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Comment by nickjj | Hacker News Reader

In 2016 I took content creation somewhat seriously and the end result was enough income to sustain living in NY.

Not sure if it's worth blogging about yet. Are other developers interested to see how to potentially make software engineer-tier salaries without having to work for another company?

(Note: I also started with nothing. No mentors, no following, no existing profile, no paid advertising, etc.).

Edit: If you're interested, my site is https://nickjanetakis.com.

If you sign up anywhere on the site, you'll get notified when I release content related to starting your own business / building up your brand as a software developer.

I recommend filling out the form at https://nickjanetakis.com/learn-in/2017, because you can include what you want to learn most about which helps me figure out what I should start writing about first.

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Of course other developers are interested in that. That's such a leading question that you risk tripping some people's BS meter.

But still ... yes, definitely interested.

Yeah my BS meter has tripped. Most of his submissions are links to his own site and his comments here are "would anyone be interested in ____" and "let me tell you a secret" self promotional spam.

I only post comments like that when it makes sense.

If you asked me, "hey I just downloaded Sublime Text, what are some good packages for a Rails developer?". Why wouldn't I link you to a blog post that lays it all out so you can consume it quickly?

"Let me tell you a secret" is a line I used twice. As a software developer I like testing things and analyzing the results. So when I reply to people, I tend to make note of the wording and phrases I use, and then see how it does.

Nothing wrong with that IMO.

You could choose to ignore the link too, but I'll leave you with this. None of my paid training material has anything to do with "selling the dream". It's all tech courses related to web frameworks and how to deploy them to production. In other words, concrete knowledge that has guaranteed results.

After inspecting your website, I realized that I had purchased your Build a SaaS App course once, on Udemy. I ended up asking for my money back after discovering that you don't actually build anything, the code is already written and the video lectures quickly breeze through explaining it.

A few people mentioned this in the Udemy comments on your course, and you retorted with snarky replies.

Not a fan of your marketing or your attitude towards customers who were offering legitimate criticism.

Hi,

Sorry you didn't like the course. I don't recall any snarky replies, but you're right. There were a few people who would have preferred a "code everything from a blank page" approach.

The problem is, how do you code up a 4,000+ line Python application with dozens of files and thousands of lines of HTML/CSS/JS together 1 character at a time?

It would take 100+ hours of video and you would want to punch me in the face after hearing me say "ok now type D I V close bracket" for the 400th time in a row.

A vast majority of people (as seen by the reviews) really enjoy the way it's presented and like seeing it get built up in 12+ stages. It's impossible to make everyone on the internet happy. The best I can do is listen to the feedback of everyone and continue tinkering with future content.

FYI - this is a snarky reply

You're being highly disingenuous with your reply, to the point that I agree with the other comment that it is snarky. Assuming your audience already knows HTML and Python is perfectly acceptable if the focus is on building the application, not on teaching how to type HTML and Python from scratch one character at a time. A video could then say "Now we enter in this page of HTML [cut from blank editor to already typed in text]. Note the following sections: [brief explanation of important parts with highlights]" etc. which the audience can follow along via section-by-section downloads. This is a very standard style, and that you seem unaware makes you appear ill-suited for teaching anybody.

Hey,

The course does mention you should have a basic understanding of HTML and Python before starting it. It's meant to teach you about Flask.

There's about 60 HTML templates in total. Rather than put the burden of copy/pasting each one onto the student, I decided to break the entire project up into 20 stages (separated by folders and git commits).

You get to see the application at 20 stages of development (to see how it gets built up). It starts with a single app.py file and finishes with the end result.

Basically I go over each line of code, and explain why it's written and what it does.

This style of teaching was a choice I made based on the direct feedback of hundreds of students in previous courses.

Most of them like the fast paced style where I talk over the code. There's also many hours of code challenges built into the course to get your hands dirty. The refund rate is currently less than 1%.

The point is, change your pitch. Your wording leads to thoughts like the two commenters had above. Shouldn't be too hard if you have real substance to sell.

I can only guess that he's not incredibly familiar with this community and its aversion to BS/fluff... I'm sure he finds great success in his verbiage "testing" on other less savvy forums.

Yeah. Agree with you. Sounds like "Do you know how to make money on my online blog? Use blue host <referral link here>"

Hmm... most (or at least many) people here are building businesses now and have little interest in being on yet another marketing-heavy email list. A forum like this is a great place to connect and share stories! In the long run that will pay off far more than just strafing by and telling people to sign up for your email.

How did you build your following? How did you monetize? Are you an ad publisher or are you selling something? What kind of content did you create?

I'm in the process of building a business right now too, which for me encompasses "how to be a self reliant software developer who can choose to work whenever and wherever".

I'll tell you a secret, I haven't even e-mailed my list once. Why? Because I'm still figuring this stuff out as I go. I don't have years of content to create marketing auto-responders and dozens of products to push to people.

Just yesterday I was thinking about the problem of "you have all these people on your list, if you don't message them, they are going to forget about you", so I thought maybe I should be spinning off newsletters based on the weekly blog posts I create -- and at worst send maybe something out every 2 weeks.

That's why when I stumbled on this ASK HN thread I thought I'd ask if people wanted to hear this stuff, and then figured by publicly posting something like this, I'll have accountability to actually start messaging my list.

P.S,

I'm just a dude who cannot accept wasting his life away to make another company rich so I can "retire" when I'm nearly dead. I want to live life right now on my own terms and have the self reliance and freedom to work anywhere in the world, and never have to worry about money again.

My income comes from a few streams. Course sales (related to tech), affiliate sales, book sales and consulting. I don't have ads on my blog and never will.

All of the content can be found on my site at https://nickjanetakis.com/. I recommend reading the home page because it better describes what I just wrote here.

You blog posts seem pretty interesting. How did you choose the titles?

I agree 100% with your statement about living live on one's own terms.

Thanks. I spend a considerable amount of time on the titles.

Usually I write out a bunch of headlines, and then eliminate the ones that are horrible.

My goal is to condense the essence of the entire post in as little characters as possible. I often ignore any type of SEO tactics, and optimize it for humans.

There's definitely way more I could write on this (there's a whole process, tons of things to research, etc.), I'll add it to a Google Keep note for a future post (if you read some posts you know what I mean!).

Alexa 500k in just a year in is pretty good. What was your general audience building strategy?

Thanks. Honestly, I don't even think I'm a blip on the radar.

For most of 2016 I didn't really try to build an audience. I just posted on topics that interested me while not paying attention to anything.

Then I stopped blogging for a few months and really started to think about what I want to do (this happened about mid-year).

During that time I re-did my site and completely changed my mindset from "I want to make money" to "I want to create the best content I can on a specific subject".

I don't really use twitter or other platforms. I just post content on my site, and try to reply to comments on relevant sites (like HN and other tech sites) when it makes sense.

I can't take any of this "how to work for yourself and make money" seriously, if the main way that you make money is by charging for these lessons. It's like a pyramid scheme where the real money is in getting people to learn from you and pay for the privilege. It would be a lot more credible if you made the ideas freely available, but, alas, that will not pay for your rent in NYC.

I don't charge any money to read the blog.

While I do have a few paid courses, they are all based around learning specific programming / developer related technologies, not marketing or pyramid scheme tactics.

Checkout simpleprogrammer.com Similar to what you are doing. Reverse engineer his marketing approach. Its pretty good.

PS. Asking for signups on HN is bad mojo. Inbound content marketing works best here, but will take multiple front page submissions for any considerable amount of subscribers. :)

NY really? Do you live on Long Island? Manhattan is so expensive. I'd be interested. I'm in LI.

Long Island (you're right, Manhattan is way too expensive to live in).

There are four other boroughs ;-)

Staten Island, Jersey City, North Bergen & Westchester? lol

this was cool until it got a little clickbait-y plug

The style of having checkboxes next to very obviously positive statements feels really disingenuous. "Urge for the freedom to travel and work anywhere" - of course that would be nice. Maybe I'm too cynical.

Active statements like that work really well. I agree with you, but as people building companies it is a choice to do what works or do what feels best to us.

write an article definitely interested

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