One and a half years ago I decided to do some React Native coding sessions live on YouTube. The original premise was simple: even if no one watches the videos, I would get value from it. The reason is that when live coding, you are in a focused environment, explaining your thoughts out loud, not checking social media. After a while, I started to challenge myself with sophisticated gestures and animations in a series named “Can it be done in React Native?”. This series found its audience.
From there, developers in the YouTube comments started to ask me how they could learn the fundamentals of what I am doing in the series. At that moment, I decided to build an online course. Here’s what I did:
Recorded 2 hours of content focus on the fundamentals gestures and animations in React Native. Interestingly enough, I learned tons of things while building the course because I had to dig into the heart of the matter this time to explain it to people. A virtuous circle was created: because I learned to master the fundamentals to teach them, my content on YouTube is now of much better quality. And better YouTube content will drive more conversions to the online course.
Hosted the content on Wistia which is distributed via a simple website that integrates with Firebase and Stripe. There are many ways you can offer paid content without coding. However, I’m a developer, and I thought it would be fun to do it myself. This has some advantages and drawbacks. You have full control of the platform and its monetization. But you need to implement tons of features to have excellent payment workflows and user experiences.
Cloned the pricing model from brillant. After looking at different pricing models, I picked this one. The gap between the monthly subscription and the annual subscription is more than 50% per month which I like. The second thing that I liked is the lifetime membership. Since I’m an indie hacker, every time I have offered an upsell, it always exceeded expectations. While I have big plans for this platform, and it will eventually provide tons of resources around React Native, there is only a single course at the moment. However, someone already bought the lifetime membership.
I’m satisfied with the first thirty days of this platform. There is still tons of value that I am not capturing yet. Because I built the website myself, it lacks many features in terms of the payment workflows and user experiences. So far, my single marketing channel is my YouTube channel. I’m considering other marketing channels such as paid advertising for instance.
What do you guys think? Are there some obvious things I might be missing to improve this platform? I'm eager to read your feedback.