CourseMaker Podcast Episode 6: Andrea Bizzotto (20k+ Students)

I had a really interesting chat with online course author and fellow IHer @bizz84

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Podcast download links (Spotify, Google, Apple), transcript, and notes here

Key Takeaways 🚀

• Open-source contributions can be a way to have a huge impact, as they can end up used in thousands of products
• Andrea admits that he feels a bit embarrassed by his first course videos, but says that it is a process and you get better
  over time as a course creator
• Andrea had seen the iphone app boom "pass him by" and wanted to ensure the same thing didn't happen again with Flutter.
• Noted the trend in frontend development towards declarative and reactive mobile application frameworks
• Before Andrea created his first course, he validated the idea that he could teach and that people would be interested by
  starting with youtube tutorials. At that time he didn't even know that people were going on youtube to look for programming
  tutorials. He started with a 6 video series on building an authentication flow with Flutter and Firebase, and people really liked them. After
  seeing that success, he decided to take the leap and make a course
• When creating the first course, Andrea expected it to take 3-4 months. In the end, it took 11 months. Part of the reason for this was
  because he wanted to create a complete course. He was influenced by seeing some very large courses on Udemy, and assumed that in order
  to compete he would have to make a long course. Looking back, he thinks he spent too much time on this first course and could have launched
  earlier.
• At first, Andrea made his course private, allowing a selected group from his newsletter to try it. He started doing this from 30% completion,
  so for a few months he had scheduled updates to release new course content
• Turns out that November is the biggest month for sales
• On why his courses are so highly rated, Andrea thinks it's a combination of being a developer for a long time, working as a freelancer in particular
  has given him a feel for what works - he taught the same tools and approaches as he used in his own client work.
• He continued building courses on the side - keeping a balance between freelance work and his course business.
• IndieHackers is a great community for learning how to grow an online course business

Quotes from the Episode 💬

I was just amazed by how quickly I could turn something around with no previous knowledge of the framework [Flutter] [...]
something clicked there and I thought "this is going to be big".

From a business point of view, if you really had to deliver a product across iOS, and Android and desktop and web [Flutter]
is the only framework that allows you to do that with the same level of quality that you would get on native. It's not production
ready for web yet [...] but just the fact that you can already get a really good quality experience on mobile [...] if you're building
something mobile first, to me Flutter is the first choice.

On Udemy, it really is about finding the right topic and getting there at the right time with a good course. If you miss that, it's harder
to make up for it.

If you want to build something for mobile, Flutter is a great choice. If you want to build a complex website, Flutter probably isn't the right
choice

Flutter is growing fast, but there are more jobs in the Javascript ecosystem. [...] If you're someone who wants to build their own product, or maybe
start an agency or freelance or start a startup then Flutter is great for all those things.