I'm making a course that teaches design, development, and marketing for digital products. I'd love to know what you think.
Hi Friends,
Karl here. I'm working on a course that teaches design, development, and marketing of a your own digital products with an emphasis on iOS apps. I'll be covering the full spectrum of technologies and skills that you need. HTML & CSS, back end development, JavaScript, Swift, the whole shebang.
It's unique because I'm building real products that I actually want to make. Documenting the whole process through video tutorials. And continuing past the launch to support and the expand the products over time.
Anyways. I think it's a good idea. If any of ya'll are interested in learning to make products, or if you have an opinion about how a course like this would be useful, Please let me know or take some time to answer these small polls I posted on Twitter.
Thank you friends.
Great idea!
What's your experience in developing, shipping, and selling mobile products?
Thanks.
I’ve been making apps, websites, and the APIs that drive them for 9 years. I’ve developed and launched many apps to the App Store, some as a contributor and others as a lead.
So I’ve got significant experience making and launching mobile apps.
Hmmm... to me, it's not enough. Show us your portfolio, some numbers (like sales, downloads, users etc.)
I'm a software developer with 15+ years of experience but I'm still a noob in marketing/sales/launching apps ("launching" means engaging really high number of users, not just throwing into the market) and would never dare to teach (even if I know basics and practices).
So, show us something!
I’ll show it in the course. Lots of the content and lessons I’ll make will be free so it will be easy to follow along.
The course is very different than a conventional course. It’s not something that’s built up ahead of time, released, and then never updated.
It’s a weekly blog, with a new lesson arriving every week. It costs $9/month. All of the code will be open source. And the products I develop are real products that I’ll support for years to come.
Ok, got it.
Good luck!
Kind of curious how you'll gauge the span/depth with people who will probably have random/different levels of experience. It seems like each of those technologies alone you could spend weeks on.
I've got a plan for that. The video course will be in depth and aimed at someone that's in between a beginner and an intermediate. To get students up to snuff I'll publish free "foundations" books that cover basic technologies by creating a simple toy kind of app. The first book will be "Swift Foundations". I wrote and published a book named Swift Foundations a few years ago, So I have direct experience in this area.
The goal isn't to make an expensive course, although valuable, mostly in service of teaching concepts and toy apps. The goal is to give detailed direction and insight into the process of designing, building, and launching a real product.
Putting the whole thing into a blog is a consequence of using Ghost 3 to host the website. Super easy to just set up password protected posts tied to a membership.
Well there is definitely a market. I personally when trying to pick up something watch Traversy Media crash courses but I've been a developer for a while so can fill in gaps.
That's pretty cool about the book publishing.
I think that's a "thing" where you build a following and can then market to them.
Good luck, nice to have a plan, maybe you'll post your progress/feedback here would be interested to see.
Thanks. I've never heard of Traversy Media so I'll check that out too.
I'll definitely post progress to indieHackers. I like this community.
I like the idea of covering everything you've listed but I'm not sure its a great idea to have a single course that does it all. I'd think splitting those out and offering them individually (discounts for 2 or more courses) would be better. This is assuming you're planning to monetize this.
Great idea though!
I’m selling it as a monthly subscription for $9/month. It’s not a buy once and rarely see an update kind of course. New lessons appear monthly.
Although breaking it into separate courses may seem like a good idea, it goes against the entire premise of the course, which is to teach how to make and launch a product. I’m teaching that by making and launching a real product. I guess it’s a little different than what has normally been done.