Got my first sale on new domain while I was on holiday ~$114 USD! WEW
I'm posting because I'm buzzed about this and kinda still have a bit of imposter syndrome about the whole thing- I work as a high priced UX consultant and generating income outside of consulting has felt very difficult.
UNTIL TODAY!
Just came back from a family trip where I was essentially off the grid, and hey, somebody bought one of my UX research info-products!
Funnily enough, it wasn't the one that I just launched - it was a research methodology course that I created 2 years ago that has been languishing on Udemy ever since.
I spun up a new site recently (hugo.limited) to house some UX research case study content, then thought ok, well this is a chance to stop getting paid $3 for each sale on Udemy (where I think it's just cracked 70 sales? so pretty low numbers for 2 years). I'd advise to stay off 3rd party platforms altogether tbh. Now I am forced to grow my audience myself, which is weirdly motivating.
Transferred the content to Gumroad, unpublished on Udemy, put up a landing page on my site, priced it at AUD $149 (I'm in Melbourne, but that's roughly USD 114), write some new marketing copy, and put it on autopilot.
Then I come home to the email I've been holding my breath to see!! And it feels great.
I spent about a week in total putting together the new content, and if all it does is drive a trickle of traffic to my course, well, that's fine!
And I think I might put the price of the course up...
That's awesome, I read through the example on your homepage and it was very interesting, reminds of the nngroup articles I occasionally read. Curious, is it possible to dilute the articles down to actionable insights i.e. "Use avatars as your sign in trigger" or whatever and the a click through to read more on why if interested? Would help people like me that down have the attention span to read through all of them.
Great to be compared to NNG! Their audience is the target market for sure. Hmm actually, there's probably one of those target-their-Twitter-followers hacks that I could do there.. thanks for the reminder!!
Re more actionable insights - totally fair point. I have a tendency to write too much, and you're seeing the extremely edited version already :)
I didn't go down that direction because I couldn't unequivocally say that 'avatar will outperform text' or 'more context = better' across every application.
The goal of the case study is to socialise the methodology, as well as the insights. For this site, it seemed like more context worked better, which is a good insight to take away if you have a site like this in the financial sector.
But that may not hold true for other sites - e.g. a SAAS product with a much simpler homepage would likely see different results. Or maybe not! Haven't tested it :)
I'd love for things to be more black and white, and perhaps they are - that's why I'm going to be producing a bunch more case studies like this, with different methodologies and example sites.
I think the power of this kind of data comes when you can view a lot of datasets collected over time to see the patterns in them. So hopefully in time, I'll be able to say things like 'for complex sites, high-context UI elements work better in 90% of tests' or similar. Just gonna take a bit of time to get there!
Thanks for the read and the feedback, I really appreciate it.
H
Awesome! Well done, Hugo :)
Thanks!!