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6 Comments

Screencasts of a real-world web app doing 10k-20k/month?

Ten years ago I built a niche marketplace and have been living from the revenue ever since. It was designed to be a lifestyle business from the get-go so I spent a ton of time initially optimizing and automating everything.

I want to create screencasts, something like Railscasts or Laracasts except:
— with a business focus
— and using a real-world web-app, warts and all, rather than toy examples.

The idea would be theses screencasts would give a behind-the-scenes, nothing-hidden, look at what I've built and how I work.

The issue is that I've no idea which topics are most interesting. If I learned one thing in creating my business, it's that it's all too easy to create something that no-one wants.

So what topics would you like to be covered?

Some ideas I had were

Coding

  • generating a maximally enjoyable development environment (e.g. seeding data, simulating cron, mirroring production as much as possible etc.)

  • removing brittleness from integration tests that run on circleci

  • dealing with the shitshow that is sales tax accounting across multiple currencies-

  • detecting and recovering from production bugs asap

  • dealing with the real-world mess that is imperfect user input (e.g. when they type emails with a leading space or inconsistent capitalization; when they create a tag that is almost the same as a previous one — like E Guitar vs. Electric Guitar—and now your data is split across two areas)

  • discussing the 8+ year consequences of certain architectural/software design issues

  • streamlining massive amounts of config

  • multi-redundant systems of backup to prevent disaster

  • designing error messages and a logging strategy that speeds up recovery from errors

  • a tour of the most evil, insidious bugs I dealt with over the years (I keep a diary for them)

  • payment systems in-depth (refunds, errors etc.)

  • caching systems for performance

Other more marketing/business-ey topics

  • how I use data to decide to add/remove a feature

  • AB testing a web app

  • technical SEO (microdata, site structure for internal links, google's tools, sitemaps, etc.) — I get 85% of my traffic (and therefore revenue) from SEO, so I know a thing or two

  • how I use JS and integration tests on all tracking code (critical to get right in my business)

  • auto-email systems to previous customers for extra sales

  • Adwords workflow to drive revenue

  • Analytics workflow to figure out what content working

  • Writing copy that gets sales (what worked for me vs. didn't)

If there's something you're interested in but don't see mentioned above, please do share.

EDIT: If you're interested and would like to receive updates, you can sign up here http://inside-the-muse.launchrock.com/

  1. 3

    Very interesting idea!
    How would you handle the plethora of programming languages and frameworks etc.

    Maybe you will have focus on experienced coders or total beginners. Since for one set it will be too much detail and for the other too little

  2. 2

    I would certainly appreciate a screencast on what you've learned around running a marketplace please :) I am also developing one at the moment, have been working on it for quite some time, and am aiming to launch it in March. Thank you. I appreciate your effort!

  3. 2

    All of these would be very interesting. You need to remember, you're much further along the curve than most and as such all of these topics could provide vital insights.

    1. 1

      Yea that's what I was thinking, though there are some downsides too, in that I probably used technologies that aren't super popular with people starting ATM (e.g. I used Ruby, but everyone these days appears to be using Python or JS for their backend)

      1. 1

        I wouldn't worry about that too much. There's still a very large and active bunch of us working away in Ruby :)

  4. 2

    looks very interesting

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