Being a developer, do you think my project is useful?
Hello!
As a developer, I like to go to tech events to improve my skills and learn trendy stuff, the problem is that a lot of them are not in my city so I end up watching some of them online which is ok, but I found two problems:
- There are lots of events and interesting speakers I don’t know about (discover)
- It’s hard for me to know when and where these talks are published (follow)
That’s the reason why @Lobo and I started building http://codetalks.tv a year ago, a platform for developers that puts together the best dev talks from all around the world in one place.
In Codetalks you can watch and download thousands of talks (+5k) categorized by technology and event, and even subscribe to our weekly newsletter to receive a customized list of new talks according to your professional profile: frontend, backend, data analyst, etc. (*)
Unfortunately, the project has not grown as much as we would like, we currently have between 50 to 100 visits per day and 530 registered users.
If you are a developer we would like to know what you think of the project, if you find it useful and if you can think of any cool new functionality that could bring more value to the community.
Finally, we'd like to start monetizing the project in some way, but we haven't found the right way yet.
Thank you very much for your help
PD: If anyone is interested, I can answer questions about how it is built on a technical level
(*) The videos are not hosted in our server, we just embed the videos from Youtube or Vimeo with a customized player.
I'd consider letting people enter their email to get "the best talks" without having to signup. I could see myself throwing my email in a form, but would be unlikely to signup for an account (even though technically there might not be a huge difference).
I like this idea - something a bit like Mailbrew where you can configure what you want to see and what is sent?
Thanks for your comment @Gabe :)
I think that would be a nice one to have... our only concern is: would we actually be providing good value to the person if we only ask for the email?
I guess we could ask for the email and also topics they like (front-end, back-end...) to send them better content 🤔
I imagine something like:
That can be a good way, agree!
Ah yes, I was imagining that if they subscribed from the React category they would be subscribed to React, etc. Of course maybe not so easy if those category pages arent getting much traffic.
I think it could be feasible. Thanks a lot for your insights Gabe :)
This is a great idea/product! I already learned something new today! 😇
Something that I've seen companies do in the past and that might work for you is allowing people to see the first let's say 5 minutes of a talk "for free", but then ask them to put in their email address to continue watching.
Thanks @michielkempen
In our case, I'm not sure it would work so great since the videos are hosted in Youtube/Vimeo... they can easily go out of our platform to watch them there if we start "bothering" them like that 😅
Nice site, I'll likely watch some of the videos on there 👍 I'm not sure there's scope for monetisation from users, as you could just jump on Youtube, but maybe you could do sponsored posts/videos from publishers that pay to get their video on the home page? Or a newsletter of curated videos with the same sponsorship model? Maybe you could ask some of the guys that created the videos if this is something they'd be interested in first...
Thanks for your message @JamieGilman
We also think it would be difficult at this point to get any monetization from users.
The newsletter seems like a good one but I think we still need many more subscribers to be able to pursue this.
We also thought about putting some ad or paid job offers related to the category the user is in. So if the user is on the React section, a job offer for a React position will show.
We are still thinking and trying different things :)
Good luck! :)
I can see potential in this. It feels like a "Twitch for developers" which I strongly believe there is a market for.
You would see this more like some kind of streaming platform for developers?
Potentially yes. There are a ton of youtubers absolutely raking it in on dev content and streaming. Some examples;
(I do not actually subscribe to any of these guys but occasionally get some entertainment value from their vids)
It feels a bit like the early days of egaming/game streaming but for development at the moment.
I get your point... it may be an interesting side to look at
Looks good. What I miss at first look is the date the talk happened. At least the year.
noted! :) thanks for the feedback
Two things in my humble opinion:
Not enough breadth on the home page as a first time visitor. I saw 3 Scala videos and 10+ Functional videos. Made me think there weren’t many categories beyond that. Perhaps one of each then browse more by that category so I can easily find categories and related content that are interesting to me.
Categories (or tags) seem hidden behind the menu (viewing on mobile). Once I opened the menu I realized there’s a lot more content than I saw on the home page. I guess this ties in to #1. “Recently added” lacks context to me, show me the value your content has first... Hook me in by helping me quickly find relevant/interesting content then throw in the recently added / popular /etc.
Other than that, I like the idea and site looks good. I’ll probably make my way back here to watch some of the content! Good luck!
I totally understand... the homepage, as a first visitor, is not showing the potential of the platform and it's basically the only thing you see when you first visit our page.
We'll definitely put some work on that.
Thanks a lot for taking the time to reply :)
You articulate two coherent problems, but your site hierarchy doesn't reflect those goals well.
The homepage is 'recently added', which is not useful for either your follow or discover goals. There are events in the sidebar, but they are buried at the bottom.
To me you've sort of been throwing a lot of content at the wall (it seems like there are a lot of videos!), but the problems you articulate have nothing to do with sheer volume. As a fellow developer I might be interested in these events and their content, but I'm not really interested in a generic list of videos.
That makes a lot of sense @msencenb
We have been putting time and effort into getting good content: we manually add every video and tag them to make sure it's good content and well organized. However, as you said, not everything we upload is interesting for everyone so we definitely have a lot to improve in that matter.
What to show on the homepage I think it's a tricky one. As an idea: if you are a registered user and you've set your preferences we can customize the platform for you, showing videos in the home just for you, putting the events that you would be interested in higher in the sidebar, etc... but if the user doesn't sign up I don't really see a great way to show content "for everyone"
Thanks a lot for your feedback, very useful :)
That is a tricky one - I'd suggest not catering to everyone at all, but to cater specifically to the engineers who have the exact same problem as you with event following/discovery.
Lots of ideas there, but if that was your focus, I'd expect to only see events listed on the homepage with no individual videos at all.
Very nice! Here are my thoughts:
Sorry to be a bit direct here. I still think the idea is pretty good!
I love this idea. I just signed up.
Thank you @ryanh1 !
Let me know if you find something interesting to improve :)
Yeah, I use to go to conferences when the companies paid.
But now I don't get to go as there aren't any talks nearby and I'm not flying to europe with my own cash.
So I'm also reliant on videos, which makes this a good idea.
I don't see and Golang talks though...
Thank you!
The name of the tag is "go". Maybe we should provide more than 1 string for each tag (some languages have several names): https://codetalks.tv/go
Oh cool.
I just looked at the left hand menu with the pre-populated languages.
Yes, exactly. Go is also called Golang because of the issues with search engines and searching for 'go' :D
Thank you for your feedback! A lot of interesting points.
I like so much the "job board" idea, could be very useful for our community and for us
It looks like TED for developers. But there are not many videos I feel interested. For django, the videos are in django conf 2018. It may be better if there are more variety
Thanks for your comment :)
You can go to the Django tag -> https://codetalks.tv/django
There are ~200 videos. It's not a huge number of talk but we try to put the most interesting and recent ones.
Regarding to monetization, I saw that you are looking for ways to monetize your site. I've built an affiliate listing for SaaS companies. Is it useful for you?
Link: https://www.afftable.com
I am a developer but I am not sure if I am the right user for your site. I never watch any video or talk regarding frontend or backend development, but I do read a lot of documentations & QA stuff like Stackoverflow. Technical videos and talks I watch are generally very specialized topics (machine learning research, conference presentation). I think if you can solve the long-tail problem, i.e. recommend the right video tailored to the preference of each user, and give me an impression that "I can always learn something new and useful" each time I visit the site, it would be quite useful.
I get your point 🤔
And yeah, I think that would add real value to the user, a very customized list of videos to their interests. We are working on putting together the best videos and offering them as a "bundle" to power up your skills in a very specific field. That would be a list of no more than 10 videos very specific to a topic and high valuable (we think)
Thanks a lot for your feedback :)
Miguel! I love your website, it's very slick and I think you've got a great idea on your hands. My one suggestion right now is to focus on content. You've got a beautiful site, but your content seems like it was "scraped" rather than "handpicked" if you get my meaning.
Your platform needs to have higher quality content. You should be excluding most content and find a way to isolate the most impactful talks you can find, and categorize those. That might mean hundreds or even thousands of hours manually curating a database of tech talks.
Or that might mean restricting the number of topics your website has. For example, by focusing exclusively on Javascript, you could become a resource for the best tech talks about Javascript. That in and of itself could be an incredibly valuable business.
Hey @silicon_sorcerer,
Thank you for your feedback, I'm glad you like it.
We want to add a new feature called "bundles" (actually they would be like playlists), it will be a small selection of carefully selected videos that will serve the user as a course.
For example: "How to use React Hooks", "Introduction to Docker", "Scaling dev teams", etc.
Each bundle will consist of 5-20 videos, related and with progressive difficulty, like a real course.
The idea is to do something similar to Udemy, but watching dev talks.
What do you think?
I think the idea of bundles or topics idea is great, although I would refrain from calling it a course, because you're not designing the curriculum. And I would keep the number of videos short, maybe less than 10. Watching 20 videos is annoying, even if they're short. My final note is to re-emphasize the point that your content is everything. It has to bring your users real value. I would suggest dedicating a significant portion of your time to this effort.
Thanks again @silicon_sorcerer
As you said, the content is the real value here and I must say that we have put a lot of time and effort into this. We manually add and tag every video, which requires a lot of time. We have one person dedicated to adding videos every day.
But if after doing this you still feel like the content is being added by a bot... we are definitely doing it wrong :(
We'll think in better ways to present the content for sure. Thanks a lot :)
So you have a dedicated person to add the videos and tags, but are they watching the videos? Are they researching the folks who are giving the talks? Are they isolating the smartest people by industry and collecting the best talks from the best folks? Are they looking at tech communities across the internet and examining the resources that regular folks are drawn too?
The reason I felt like your content was "scraped" was because many of the videos are pulled from conferences/talks, and from the looks of it, pretty much every talk is pulled in. That's not being selective!! The way you should be thinking is, every tech talk or conference has probably about 10% usable content. You should be throwing away 90%. Say "no" with your content more often.
I would say to the person dedicated to adding videos, start spending more time watching each video, researching industry thought leaders and best practices and finding any other way to be more intentional about the way you select content. Also cut the number of videos you're adding per day, and ruthlessly focus on the real value each video, or each bundle of videos, provide.
Also ofc it goes without saying that this is one man's opinion. You guys are already doing a ton of stuff right, keep it up!
Thanks a lot for your advice, we really appreciate it!
We'll keep improving and trying our best :)
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Yeah.. It's something that we are thinking about, thank you for your feedback
This comment was deleted 2 years ago.