Who's had any success building building a profitable content business as a solo founder or side project?
I'm asking this because I just saw a similar thread here about SaaS and wanted to contribute but my project is a content site.[1]
I've had modest success and would love to learn from some of those of you who are a bit further along!
[1] I did write the CMS for the site myself, though... for better or for worse though.
The most challenging part was marketing. I also run a blog about this subject and 90% of my traffic is from the blog.
Can you give more details about your marketing? Do you just point to your sales page from your blog? Any email capture form / mailing list / automated sequence?
Also, is there Any advantage of using java for webscraping instead of python? (Which is often used by web scrapers)
I started a YT channel 1.5 years ago, and a paid membership website a few month ago.
Its not paying my rent yet, but its making in the a few 100’s USD MRR. Looking to reach 1000 usd MRR at the end of the year. Seems like the growth has been accelerating, so maybe that I will revise up my target.
For me the rule is pretty simple: more content = more paid subs. My big problem is the cost of production: producing video tutorials takes me a massive amount of time, and at the moment is not profitable at all when you take into consideration the time spent. Also what worries me is that I dont really see a way to scale this up, as hiring other devs to produce content is almost impossible: Need a very rare combination of tech skills, and presentation/ teaching skills.
The only solution I see to this problem is to break down the process of producing content (generate idea, coding, recording...), delegate some parts, and do the integration myself
I started putting screencasts on YouTube at the end of 2017 and started charging last summer. My revenue is somewhat erratic since a large percentage of my customers sign up on an annual plan, but it's been covering my rent since the end of last year. My goal is to hit a baseline $2k MRR within the next 6 months.
The biggest challenge right now is that I started a lot later than my main competitors did. As a result, my site simply isn't on a lot of the lists, many of which include badly out-dated resources that don't compile with current versions of Elixir. There are always ways to improve the product, but I've probably underperformed more on the marketing side.
Longer-term, the popularity of the Elixir language itself is also a major consideration.
If you’re ever looking for a collab or another content creator for elixir courses it’s something I’ve been thinking of getting in to. HMU if you want to do something like that.