Launching a programming course without big followers base

To your second question.
As mentioned in this topic already: it's like with any other product or service. In order to get people to use your offering, you have to:

• know who your ideal customer is
• know where to find them
• provide something of value for them at the right time (e.g. if your ideal customer persona is a senior dev, it might not be interesting anymore to find people who once were a senior dev - and are now an Engineering Manager).

Most often I see people building a product or start offering a service, without having spend enough time on thinking how to actually attract users. Even though this is probably the most important part of any early stage business.

If I were you, I would engage with people in your target group via social platforms. Twitter, linkedin, reddit - maybe even Quora. And start answering on topics where those people actively seek for advice.
It's a bit like building in public. Not just those people that seek the advice will see your comments, but also everyone scrolling through those threads can potentially become a user.
In my experience, this even beats creating blog posts in early stage projects.

If you need help finding people that are talking about the problem space you have the solution for, you may want to check out https://audiebox.com.

It depends how much you want to hustle and whether you have any experience with marketing / building an audience or whether you would be able to partner with someone who does. If the answer to all of these is "no", then a platform might be the best choice but I suggest you do your homework carefully - you want a topic that is already somewhat popular with a subtle twist/differentiator.

E.g. not "Elastic search complete course" but "Elasticsearch for data scientists". Or if you notice courses on the platform are out of date you can do an updated version, e.g. "Elasticsearch (2021 edition)".

Happy to answer more questions (I have courses in the mid-level/advanced developer range)

I would try and submit to well-known platforms because they offer distribution.

Yes, people do use the search engines of those platforms (like Udemy) to find a decent course.

Plus, these platforms have newsletters with thousands of subscribers (so you'll get free promotion).

As for 2), I don't see much difference between marketing a course vs. marketing any other product. There are a lot of acquisition channels you can use (take a look at my profile link for some inspiration). You already know where developers hang out (HackerNews, Twitter, maybe some FB groups, Reddit).

I can answer both at once just use Educative.io . I thought your will saw money quickly because they use royaltie program like skillshare. also they help your promote too . but it's take time to add content to they platform