One year ago I started building Practice Probs - a programming practice site. Here's how it went..
Pro Tip: Begin your next startup around December 31st and then your annual reviews will be really convenient 😄
About a year ago I decided to try building a site like StackOverflow, but more focused on "Solve this challenge" questions as opposed to "Why doesn't my code work?" questions. Building the site was HARD, especially for me - a lowly data scientist without much web dev experience. I ended up pivoting to a static site builder (Material for MkDocs) and decided I'd write the initial content myself. It's been a lot of work, not profitable, and incredibly fun. Here's what I've accomplished in year 1..
- 138 programming practice problems
- spanning 13 topics
- 42 articles
- 13K website visitors
- 318 registered users
- 30 paying users
- $673 revenue
Even though Practice Probs isn't profitable (yet), I've learned a TON building it. And the dopamine hit I get from a new customer is very, very real 🤣
Post-launch lesson: traffic came, activation didn’t
I Stopped Browsing Reddit Randomly. Here's the Keyword Monitoring System That Actually Gets Me Customers.
For indie hackers: Outsource marketing or do it yourself?
Awesome! Where did the majority of your users come from?
I really like the simplicity, and I like that only the answers are gate-kept -- the "free tier" is still effective at enabling people to up-level, it just requires more work to go and look for the answers elsewhere :) I can't imagine how much work it's been to write all of this yourself.
Thanks! Most of my users came from Google Search, aided by some highly upvoted Reddit posts. And I wrote most, but not all of the content. (I hired a few writers, but honestly it wasn't worth it.)
Oooo super interesting about having hired writers. Was the quality just really bad compared to the threshold you've set with your own content? What do you think it would take to make that worthwhile?
Super bad sounds harsh, but yes. It takes a lot of effort to make a good practice problem. It needs to be short, fun, easy to understand. It needs to focus on a concept. It needs to be challenging, but not impossible. It needs to be motivational - like something you'd actually need in real life. It needs pictures or animations. The solution needs to be explained from a beginner's perspective. Why is this solution better than that one? What errors might people run into? How would someone actually figure out the solution on their own? Reference the docs. etc. etc.
Ultimately it just wasn't worth the money for me to hire out content creation. Maybe one day..
Hey Ben, what you said about " It takes a lot of effort to make a good practice problem" is very true. I just launched a website that has practice coding problems as well and I am struggling to come up with interesting problems for people to work on. I just looked through your website and it looks like you have a lot of data science related stuff. I am wondering if I should niche down as well and maybe build a bunch of crypto/web3 related questions. Anyways, here is my site if you are curious.
codeonthecob.com
Hey, love that domain name! Niche'ing down is probably a good idea, but I think you should also improve the instructions for some of your challenges. I just opened up Simple Calculator and can't find the instructions anywhere.
Awesome thanks for the feedback!
Thanks for sharing these details, Ben!
I saw you've got a "Promote" page where users can secure lifetime access in order for promoting your product. Curious to hear how effective was this method!
It's a little hard to say, but definitely not as effective as I had hoped. I've had something like ~10 people take advantage of the program. I would love to see hundreds of people take advantage of it. I'm sure all those backlinks on twitter, reddit, linkedin, etc. have helped boost my SEO.
what do you use for images for each of your problem sets? do you search and add them manually or is it automated?
Canva. I'm a terrible artist.. I usually search for "retro t-shirt" designs, then tweak them to fit my content.
Amazing and future ready software for all projects. Really safe and convenient to use
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