality is the only metric I (and probably many of Udemy's shoppers!) really care about. Anything that could result in less noise/spam in their signal is appreciated.

It'll be interesting to see how Udemy responds.

As someone who has been doing screencasts with voice, I can tell you the mic is really important. If you use a headset, even a good one, you can generally hear the spit swishing around in your mouth. It's awful.

A buddy runs a pro recording studio and recommended Aphex Microphone X. I haven't looked back. Aphex makes amazing pro microphone preamps that are pricey. They launched something called Microphone X which has a compressor and a "big bottom" feature that were previously only in their high end pro gear. It's quite affordable - about $200 compared to an EV RE20 broadcaster mic for $600. It's a USB mic, so you don't need a preamp or digi interface. You just plug it into your computer and you're all set. I use it with a boom stand and pop filter. I love them so much I use them for everything including skype calls.

What this does is negate the changes in volume as you get closer or further from the mic (compressor). Add some nice radio bass to your voice with the big bottom effect. And generally give you a pro quality mic with a USB interface.

Here are all three:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00B73OJT2?psc=1&redirect=t...

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00DY1F2CS?psc=1&redirect=t...

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B008AOH1O6?psc=1&redirect=t...

Sure, purists will argue the EV20 is worth every penny. But pre's like the aphex have gotten so good that they've made the gains from a high-end source mic worth a lot less, if anything.

Thanks for that. I really hate the sound of my own voice when I hear a recording back. The only microphone I did not have that with was an AKG that was priced way out of the ballpark and it needed an equally expensive pre-amp to go with it. Nice to see a reasonably affordable ($200 is still quite a bit of money) alternative.

Thanks. I'm curious to know whether you've compared this with the much cheaper Audio-Technica ATR-2100-USB that Marco Arment mentions here: http://www.marco.org/podcasting-microphones#rank

A boom or scissor-arm stand with suspension mount ($30), a pop filter ($10), and USB condenser-type microphone at the bottom of the range of your chosen manufacturer ($30-$100) will get you 80% of the way there. The cheapest $5-$20 microphones are cheap plastic USB crap with 5 cent dynamic transducers, but it's really a huge step up to something like the chunky, metal Samson C01UCW studio microphone, for only a little more money.

The whole setup cost me $76.

What do you think of this review? https://fizzle.co/sparkline/podcast-high-quality-microphone-...

The author raised $12,451 USD from 13 backers for a Flask course?

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/nickjj/build-a-saas-app...

Maybe I'm in the wrong line of work.

The great majority of that came from 2 backers, who also received these services:

  - I will do a case study on your app and it will be featured on the project's website. 
  - 1 hour remote consulting session to help you get unstuck with the project. 
  - E-mail support within reason. 
  - Both screencast series. 
  - A PDF cheatsheet of all of the tasks and deploy commands you can run. 
  - A Flask sticker that you can place anywhere!

So essentially they paid a few grand for a Flask course, decent support package (1 hour live support, unlimited email support), some videos and swag.

wait, wait, wait on your third point - a whole hour for each of all two backers you mention?

I think I detect sarcasm? That seems like a fairly reasonable rate.

This wasn't something that happens every day.

The Flask screencasts were my first attempt at a Kickstarter. My goal may have been ambitious but I looked at other programming books/material and tried to price it around what those projects got funded for.

Long story short, my campaign tanked for nearly the full month and 36 hours before it ended an Australian businessman nearly solo backed the project and we've been in contact since working on various things.

I don't want to mention his name unless he gives me permission, but I wanted to post this now to clear up how this took place.

It says 2 backers pledged $3,000 or more for:

  - Case study on your app and it will be featured on the project's website
  - 1 hour remote consulting session to help you get unstuck with the project
  - E-mail support within reason

I agree, that is quite impressive! Looks like the author discussed how this managed to come together though, so I probably wouldn't be too excited to follow in his footsteps.

IT education is a huge market. Unfortunately it also attracts a lot of fakers and cheapos -- in this case, the Udemy owners.

Its amazing how many phone calls you get in a week for IT education even at a small business / community college. These course aren't cheap either.

> Unfortunately it also attracts a lot of fakers and cheapos -- in this case, the Udemy owners.

Or, from my experience, most Udemy courses.

The author might be better off going with the flow and treating Udemy-imposed discounts as a loss-leader for consulting gigs.

Udemy is creating a race to the bottom for their course creators, to the benefit of the students, who will always be able to find quality courses for $10. The winning course creators will be the top 2%, plus those in the top 10% who are able to convert the courses into other forms of income.

However, this is not much different than almost every other form of content creation and centralized distribution these days, where there are winners who are good enough that they can make a break and create their own distribution channels, another tier who can make a living by hustling in multiple modes, and the hopeful replacement-level masses who keep the broad distribution channels afloat with a deep catalog.

You can also split your course into multiple parts -- part 1 can always have the $10 price, then the next part(s) could have the higher price point. This also gives the student a cheap way to sample your course to see if it is worth purchasing the higher price ones later on.

While that obviously works out to a surprising amount from each individual, if the author really spent two months putting the course together, well ... it wouldn't be particularly well-paid client work for a contractor in the Bay Area.

Yeah, I was definitely mostly surprised by the amount per individual

13 people who didn't realize they could get a similar course for $10 on udemy... ;)

Udemy's getting absolutely slammed today on HN. I wonder if they're paying attention.

Very informative writup about a platform I had only heard of before.

Some comments on book publishers:

> A book publisher will happily give you better margins >

No. If, an author makes 5% royalties on their book sales they're really lucky! Mainstream publishers must make a cut, so they'll only fork out a tiny percentage of the profits, which is a tiny percentage of the wholesale price, which is 45% of the list price (standard wholesale discount).

So 12% royalties, is really like 4-5% of profits, and if the book is sold with extra discount, we're dropping into the 2-3% range.

> than that AND print you high quality hard cover books > while bending the world to sell it for you in the process. >

More no. They'll put the book in a few catalogues, and maybe make a flyer or two. No world bending stuff.

takeaway: break you lessons up into $5 (to you) chunks and the let them go on sale for $10.

Udemy is a TERRIBLE platform. I'm surprised that so many instructors consent to putting their stuff on there. It's so much better to just have your content on your own hosted solution or Teachable (previously Fedora). Looks like there's a lot of room to innovate in this space.

I don't know if it's an open course hosting platform, but there's http://02geek.com/

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