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Comment by m0ck | Hacker News Reader

Props to you, that's inspiring. On the other hand, if I have to be completely honest, I can't wrap my mind around why would anyone pay for what are you doing, let alone so many people. There is so much free resources on Internet on popular topics (such as Ruby/RoR in this case), that I simply don't understand how people can pay for something like this (I didn't read your articles, but if you churned out 30 articles in 50 days then I dare to make a bold claim they aren't world-changing, or presenting something that wasn't already there). Just as I will never comprehend how sane person can regulary read tabloids. But as I said, I admire you and would gladly be in your position, well done.

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>I can't wrap my mind around why would anyone pay for what are you doing, let alone so many people

Your mental model of the world is not the mental model everyone has of the world. Your quoted sentence above comes from the result on one thinking their way of the world is the only way. This is surprisingly common in a number of intelligent people. The result of this is that it prevents them from creating products.

One person might pay because the course provides a structured way to learn a topiC. Another person might pay because by paying, they are more likely to learn the subject.

> I can't wrap my mind around why would anyone pay for what are you doing, let alone so many people.

Support is one thing.

Let's say you have a $100 course where you build something real in the end. Not only do you get fully working code (which could easily save you 100+ hours of dev time) but you also get direct access to the author to ask questions. At least that's what I do in my own courses (I offer (24/7 - sleeping hours) support).

Sure the fully working code that gets continuous updates is nice on its own but think how expensive it would be if you wanted to hire someone to do 1 on 1 help with you as you learn something new from various blog posts and scattered Youtube videos. You could easily spend $100-200 an hour for that and it would be less effective because the person you're paying likely didn't write the material you're learning from.

For a lot of folks $100 is well worth saving an endless amount of nights of furiously Googling around on how to troubleshoot things. Especially if they have a family or are trying to ship whatever they want to build as soon as possible.

With enough persistence you might be able to battle through that on your own, especially if it's a well explored technology that's been around for a long time but we all have limited time. If you value spending 50 hours of your own time instead of spending $100 then you're right, you're probably not the target audience for buying courses.

This is very well articulated but don't forget that another big reason is simply buying a new start/commitment to learning something.

If I see a course on SQL, sure I could get all that content for free, but I am more likely to commit if I paid something for it, and I know that, and I'll convince myself it's a good investment because it's curated etc even if I ultimately end up using a lot of free resources anyway to do my learning.

Yep paying does help to move things forward.

The only exception to that is domain names of course.

what you describing now becomes low paid work.

1) make a course 2) constantly put in hours supporting it.

It's not too bad. I support over 30,000+ people and handling email and forum support is one of the least time consuming parts of my business.

Building a community is sticky. It's the same reason people trust opinions from people rather than some anon on the internet.

It's not world changing but it definitely is to his users.

I can't speak to this particular case but there's something to be said for a subject matter expert systematically pulling a bunch of information together in one place.

Another example in my case is guidebooks. Sure, a lot of the information is online. But paying $15 for something that lays out the travel information with nice maps and organizes it has paid for itself if I save one hour or points me to a better restaurant.

I pay people or donate willingly, to encourage them to continue writing. I buy books and pay for movies so the authors can keep making them. It's possibly more rare that people are looking to find ways out of paying. The developer here must have made compelling content, well done on them for their efforts.

Seems like you’re not far from the truth: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24813732

Thank you for your honest feedback!

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