How I made a profitable Vim course
slip.so
slip.so
My honest opinion is that I'm a little disappointed with the content of the course itself, I feel like it's way too basic and offers too little insight as of now. But maybe more sections will be added later?
Maybe I missed it, but I haven't seen any explanation of VIM's combination of verb and nouns? I think thats the most important part to understand when learning VIM.
Anyway, very cool product and a nice experience.
Good feedback around needing better explanations of the verbs and nouns. I try to teach it through the examples but maybe I could add a better explanation :)
I think in the future I’ll add more lessons but it might be a while.
I’d be happy to refund you or upgrade you for free (when the new lessons are available) if you want to email me. My email is at the bottom of the vim home page.
Happy to answer any questions y’all may have.
It’s been a nice feeling finally having an a product that makes some decent revenue!
One thing I would suggest creating as a marketing tool is interactive guides on books that don't have alot of excersices or are more 'text-booky'. Like a no fear shakespear for some technical book.
One of the things that made me think of this is my current rabbithole that is learning the rust programming language. There are generally two answers when you ask someone how to learn rust, "Learn C++ and read The Book, or read The Book". "The Book" is dense... but i found this program called "Rustlings" that makes the experience much more enjoyable.
Rustlings is essentially a list of exercises, tests and quizzes attached onto the rust book and some of the documentation.
With Slip, you could be the genius.com of open source technical books on top of courses. More detailed explanations, quizzes, courses, etc.
Also, Another field that needs to be disrupted is paid webinars. There's alot of people who give talks on topics and get paid per attendee. If you could centralize that, i'm sure it'd be a good business to get into. I have a friend who gives webinars on certain topics and he uses onlyfans lol.
This one is money.
I have no idea how you'd do this besides Maybe Live courses, or somehow creating a social-dynamic between creator and consumer. This would be an invaluable vibe to cultivate to increase completion. Continuing to just throw ideas out, maybe you could give a % refund if you actually complete the course, or you earn back as you complete the challenges.
As a developer, it'd be great to hear from you (or someone similar who's reading this) about the business side of how you got started. How do you set all that up? Any gotchas?
Pretty happy with it, especially since I didn’t even post the HN article
If the title begins with a number or number + gratuitous adjective, we'd appreciate it if you'd crop it. E.g. translate "10 Ways To Do X" to "How To Do X," and "14 Amazing Ys" to "Ys." Exception: when the number is meaningful, e.g. "The 5 Platonic Solids."
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
... although I notice that it's worded more restrictively than I remember. It should cover magic numbers in general, not just at beginnings. (Edit: fixed now!)
Can I please get insights into your stack to launch? I’m thinking to do something similar for another programming language and have a mental block right now on which stack to use / get up and running on an MVP without spinning my wheels :-)
Not the author, my go to stack in general is:
- https://blitzjs.com (backend + frontend) - https://chakra-ui.com (frontend library) - https://chakra-templates.dev (for landing page) - https://stripe.com/docs/payments/checkout (stripe checkout + customer portal) - https://render.com (blitz supports this quite nicely: https://blitzjs.com/docs/deploy-render)
Code evaluation is done via spinning up docker containers (Source: https://twitter.com/Faraaz98/status/1375802851696373762)
I know Kenneth, the author, used create-react-app intially for the frontend and switched to Next.js. Really worth it to follow his twitter btw :)
Users seem to enjoy the lesson authoring tool!
It’s fun building things for developers.
Seeing the stripe notifications roll in when an author sells their own course feels pretty amazing.
Making that first $8 was life changing for me. I hope I can bring that to other devs too :)
If I may ask, your $25 seems to be a one-time fee; do you incur any recurring revenue from already-signed-up users?
vim.so is $25 one time fee.
Slip is a subscription
How did you build vim.so? Is it a framework or purely coded in vim?
Seriously just sit down and dedicate a week to typing solely in vim. It feels extremely weird at first, and you'll keep wanting to use the arrow keys. But after that you'll never want to go back to using non-vim mode editing again.
But in all seriousness, sometimes people just need to pay money for something to feel committed to learning.
Also, some people dramatically prefer the format of a human talking to reading text. You also get insightful tangents, from listening to an expert give an intro, that are sometimes worth the price of admission themselves.
I personally love to watch high performing programmers work, you learn so much just from the nonverbal parts, get workflow inspiration, etc.
"you can tell its a market by the way it is; how neat is that?"
I'm grateful for the story for exactly the reason you mention: it's a datapoint from someone struggling, not from someone who made it. And like you say, we need those datapoints just as much as the survivor stories.
It’s brought me more opportunities than any resume I’ve ever wrote.
It paid off my CC debt.
It’s connected me to some really interesting people.
It gave me the idea for my current startup which is growing nicely so far.
Couldn’t be happier with the outcome :)
If at all, HN is much better at showcasing failures than the rest of the interwebs.