Start React Native
React Native Courses and Premium Starter Kits
Twelve months after the launch of Start React Native, we reached the 10k USD monthly revenue milestone.
Start React Native is a course on React Native gestures and animations.
The course is focused on providing fundamental recipes that will enable developers to build user-experiences that will run at 60 fps, even on low-end devices. It is exclusively marketed via my YouTube channel.
Below is a breakdown of what happened since last February, after being invited to the Indie Hacker podcast. Getting to interact with Courtland for the podcast left quite an impression on me. It was simply inspiring to witness someone operate at such a high-level.
Technology Shift & Second Edition
The initial success of Start React Native comes from the fact that due to React Native's architecture, animations have an extremely high barrier to entry. Therefore people welcomed my content. It was always clear to me that this barrier to entry would eventually be shattered by new technology at some point in time.
As expected, with the new version of the animation library, named Reanimated 2, it is now much easier to build these animations. As soon as version 2 was publicly announced, I published content on that topic. And while version 2 is still in alpha, I am now close to a fully-featured Reanimated 2 course published on my platform. Getting to know this new library as soon as it was publicly available made me realize that I have tons of exciting content to contribute on that topic.
The Confinement
The confinement gave me time to geek out about things. Things that wouldn't improve in the short term the business's bottom line, but that would be fun to me. Looking back, it helped me to sharpen some technical skills and to keep my work fresh.
For instance, I spent a substantial amount of time on building 3D projections in React Native. The video that came out of it is one of my least successful ones. But it is one of the videos I had the most fun doing.
Going forward
The plan for Start React Native is to be a premium membership for my YouTube audience. It is more than an online course. I'm currently making other resources available via this membership, such as starter kits and templates. There are also plans to make some of the YouTube content available first for members.
Advice on Competition?
I used to be alone in this niche, and there seems to be now competition forming. My goal is not to let this new variable influence my work and to see the opportunities that competition might bring. Do you have any advice or resources to recommend that would help me nurture a positive mindset towards competition?
My YouTube channel about React Native just reached 20k subscribers. Below are the three phases of the channel lifecycle that led to this milestone.
Simple live coding sessions on YouTube.
Dec 17 / Sep 18 (0 to 2k subs)
The original premise of my channel was simple. Even if no one watches the video, it would still be more productive to write code in a focused environment, explaining my thoughts out loud, not checking Facebook.
The “Can it be done in React Native?” series
Sep 18 / Aug 19 (2k to 10k subs)
After finishing a contracting job during the summer, I started to look at the apps on my phone in a very different way. For every delightful user experience, I would wonder: can we implement the same user experience using primitives from the React Native world? This is how the “Can it be done in React Native?” YouTube series was born. This series found its audience somewhat quickly.
Teaching the fundamentals
Sep 19 / Feb 20 (10k to 20k subs)
While I’m having a lot of fun challenging myself with the “Can it be done in React Native?” videos, people have often asked to build videos to teach the fundamentals of gestures and animations in React Native. And at the end of August 2019, Start React Native was born.
Production Tips Anyone?
I have a lot of ideas for the content of the channel, and I’m having a blast implementing them. I am also trying to learn how to improve the quality of production of the videos.
My audio recording setup is quite rough as I live up to a busy road, and my flat doesn’t have much isolation. I manage to remove the background noise by setting a low gain on the mic and by doing some post-processing with Audacity. Now that the background noise removal situation is more or less under control, I am wondering which other post-processing could be applied for the audio to “sound better”?
Since most of my videos are screencasts, the filming of my face is not so important, but I am also trying to improve things there. It’s a slow process. Which YouTubers doing coding screencasts on YouTube inspire you the most?
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Some pointers for voice recording to consider. You want to improve the signal to noise ratio so talking as if your listener is about 8 feet from you will strike a good balance of energy and volume but not yelling. If you are listening to your self in headphones you may want to turn them way down or stop completely since many people don’t like to hear their own voice and talk quietly as a consequence.
Your mic should be pretty close to your face maybe 3 to 6 inches.
Apply “normalization” to your audio clips. This makes sure your audio uses the full dynamic range and makes your audio sound a similar valume compared to other audio clips on the web. You don’t want your listener to turn up the volume all the way and you’re still not loud enough. Normalization helps.
This is a bit advanced but applying a light compression helps keep your volume the same between softer and louder speech. I don’t mean file compression. Audio compression turns down loud parts some. If you use audio compression. Apply it before normalization.
If you venture into EQ to try to cut a persistent noise or something you generally only want to cut with EQ and maybe only cut 3 to 6 dB. A lot of you tubers boost low EQ to sound more masculine but they just sound more muffled.
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Justin, this is incredible valuable, thank you. I might ping you again regarding this details. It's interesting because I do feel like I got the noise removal and normalization under control but I would love to get that low boost poping radio host voice.
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Haha I knew it was you after reading the title! Congratulations William. Specializing in React Native, the team and I are all fans of your work. Keep it up!
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I too am interested in this topic; I record screencasts about Vue.js on my site vuejs-course.com and am having trouble with getting a good sound recording. I use the Blue Yeti mic which has been recommended by many podcasters but I think the problem is my wooden flat has bad acoustics.
You have impressive monthly revenue - where is most of this coming from? Your course? YT ads? Do you find the YT channel drives most of your sales? Should I post on YT over Vimeo?
I’m planning to do a course soon too - I’ll go over your milestones and learn as much as I can.
Awesome milestone, you are an inspiration!
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Congrats on http://vuejs-course.com/! What led you to choose Vimeo over YouTube?
So far the revenue is 100% generated through YouTube. I don't have any paid ads, don't blog and as you can tell my website doesn't say much. Only people coming from the YouTube channel have enough context to convert when landing on the website. It's sometime that I plan to fix over time: opening my platform to people coming outside from YouTube.
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Thanks for the reply? By "100% through YT" you mean you have done no other marketing outside YT, and your website ($9 subscription) generates $6.3k/mo (around 700 active subscribers?)
I chose Vimeo since I had the idea to distribute my course via my own website; Vimeo offers an option only serve videos on a certain url, that's how I thought I might distribute the course - you sign up on my website, and consume the video through it. I also plan to allow paying users to download the content.
So to clarify, your path so far was
- post YT videos, show you are the "real deal"
- people gain confidence from your content, so they are happy to pay $9 a month for additional, more detailed videos
Did you try any other monetization models before arriving at $9 / mo?
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No marketing outside youtube has been done. And your math is correct. And I didn't try any monetisation model before.
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Production Tips Anyone?
You are not serious. If YT has anything then it's the best resources on doing video productions. Just google a bit and you will find goldmines on the right cameras/micros/lights/cutting/...
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@wcandillon Congrats mate! :D What about react native shop? What's the revenue like on that startup? Are you focusing fully on tutorials now?
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Great news, good content gives good result over time and it seems to grow faster as time passes.
We should chat someday about your marketing, I'm sure you can do a lot better on other platforms as well, and could give you some hints on LinkedIn 😉
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Congrats on the 20k subscribers!
I'm sitting short of 2k now (1.8k), but I haven't put out a video in a couple of years (we had a baby and life got busy).
Planning on getting back into it soon!
I think I need to expand to more popular topics though. I mostly covered WebGL + 3D Math (roughly 200 videos between the two) and a long while back had covered other things. Unfortunately, these are just too niche. I was hoping to avoid the JS circus (React, Vue, Angular) and do things that aren't so popular.Anywho, keep up the good work!
(my channel, if interested: https://www.youtube.com/user/iamdavidwparker)
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Congratulations on 20k! And thanks for sharing some of the things that helped you along the way.
It's been an ongoing goal of mine to 10x my subscriber count each year. I ended 2017 with ~20 subs, had ~200 at the end of 2018, ~2,000 at the end of 2019. So for 2020, my goal is to reach 20,000 as well 😊
Here is an example of one of my coding tutorials, where I capture both the desktop and my face using a webcam... in some instances I do have to hide the webcam in post-production if it covers something important on screen, but thankfully that doesn't happen too much.
Cheers!
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What's the price of this? It doesnt show on Amazon
Do you have any recording made with this mic?I bought the Purple Panda recently.. and I am a bit disappointed, sounds a bit muffled. Here is a recording I made with it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hlt62foEWVQ
I have read that RODE smartLav+ is better, might be interesting to have feedback.
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Aleksandar you have made my day: thank you! I was looking for something exactly like auphonic.com. This was really the missing piece for me at the moment.
Looking forward to check out the YouTuber you mentioned. That's one of the thing I love about YouTube: how much we inspire each other.
Good luck with your project on YouTube and let me know if I can help.
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Woah this is very valuable thank you. Great job!
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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:
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Hi William!👋
Congrats on this awesome milestone. Everything looks good and I love that you provide first lessons for free without any hassle around emails, sign up, etc. Just come and watch. If you like it - you will create account and pay, if not - you don't feel bad, because of you don't give your email or spent some time for registration.💪
Quality of videos is really good and voice is clear. I'm not familiar with React Native at this moment so can't say anything about material. Anyway, I wish you good luck with your product. I like it.🤓
Small note: I will share my little thoughts, it’s not necessary to pay attention to them, but still they can be useful. I like all this "free" illustration and they are really helps you build something nice without spending a lot of time on creating picture by themselves.. But usually when I saw it - I start feeling that I already saw this website before. I guess it would be much better if instead of this illustration you will add some screenshots from your videos.. (maybe with your face, maybe with some code, etc) and on top of this you can add some icons.. let's say in the bottom corners... I guess it make website more "personal" and "fresh".-
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I agree on this point. I guess, in this case a simple preview instead of illustrations would be a better fit. Now, it looks more like design videos than coding (if you don't read any texts).
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Thank you so much for taking the time to write me such elaborate feedback. This is very valuable. Your point on the illustrations makes perfect sense, especially considering that my audience is full of developers who are familiar with these free illustrations. I'm planning to use professional help for the visual. Again, I appreciate you taking the time to send me this comment. 🙋🏼♂️
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You are welcome🙌
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Hi William 👋 and congrats for your success, your update pushed me to create more content on YouTube to create a better audience and sell my courses!
Hope to hear more from you and keep up the great work you're doing on your channel!
BTW I think I will use the same approach to the pricing model to differentiate the monthly and annual subscription.
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it's an amazing milestone. I want to move my courses to a separated platform as well but cannot build it from scratch at this point. was thinking about implementing something, related to NO CODE movement. like @bentossel doing
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Thank you, Arthur. It's funny you are mentioning because I listened to the IH podcast with @bentossel right in the middle of building my website. And I was close to using a NO CODE approach, I at least took one hour or two to consider it and try it webflow 😅
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Why didn’t you go for this approach in the end?
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Guilty pleasure, I've always been a developer and it's more fun for me to code. It's just a hobby for me 😅Not a business decision. However, while it costed conversions (it took more time to release the course, right now payment workflows are not optimal), in the long run, it will be better for me to have control over the platform.
I really loved the @bentossel podcast and as a developer, I couldn't agree more with some of the perspectives that were shared in this podcast.
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Congratulations on your milestone William.
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Thank you for your support!
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Great result! Inspiring
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Thank you! Coming from a fellow React developer, that means a lot :)
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This is really great to see, and really interesting to read! Do you make a lot from your YouTube channel? It's great that you can monetize both, and each feeds into the other like you mentioned.
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Unfortunately not. YouTube ad revenue is very small: 80 USD per month. What is interesting is that I heard that on average the YouTube revenue used to be 5x higher which in itself would start to be quite attractive.
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Fantastic story, congrats! 🎉
Where did you build your initial audience? Were they all youtube videos? I'm curious as to how you got attention before and after it became a product.
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It took me one year to go from 0 to 1k subscribers and one year to get to 1k to 13k. This is when I stumbled on the gesture and animation niche with the "can it be done in React Native?" series.
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Hey @wcandillon,
/offtopic: First of all: your accent alone is worth the money! It is soothing and calm :)
/ontopic: how much traction were you experiencing on YouTube before you were going for this course. And could you elaborate on how (if any) promotion was performed to gain traction?Love the website. Clean and to the point!
All the best 🙌🏻
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You've made my day: thank you! My struggles with the English language is actually a source of insecurities sometimes.
Since Mars/April, people in the comment section really started to ask for an online course in order to understand better the fundamentals of what I am doing on my video. I decided to do the course in May but it took a while for me to finally put it together. I started to work on it actively only early July. Since the launch, no promotion outside YouTube was done.
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You’re shipping and that is a victory on its own. Going on cam is tough for everyone at the start. It’s about daring to be vulnerable and you do it well. I’m Dutch so i know how hard it can be to not sound like a dork.
It’s like both the exposure fear for shipping product quadruple and just doing your thing at the same time 😅
Thanks for the insights and keep shipping 👊🏻✌🏻️
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yes 🙌🏻Let's keep putting the reps in 😉
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Felicitation, vraiment beau travail :)
Love your youtube channel, your video are awesome and surely the best available in animation for React-Native. I was scared of the reanimated library but you make it so easy :)
Keep the good work!!
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You were one of the very first customer for React Native Elements. Thank you for being one of the earliest supporters of my work as an indie hacker.
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Amazing work, thanks for sharing!
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Thank you for your support!
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Nice, great numbers. Where did you advertise your course/platform?
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Only via my youtube channel so far.
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Congrats! Sounds like you are off to a great start. I am curious, if there was a service that generated the api for you to have your invoicing and payment workflows would you have used it? I am thinking that would saved you a bunch of time.
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Absolutely. And there might be already some amazing tools available in the Stripe ecosystem. I'm just not aware of them.
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Yup, confirms that you can make a difference with just 2 hours of quality content
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William! It's great to see you on here. What are the odds? I'm a YouTube subscriber of yours already, as it happens. I'll have to go check out the course! Best of luck and cheers from Utah!
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Man, that's so cool! You were one of my earliest viewers. Please let me know if you have a request for me to do on the channel ;-)
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Great
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Congrats @wcandillon.
One Question but not related your product :)
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Nice story! You mentioned a lifetime membership. Where do I find these pricing options (monthly, yearly, lifetime) on your website?
On another note, how would you explain that so many people are willing to pay for this course? I believe that you did a really good job. But on the other hand there is also so much free stuff out there.
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Unfortunately, the pricing page is not yet available without signing. It's not done on purpose; I just bootstrapped the website quickly. The monthly subscription is 23 USD, annual subscription 108USD, and the lifetime subscription 600 USD.
There are many free resources but I found a niche where a lot of people struggle with. The topic of declarative gestures and animations in React Native is reasonably new, and there aren't a lot of free resources on that topic yet. Most of the free resources available as of now are super recent. Technology moves so fast that it is also likely that the content will lose its relevance quickly. This is why I decided to opt-in for a subscription model where I can update the website every month with various up-to-date React Native courses and resources.
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If I understand correctly, you're not offering any one-time purchase options for the course? You are only offering subscriptions?
That's an interesting model when you have only one course ... I'll be very interested in finding out what your retention is. It feels like it might put a lot of pressure on you to deliver new courses every month or two?
Also, do you have any breakdown of how many users bought monthly vs. annual subscriptions?
This is all very interesting for someone who is considering doing the same thing. Thanks for the great info!
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That's a great question. It's a gross estimation but right now out of 3 customers, 1 take the annual subscription (it was almost 50/50 during the launch, now decreasing). I don't have numbers on the retention rate.
Right now because there is only one course, it does feel interesting to have such a paid membership option. But in the upcoming months, it will make more sense.
Because of my experience with the YouTube videos and building other resources for React Native developers, I am relaxed and confident about behind capable to deliver great updates in the upcoming months.
Good luck! Looking forward to see your journey here.
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That's Amazing! Well done!
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Thank you! Is TrackMyLift done in React Native? I'm a fitness enthusiast and I would love to eventually combine my passion for tech and fitness into one. Sounds like you might have achieved that goal :)
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Yep I've achieved it and it's going fairly well. I've built it in ResctJS as a PWA. Hard to distinguish though if you try it out 😁😁 thanks for the feedback!
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Well done!
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Thank you for your support 🙋🏼♂️It was interesting to check out Human Engineering, my roommate is a cancer research scientist and we were recently talking about potentially monitor our blood sugar for health and performance. It sounds like a very exciting project.
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Very cool! We are definitely very excited to be working on it. :D
Your product caught my eye as we are exploring different avenues to scale things up in the near future. We don't have a ton of programming experience so learning resources such as yours are a godsend.
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Sweet start, mate. Can't wait to see where you take it next. :)
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That's going to be another couple of hundred coffees at Auer&Co 🙌🏻😃
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Congrats bro. I too found screen casting increase productivity, Go Far, Go High!!
enjoy!
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@wcandillon looks great! Out of curiosity, did you think about making a course for Udemy or Pluralsight instead of your hosting on your own domain?
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I wanted to have it under my own platform because even though it's a single course right now, there will be many other things available under that subscription.
I heard many negative things about Udemy, but I haven't tried it myself. One product which could have been great to release my product without coding would have been: https://www.podia.com or https://teachable.com.
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After doing most of my coding live on YouTube, many people asked me to publish a course on the fundamentals of React Native Gestures and Animations. I just released it https://start-react-native.dev
There are many ways to publish a paid online course but I decided to build a website myself with Firebase/Stripe just has hobby/guilty pleasure. I used Wistia for the video. After checking out other options such as Vimeo and self-hosting, they were the one that was providing the most value for my current use case. Firebase/Stripe/Wistia is a powerful combination.
The pricing model was inspired by brilliant.org. I just find it quite clever. I'm excited about this project, I plan to provide a lot of great content under this subscription model.
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Go William! Looking forward to look into the course myself.
15 Comments
Congrats man, I can see you have made a website where you are taking the enrollment (of 9$ course). Can I ask what after that? I mean I can see your youtube channel has covered pretty vast type on mobile animations. So, it means all these are free to watch. So, What left to provide in a paid course?
I guess the paid course is only focussed on gesture animations? Right?? and rest of the free videos are generic animations tutorials.
Also, you told you are not doing paid advertising but I have watched a couple of videos, you are not promoting, even your course at the end of video.
So how come the users know about this? Only via video description?
Actually I already have audience from Instagram. But I am confused how should I divide the stuff into free and paid categories?
Wow, that's really cool! For now this is not a subscription model but just a one time fee for the course, right? 10k MR is awesome, congrats.
Regarding the competition: don't see them as competition but fellow content creators. If they're not just copycats see them more as colleagues. Everyone has their own teaching style and this will attract different users. The market is big and there's plenty of opportunity.
Why not wait a bit, see who sticks with it, and reach out to them. If you've been the first in this space you surely made a name for yourself. People will be super happy and honoured if you contact them. You can collaborate and benefit from each other.
The course is a subscription. Thank you for your comment. This is exactly the kind of positive outlook I was looking for, really appreciate it.
It's very interesting and not so common fort courses that you chose a subscription model. I'm curious why you decided to go down this road. Don't your customers churn once they're done with the content?
I update the content of the course almost on a monthly basis and I provide other resources as part of the subscription. I try to give as many perks as possible to the member. It's very similar to Patreon in that regard.
IH is pretty know for people copying other products. I've expirnaced it myself. It's means that you're doing something well.
Focus on your company and you will win. As those who copy, copy for the wrong reasons.
At Competition:
Keep it up, if they are only clones they'll not have the drive that you have.
Look what happened to Fisker Automotive (a "me too" Tesla clone).
William your interview was so inspiring and a major reason I started my own screencasting journey for Slingcode. So far my videos are not great but I'll keep practicing because I can see where it might lead in your example. Thank you!
Congratulations!
Competition is a good thing. It implies there’s more untapped market out there who need your course. The best way to stay abreast is to keep building new courses and compound your clout over what you’ve already built. At some point you’ll break even and from there your earnings will be on auto cruise.
Congrats! Great milestone. What customer acquisition channel has worked the best for you?
It is exclusively YouTube for now.
Hi William,
Congratulations on building Start React Native and reaching the 10k milestone. I launched an eLearning business on a specific but high impact topic just before COVID-19 confinement and we launched our first product a few weeks ago. If you had a moment to take a quick look at our page (www.SOFR.org) I would really appreciate any advice or feedback.
Kind regards,
Marcus.
This is great, but where is the course link? Are you also accepting affiliates, I am keen to work with you and promote your course in our blog and network?
Congrats! I really like how you explain everything on your youtube channel.
Congrats!!