Would you pay for this?
Hi
Before becoming a developer, I worked in sales and marketing positions for about 10 years. Now, as a developer, my coding skills are just mediocre (or even less than that), but I've noticed that my business 'sense' more than makes up for it. In fact, my clients seem happy to pay me more than the going rates of many senior developers.
Would you, as an engineer / developer, be interested to pay for a course or book that could teach you to understand business, and how to apply that it in your daily work?
If you personally wouldn't pay for it, do you think there's a good market for it?
If the answer is yes, what's number one thing you'd have me focus on?
This is like asking if we would eat in a restaurant.
Yes, we would but it doesn't mean we would eat in your restaurant.
There are plenty of books about business. Plenty of courses, video tutorials etc.
People are paying for them.
At the same time, books / courses are a tough business just like restaurants because there is lots of competition.
Your ability to make money from information products is more about your ability to promote your work than it is about your ability to write a good book.
Why not start by writing few blog articles and see if you get any traction for such articles? If it does, you can expand your scope from there to writing ebooks and coursewares.
I would pay $15-30 for a well written e-guide focused on solo bootstrapping - how to do effective marketing, sales, pricing, etc. as a solo entrepreneur with a small budget.
Same, except I'd pay to learn how to interview people, send cold emails, find and validate ideas. IMHO, there are lots of good material on the interwebs on marketing etc, but not that much on identifying gaps (at least, from what I've looked).
How are you going to differentiate from places like Coursera, Udemy, Harvard online, etc? There is a market for it, but there are a ton of players in the market.
Hello, this all depends on many details. I read a lot of articles, explaining business to technical people, and especially to software developers. Most of them just a waste, but some may change state of mind and help.
As a developer, i am most interested in practically applied knowledge, rather than to "ideas" or "suggestions". From this writing i would expect the same state of formalism, that programming books have.
I would pay for a really good book that would explain how to monetise programming in the best way and optimise the conversion from labor to money. I think there is market for this
Hey Aleksey
I haven't searched Udemy, Coursera. I've done some Googl'ing and checked Quora. The only things that seem to pop up is some articles that seem to be used to get inbound traffic (quality rather on the low side). There are some books around as well but these seem to be aimed at a very wide audience (e.g. engineers in general).
I've seen a lot of bullshit articles with bulletpoints like "do active listening", "be proactive" and then a small paragraph explaining it. But I haven't found any that actually explain a way to ACTUALLY DO that and push the reader into really applying it.
Let's take "do active listening" as an example.
I don't really try to do active listening, and I never actively tried applying it. But what I do instead (consciously) is dig and find out the main drivers of what makes my client say something. That means, I try to not just hear everything he says. I try to find out WHY he's saying it.
That feature he wants implemented? Sure I can do that. But why does he want this feature anyway? Maybe I can deliver something better than what he has in mind (this happens to me ALL the time!). During the conversation I try to take him back to the moment that he got the idea for the feature.
An article telling you to 'listen attentively and ask questions' isn't going to get you much results. But I think / hope that the concept above may actually do it.
What do you think? Is this a bit in line with what you're saying? Surely you've read a lot more on this than me, so I'd love to hear more from you. Hey, perhaps what I wrote above is equally as much bullshit as what is out there. You be the judge. :)
Yes, this makes sense to me. I noted that the manner you try to deliver this knowledge is closer to course ( or even seminar or lecture) rather than to the book
From this perspective, it may be useful, as you can combine business and development. But to me it would be better to focus on effective use cases as a prove of your expertise across both industries, don't babble about everything but actually nothing. have a structure.
And by the way test yourself on social media or try blogs, whether people are engaged :)
Book: There are ton of books about business, i would buy it, yes, if it has good reviews of course, because i read almost all i can, but the competition is fierce, i dont know if its a profitable idea.
Courses: I think this is the way to go, courses, ebooks, good content, lots of things to do here and to experiment, you can then launch a book or ebook and sold it, but i would start with courses, courses will be the standard for learning in the next 5-10 years, so start now
I'd pay for something short and concise that would teach me how to sell online.
With the variant of the written chapter, the answer would be more precise