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Comment by patio11 | Hacker News Reader

There's going to be a lot more teaching-programming-as-a-product startups because the user base is proven, the economics are compelling, and the underlying story is that "Anyone who successfully figures out a scalable process to turn people into programmers wins the 21st century."

Incidentally, as long as I'm up:

https://onemonthrails.com/try

A little birdy says that "Submit" is the worst possible copy you could use for that button, unless you're running an S&M site. Try [Get A FREE 7-day Video Crash Course] rather than "Sign Up For..." and [Send Me My Videos].

(As always: do it in an A/B test if you don't believe me. This one is generally cough fairly compelling.)

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Good call patio11, I made the change. It's a good thing we're using optimizely and can push that up quickly.

On a side note, this landing page is actually an A/B test we're performing on the effectiveness of an email drip campaign vs a hard sell to signup (which is currently still up on the homepage). The writer of the article was part of a 10% of people that were redirected from the homepage to the try landing page and so he hardlinked directly to that page in the article.

That's our mistake.

Does that have anything to do with my not having received an email for the 7 day trial? I signed up over an hour ago.

Also as a side note, you privacy statement link is 404ing.

Edit: got the email! thanks

I signed up about an hour ago and got my email just now.

Sorry about that scubasteve. That's not nearly fast enough.

It was more informative than being disappointed :). Thanks for the great service.

One question, sorry for hijacking the discussion.

Is this the same course offered on Udemy? (https://www.udemy.com/how-to-teach-yourself-to-code/)

Potential suggestion: add a syllabus or at least a (more) concrete summary of what course takers will learn/build. I read the 'Sign up for this course and you'll learn' section and it's very thin on the specifics. The Udemy page is much better in this aspect, IMHO.

Mailchimp's autoresponders can't be set for immediately, only "within an hour" because I don't think they want people using it as a transactional email / content delivery system

Good call on the 404. That's bad. Fixing now.

I've used Mailchimp's transactional service (Mandrill) on a number of projects and it's been great. If you're looking to set up the AR yourself at some point and want insta-respond, give it a whirl.

A little birdy says that "Submit" is the worst possible copy you could use for that button

Aren't you being too literal here? Vast majority of internet users have been trained to see "submit" for "okay I'm done filling out this form, next!".

We have competing hypotheses about an observable future fact. We should resolve them via the scientific method.

But if you don't have an email form doing thousands of impressions and want to just bet on this one, your bet would be a very bad bet to make.

While I won't disagree that there might be other labels that perform better than "Submit", calling "submit" as the worst possible copy seems overtly sensational. We both know it isn't.

It was too literal. "Don't submit" would definitely be worse, but still not the worst possible copy.

@dxm, haha I actually want to try "don't submit". That one may backfire and actually work better.

Do an A/B test. What if you're wrong?

He's likely right, it's a best practice that may be wrong in some cases. Though generally, you're better off going with a best practice and then A/B testing alternatives.

The reality is that you're limited in the number of A/B tests you can do, both by traffic but also by your own time and resources. So you can run a test against something that is generally accepted (like what text works on a button) or against more important changes like headline copy or page layout.

What makes you think it's a best practice? It may be usual, but when it comes to getting people to notice (and therefore, do) things on the web, "usual" isn't usually that good.

The rest of your comment is a straw man fallacy. Of course you can't test everything. But, you know...it might just be reasonable to test the conversion button on your landing page, especially when someone who does a lot of testing tells you that it has a big impact. Because that's a more informative prior than "we should just use the default behavior".

point well taken, timr

you're better off going with a best practice

No-one ever got fired for buying IBM.

When do you think this space will reach full saturation to the put that new entrants will find it hard to notch out a spot in it?

As some others have mentioned, knowledge economies are not zero-sum. It's not like you can only use one course or one class (I've taken many).

As for market saturation, I think it depends on what your thoughts are about theories that some futurists (like Doug Rushkoff) have put forward saying that one day everyone will have to learn how to code. If everyone will one day learn how to code, then it's a pretty big market.

"97% of people recommend One Month Rails" is also a little misleading. I'm willing to bet 97% of people don't know what One Month Rails is.

Haha that's fair. Not intentionally misleading though. I had hoped people would interpret that as "97% of people who have taken One Month Rails recommend it" like when mouthwash brands say "4 out of 5 Dentists Recommended" they don't literally mean 4 out of 5 dentists on earth.

Fun fact: all five dentists are employed by the mouthwash company. But five out of five would sound suspicious.

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