Comment by CoffeePython | Hacker News Reader

Comment by CoffeePython | Hacker News Reader

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.

[1] https://www.vim.so [2] https://robwalling.com/2015/03/26/the-stairstep-approach-to-...

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.

This is where we hang out. I’m very open to other suggestions though, as well.

Yes I did get to the front page of HN. It generated around $2800 worth of revenue. The largest chunk for sure.

Lots of traffic also came from: reddit, word of mouth, FastAPI sponsorship, twitter, and indiehackers.

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.

[1] https://www.slip.so

[2] https://twitter.com/KennethCassel/status/1356578440015716352...

Udemy is actually a great platform for courses. I've used that and Skillshare and both are great.

How do you arrive at $100-$300/day?

Selling something and doing a lot of promotion in the right places.

My conversion rate is right at 1%. Product is $25. I think I can realistically drive 400-1200 visitors a day to the site with some focused SEO work.

I see. Still relying on some assumptions at this point. Keep us posted. Best of luck.

Why not increase prices?

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.

congrats that is awesome!! did you do courses in an area you were genuinely interested in or just for income??

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