GoRails
Screencasts for Ruby on Rails developers
We just crossed $1M in revenue across GoRails.com, Hatchbox.io and JumpstartRails.com. 🎉
This has been a long time coming over the last 6.5 years. Averaging that out gives me a pretty good salary, but the first few years earned very little money and were definitely a struggle.
I shared some thoughts on this Twitter thread: https://twitter.com/excid3/status/1295730795148193792
I launched two courses and got about one sale a week. GoRails.com had already been live as a Rails app with a few static pages for the tutorials I had previously published. To sell the two courses, I built out payments with Stripe and the course functionality to watch videos using Wistia, track your progress, etc.
It took me five months to plan, record, edit, and complete the first two courses. This took way more time than I expected because I just wasn't very comfortable recording screencasts. My daily routine was to record 15 minutes of video a day whether or not I threw away the recording later. I just needed the practice to create content I was happy with.
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Nice! We are using Jumpstart Rails on a project and love it. It has saved us so many hours of work.
That's amazing to hear @a2k! Makes my day!
Hello Chris!
My congratulations! That is an amazing milestone. Can you share some tips, that you have learned?
I think the biggest thing I learned was just going out of my way to talk with people and help them, even if it didn't seem like it would grow my business. I'd learn a lot and build trust with people and that went a long ways towards growing my audience and getting customers.
Could you share what the split is like between the three products? What has been challenging about each product?
Congrats on the success!
Currently, I spend about half my time on Hatchbox, and 1/4th on GoRails and 1/4th on Jumpstart.
Hatchbox is tough because it's running other people's code and managing servers. Super complicated, technical stuff and needs constant support.
GoRails is challenging because of churn. Teach someone what they need to know and they move on to the next thing. Plus, the never ending hamster wheel of producing content every week.
Jumpstart's challenge has been building features that everyone needs and sometimes those are quite complex. It's definitely the easiest of the 3 products by far.
Thanks for the reply! I figured hatchbox would be the most complex. The DevOps world has evolved so much lately. Is hatchbox backed by docker or is it mostly well crafted bash scripts to do all the setup?
Do most of your support come from people trying to do things with hatchbox that you don't officially support? Such as new tools or libraries?
I'm curious if those complexities align with the revenue earned too? What is the profit split like between the three?
I don't use Docker for it, but will probably support it in the future. The problem with Docker is it offloads the devops to the developer a lot and can make development a lot harder (and slower). I don't want to force anyone into that and hopefully it gets a lot better in the future.
Most of the support is just from misconfigured apps and things. Sometimes it's from people doing things we don't support, but it's less common than you'd think. It's a lot of small mistakes, having to undo tweaks they made to use Heroku, forgotten env vars, too small of a server so assets won't compile, etc.
The complexities don't align with revenue (yet). Right now it's by far the least profitable of the 3 products, but also has the most potential. I'm willing to take that risk to see if I can make it more sustainable. If I can't figure it out, I can always sell it or something. It's valuable enough it wouldn't make sense to just shut down. I'm not sure the exact breakdown, but Hatchbox is probably about 1/4th revenue right now. Jumpstart is about 1/4th and GoRails is about 1/2.
That's awesome, congratulations!
Thanks @gilli! 🙏
Congratulations.
I am a founder myself doing $200 MRR. I've built https://storycreatorapp.com and my goal is to hit $20k MRR.
My weakness is I keep building and avoid talking to users.
What were some daily activites and habits you followed that helped you unlock your first 100 customers?
I see you mentioned going out of your way to talk to people. I agree and have been doing the same thing. Sometimes I get tired and go back into the product, which takes away from time interacting -- bad. I find following up with sign ups and anyone who has shown interest to be good. With that said I have a few questions.
I talk to people over email a LOT. It takes different energy for me too, so when I get burnt out of answering emails, I'll do something else like coding. That's totally fine. Different work is taxing in different ways (and different for each person).
You've probably seen automated emails from products you've signed up for, but I really liked the automated email that seems like a person hand wrote it. Just offer to help if they need anything, try not to include too many links, etc. It usually gets a lot of replies and that way you can help anyone new with the product. I try to prioritize answering those emails so they feel welcomed.
For momentum, I had to force myself to record videos for a minimum of 15 minutes a day. Whether I threw away the result or not. That got me past the feeling of frustration because I didn't like the end result I was producing. My work wasn't good enough, so forcing myself to practice got that better. Now I try to make sure I work on at least one feature a day so I can keep the momentum going there. I'll also alternate days or weeks on the different products so one doesn't get unfairly neglected.
Awesome! What were your top 3 watering holes? Watering holes meaning sources of leads that you would constantly resort to.
For me getting #1 on Hacker News drove 1k+ sign-ups. I'm going to try and reach out to all those sign-ups and see what happens.
The other ones would be going to Facebook groups and finding folks talking about the problem I am solving and messaging them directly.
Then lastly there are groups within Instagram that are filled with creators that I am targeting with direct messages.
That's great. Since my niche is Rails, I went to where people were discussing Ruby and Rails, so Reddit, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc. Really depends on where your customers are.
Sounds like you're taking a very similar approach. Curious to hear how it goes! 💪
I'm in the same shoes as you - although I know how to sell B2C and not B2B. And honestly, @excid3 b2d (developer) which I'm now doing b2d+b2b which is just like 0.0.....
It was way easier/more fun doing in app purchases with ads in addictive games and acquiring users was only a few hundred bucks to get a test going.... Dev tools so far... but <3 the challenge, but damn!!!
Anyways love this thread, gonna try some automation mails with www.kintohub.com with less links (Thanks) and I'm gonna try doing a video per day trying to deploy a random tech stack on kinto that I find in the twitter community which is inspired by this thread.
And I'll go ahead and increase your MRR on storycreatorapp since you have inspired it :)
Thanks again for the thoughts here guys!
Congrats no your success
Such a long and painful road to 1M in sales.
What would you do differently this time if you could start over?
Congratulations!
Congratulations!! I've been following GoRails for a long time. Keep up the great work!
Thanks @Perd!
Thought of another question, this one's a thinker ...
Do you think this success is possible without putting your personal brand behind it? Which of the products benefit most from it?
If you had a take a guess at the time spent so far, where would you rank them?
Definitely possible without the personal brand. You'd still want to create a brand of some kind for people to trust, but it doesn't have to be you or your face.
GoRails obviously benefits the most from the personal brand because I'm the one talking in the videos, but you can easily have other teachers and still build a brand. MasterClass is a good example, as well as Egghead and others.
Awesome!!
Just wanted to say I have been watching your videos on and off for 6 years. Every time I jump back into a Rails project I end up at GoRails and always find it great to get back to speed.
Recently started a new venture, started with NuxtJS / VueJS and found some limitations and decided to go back to Rails and boy was I happy I did that because you introduced me to StimulusJS, CableReady, StimulusRelfex and so much more.
I use TailwindCSS and one day googled StimulusJS + Tailwind and your Github for tailwind-stimulus project and got it running in minutes.
Also the notifications gem, I'm excited to use that in my project.
Overall, you have a big impact on my development and I clicked this post and upvoted it before I even realized it was you, so it is great pleasure to post this and share my gratitude.
You rock, I know you can reach your next million in a 1/4 the time.
Keep it up!
That's amazing to hear @wynterjones! Glad I've been able to help make things easier for you. These are all things I wish were easier, so I guess I'm kind of helping myself and sharing it makes the world a better place. Stimulus + Tailwind really does make for a wonderful experience.
You'll have to send me a link to your new venture when it goes live!
Congrats! Nice milestone
Thanks @brunor! 🙏
Congrats!!
Thanks! 💪
Congrats, FYI the link to the Twitter thread is missing...
Thanks, for some reason it shows up on the product page, but not this one. Added the link.
This comment was deleted 6 years ago