Code Mochi

Back in September, I received an email from Prisma asking if I would be interested in partnering when them to create a course about a product that I had previously created Youtube videos about when it was back in beta.

The idea excited me and I set to work with creating a course that would cover all of the fundamentals needed for creating a social RSS reader application that would allow people to log in, like each others' feeds, bundle them together, view paginated article lists and save your favorite articles for later. The idea was to teach most of the major features that someone would need if they built their own app.

After creating the working application, I set to work building up the source code step-by-step so that I could break it down into a series of lectures. I was able to record the lectures in December and so I was ready to launch in January.

One of the requests was that it would be a course on Udemy. The previous course that I launched was on my own platform, so I hadn't used it before. I submitted the course and it was approved a few days before the launch.

When launch day came, I generated a coupon code for the course. The intent was to make it accessible to a large group of people. Udemy only allows for 4 coupon types and only 1 is free and has unlimited redemptions. The catch is that it was only available for 3 days.

We decided to go with that 3-day free unlimited coupon and Prisma announced it by tweeting out the launch of the course, and boy did it take off. I was retweeted 50-100 times including from a few twitter accounts that specifically retweet free Udemy courses. From that 1 launch, I saw 10,000 signups!

I really couldn't believe my eyes- although creating this course took about 500 hours to create, the publicity that it gave was truly priceless. It also taught me about the immense power of partnering with someone- I'm deeply thankful to Prisma for the collaboration, it really couldn't have worked out better.

With Code Mochi, I have created a number of different blog posts, as a way to draw interest and excitement to the website. I had an idea that I wanted to create an open-sourced project that would serve the dual purpose of creating a useful tool that people would use but also have a lot of cool technology behind the scenes that could serve as a model for people to create their own web-apps.

With the frightening spread of the Coronavirus, I saw a number of websites out there but none had the ability to directly map the cases counts on top of each other from country to country. So if I wanted to tell how the cases in the US compared to those in Italy, there wasn't a good visual way to do this.

I created a tool called the Corona Examiner that would make this possible:
https://coronaexaminer.codemochi.com/

In addition to comparing case counts, it critically also provided a way to look at the log of the case counts so it was easy to tell whether we were flattening the curve and the cases were becoming less exponential in their growth.

I also documented the build of this web application over on codemochi and provided an opensourced repo so that others can use Gatsby to deploy their website for free to github pages.

https://www.codemochi.com/blog/2020-04-18-corona-examiner

Yesterday was an incredibly exciting day. After uploading my processed videos to my course platform and testing out stripe two days ago, I opened up my course to being purchased:

https://courses.codemochi.com/frontend-serverless-with-react-and-graphql

This course has been a labor of love- I built a recipe sharing web app using popular technologies to make it as easy as possible to learn how user management, SEO, a backend database, and deployment all come together to make a professional app.

This took me about 2 months to write and another 2 months to record the 11 hours of videos and 47 videos where I build and explain every step of the process from scratch.

How I marketed it:

1. I first posted on the /r/react subreddit. I started with sharing the source code for the entire project which I had already posted on Github. This allows users who know what they are doing to freely take snippets or the entire project and I neatly organized each step into commits and had a thorough readme.md file so that people could understand how they could use the project. After starting with the source code in the reddit post, I also mentioned that I built an entire course around it and provided a link. I was absolutely flattered to hear a bunch of positive responses and people that bookmarked the post for later. https://www.reddit.com/r/reactjs/comments/f3c67x/the_next_chop_a_recipe_sharing_application_with/

2. Within the first 6 hours of posting, I was excited to see that two people had actually purchased the course and created an account on the platform.

3. From there, I made a post on twitter. I mentioned the companies and services that I use by name using @ mentions and # hashtags. https://twitter.com/CodeMochi/status/1228133319197495298?s=20

4. Since I got a positive response on reddit. I decided to run a short-run ad for 3 days and $5/day to see if I get a good response. I tried a text-based and image based post in /r/javascript, /r/react, and /r/serverless. I'll circle back later to report back how this small test works out.

5. This morning, I sent out a single mail chimp email explaining the product with several screenshots to 26 subscribers that I already had from the Code Mochi blog.

Fingers crossed that this continues to gain traction! I’d love to hear what y’all think and any suggestions that you might have.

I reworked the main Code Mochi main page based on suggestions that I received from several people on Indie Hackers (that’s all!). I condensed the layout so that it was easier to see the different blog posts at a glance.

I also added a courses section to the page which features the new course that I’m working on about building frontend serverless web applications with React.js and GraphQL. I created an accompanying course page which details the topics that we will cover in the course and have a signup with Mailchimp so that people can be notified as soon as the course is available.

https://courses.codemochi.com/frontend-serverless-with-react-and-graphql

This week I published another milestone post about how to take the previous fullstack that I wrote about and deploy it totally serverlessly. This reaches one of the objectives of Code Mochi which is making scalable fullstack development accessible to everyone.

My ultimate goal is that I want to create a paid course about how to build a complex, real-world serverless application using Prisma 2 and Next.js. I have a lot of luck with viewership on youtube, but unfortunately, there isn’t really a way to sell a course there. What I want to do instead, is to create a course platform where people can watch the content on my platform so I can have both free and paid courses there.

In order to pull this off, my plan is to do three things:

1. Build a course site that will allow me to create and host courses that have lectures and videos.
2. Create a kick-ass free course that covers some chunk of content- probably the frontend piece of things and it would interface with an already built CRM such as Contentful or GraphCMS. I can use this to get people to start using the platform and enjoying my style of teaching.
3. Create a paid course that covers a larger/more valuable chunk of content. This would cover the entire stack, automated deployment, testing, user log in, maybe payment too. All the design decisions would be made with an eye for production-grade tools and I’d use tested solutions over coding your own. For example, although you could, rolling your own user log in is not a good idea because you don’t want to be in the business of storing user’s passwords. Just use Auth0 or Cognito. I want this to be a general trend of my site- how can you as a developer build your product as fast and painlessly as possible by outsourcing all problems that are already solved to services that are tried and true.

This was a big week. Due to the popularity of the previous Prisma 2 post, I decided to make an entire full-stack web app that uses Next.js on the frontend and Prisma and express on the backend. I also built all of it in docker containers to make it easier to develop and deploy.

This was my first shot at a mini-course that I hope to expand into an entire paid course. It involved about 2 hours of video and an entire GitHub repository. https://github.com/CaptainChemist/blog-prisma2

I was pretty overwhelmed by the response- as of mid-September, these posts have been viewed over 2000 times on dev.to and I got a lot of great feedback from people who found it on youtube and requested that I create a more full-length course.

This week I created a sneak peak post about Prisma 2 which is the successor to a wildly popular open-source package that makes building graphQL backend servers a snap. I ended up getting 13 retweets and 65 likes- a new record! I also got about 200 people to the site over the same 3 day time period.

Since I was one of the first to blog about this new technology- it was pretty cool seeing my post show up on the first page of google and youtube for "prisma 2" even though I have basically no backlinks.

I have used medium as a place to publish my blogs and published several Code Mochi posts there. I made sure to set the canonical urls so that my domain, not Medium would get the credit for posting them.

Unfortunately, my traffic results were just not very impressive on Medium. I stumbled on dev.to and I found that to be a much more vibrant community. Here are examples (results updated as of Sept 19th, 2019 to prove a point):

Prisma 2 Sneak Peak Post http://bit.ly/sm-snkpk :
Medium: 20 views
Dev.to: 141 views

How to add sitemaps to React http://bit.ly/sm-stmps :
Medium: 10 views
Dev.to: 268 views

Such a difference! ❤️ Going forward, I'll stick to Dev.to + codemochi.com for the homes of my posts.

This week I created a new video that showed how to use the AWS Amplify pipeline to automate the deployment of a Gatsby Site.

It is actually how I deploy Code Mochi so it was great taking the knowledge that I gained from that to share it with the world. Now that I’ve unburdened myself from the operations side of my website it will leave more time to make content.

I tweeted out the second post and it got retweeted by @GitKraken which is a git client I love and demoed in the video. This turned out to be huge- I went from having 10 users in a week to 154 so it was a pretty remarkable bump!

It also taught me a valuable lesson- including entities who share overlapping goals can be a good way to promote your product. I was used to my posts barely getting any likes but once it got the @GitKraken retweet, many more people saw and liked the post and it started a chain reaction of retweets.