nspeller

I have not implemented this (yet).

But every year around the holidays a bunch of folks request this. I tell them to buy the course, and then email me who they'd like to gift it to. Then I just manually create a new account and send an email saying so-and-so bought you this course with the login! nathan [at] lightnote.co

Thank you!

Over the years I have run a few A/B tests on the landing page. I tried some variations I thought MUST improve the conversion rate. However, this one, which is basically the original one, is still the best performer.

If it ain't broke.

Ah, yeah that is misleading. Let me clarify.

The landing page is what I built over the winter break, including those first 7 lessons. Since then that page has remained largely unchanged.

However, when it started getting a lot of traffic I added a pre-order form for a full course. THAT took me 6 months to code up all the additional lessons. Building all the interactive pieces (drum synths for rhythm lessons, an ear training game for intervals, a virtual guitar, etc.) was really fun but a lot of work. For example, the interactive guitar uses samples I recorded note-by-note from my acoustic guitar in my bedroom. Afterwards I couldn't look at it for months. And then over the years I've added more.

So not quite an overnight success.

Thank you for the kind words though!

I built an interactive Music Theory course 8 years ago over a winter break and it continues to bring in enough to pay my rent each month.

I just thought there had to be a more intuitive way to learn music theory than the very boring and jargon-heavy alternatives.

It uses Tone.js to include little interactive pianos, guitars, and other demos.

I've done no marketing, it hit the HN front page for a day, and after that initial spike in traffic has been fairly consistent over the past 8 years.

It uses Stripe for payments and for the first few years it was only Stripe. 3 years in I decided to add PayPal support... revenue doubled overnight, mostly from international customers.

https://www.lightnote.co/

Is a better UI always the best choice?

I've often wondered what impact an "enhanced ui and interface" would have on the audience HN attracts. Would more people visit? What demographics? Would it change what gets upvoted (both in content and what's above the fold)? Would there be more comments? Would there be an impact on comment quality?

Poor UXs act as barriers to entry. Barriers to entry can be beneficial depending on the goal.

That being said, I've still changed the HN styles many times over the years to make it easier for me to scan.

[shameless plug] I built http://lightnote.co for exactly this. Starting from basic sound waves, it teaches music theory while skipping all of the technical notation. It definitely doesn't go as deep as this post, but I don't think that's essential to getting started.

I wrote a course on it!

https://www.lightnote.co/

It's a bunch of short, interactive lessons to help you visualize the concepts. Still going strong after about 3 years now.

If you check it out, I'd love to hear your feedback.

I used Tone.js to create my music theory website https://www.lightnote.co/

Using recordings from my guitar (of each and every note) I was able to build an interactive fretboard that could play guitar tabs/chords. Also the Transport API made it simple to build a drum looping machine very quickly.

Ableton has built something similar, also using Tone.js: https://learningmusic.ableton.com/make-beats/make-beats.html

Performance on mobile leaves a lot to be desired. I found there was considerable lag.

Nice job! I made some interactive visualizations to calculate something very similar:

https://www.workfortime.com/investment-calculator/

https://www.workfortime.com/retirement-calculator/

I tried to show how age and length of investment really impact how much wealth you can create.

Hi, I'm the guy making this course. A little more about this project: I'm looking to help people who know almost nothing about photography. Maybe they've only taken photos with their smartphone, or maybe they own a DSLR but never really learned to use it.

My goal was to create an interactive course to "show them what they're missing" and what they can do with photography at a very high level. In later lessons I'll dive deeper into the each of the topics briefly covered in this first lesson.

I'd love any feedback you might have on my first lesson! Is it engaging? Do you know people who would benefit from this? If you were starting over in photography do you think this would be a good beginner approach? Thanks in advance!

Thank you! Definitely. There's a lot more I'd like to add.

Thanks. Yeah, the experience on mobile devices too is admittedly pretty poor right now. I wasn't ready yet for the traffic but I'll get this fixed.

This is actually my side project. It's very much unfinished but if anyone has any feedback I'd love to hear it.

Cool product.

However, I really had no idea what this product did from the landing page. Had to create an account, and wait for a psd to process. Then I had to click around before actually understanding what was going on. Most people aren't going to get that far before they leave and you don't want to lose that audience.

The line "if you're a web developer you no longer need photoshop" was confusing. Because I read this as "another web-based photoshop alternative". And for some reason I couldn't figure out what you meant by Photoshop styles (maybe just me).

I think I'd personally describe your product as 1. Upload a PSD, 2. Download the CSS, thats it. Maybe a landing page more like: http://jade-lang.com/

Hope that helps.