100,000 registered users in 3 years
I turned 29 yesterday and coincidentally, my online courses reached 100,000 registered users! What I'm particularly proud of is:
- not spending money on advertisement.
- not accepting investors (to protect the interest of learners from investor greed. Yes, that's a real thing.).
- following honest marketing techniques (no fake discount timers, no marketing emails, no black-Friday discounts, just a plain and simple payment page)
I'm extremely grateful for all the help and feedback along the way ❤️
If you haven't already checked them out, here are my interactive courses:
[no coding experience] https://learnprogramming.online
[basic coding knowledge, want to learn JS] https://learnjavascript.online
[React hooks course] https://react-tutorial.app
[Coming soon!] https://learnhtmlcss.online
I can definitely recommend you to try focusing on organic traffic and continuing to improve your product based on the feedback of your customers. I've noticed that users enjoy it a lot more when they find it themselves compared to when you push it forcefully in front of their faces!
You will still need to have a way for users to find out about your product (articles, links from other websites, YouTube videos, etc.)
One of the benefits you will see is long-term trust. I would've probably been able to make a lot more money by using shady marketing techniques, but in the long-term, I don't think that would play well ;)
Let me know your thoughts or if you have any questions!
congratulations! what marketing techniques/channels/tools gave you the best results? and how did you push for your initial customers?
Thanks! Organic is by far the biggest source of visitors and new registered users.
I've also received some very high quality links from reputable sources which has further improved organic traffic.
There are also some very specific articles/videos (a minority of which is authored on my youtube channel or my personal blog) that also regularly convert some users.
As for the initial customers, I've launched with a
Show HN, product hunt, and social media posts.Well done Jad and thanks for sharing your story.
Big fan of not using "shady marketing techniques" - you'll grow slower for sure but as you said it has many other, important, benefits to it as well :-)
Indeed! Thank you :D
Looking good! I'll definitely be starting the React hooks course.
Thank you!
Congrats Jad! Happy birthday and wish you all the best, especially in achieving your goals and sharing what you learn with the other people. Thank you!
Thank you!
Congratulations! Glad to see that you reached your goals :)
Thanks!
Nice work! The code education space has a ton of players, but the simplicity of getting into your courses is refreshing compared to the hoops needed for Coursera.
Out of curiosity, are you running their code against a test suite for each code lesson? Once they all pass then the challenge is successful? That was the approach was used at Code School using Mocha for JS courses. I'm curious what you landed on.
Thanks! I have my own custom test runner but I do use a unit testing library such as chai (though it could be swapped with any other unit testing library)
Happy Birthday!!!!!!!
Organic.... that's awesome.
Mainly blogs or Social Content?
Thank you! Mainly word of mouth and blog posts linking to it. Some universities have also added it as part of their curriculum which has helped a lot