SQL Habit
Learn how to run business/product/marketing with data & SQL
Really excited to share that SQL Habit Blog is live! 🍾
Reminder: SQL Habit course is a business simulation that teaches Product and Marketing analytics. But there are so relevant data analytics topics outside of the course' scope! 🚀
SQL Habit Blog will share the same values as the course – always provide insights and ideas that could be applied right away! 📈
Enjoy the first follow-along blog post about detecting recurring transactions with SQL:
https://www.sqlhabit.com/blog/posts/how-to-detect-recurring-payments-with-sql
It is so surreal to see my post with the course idea from July 9, 2019. After 8 months I can finally say that the SQL Habit course is finished! There are 12 chapters with 242 published lessons and exercises atm.
From this point of view, the course is finished. I can finally catch a breath without the pressure of unpublished content on the website. But the journey is not over, in fact, it's just the beginning.
Soon I'll register a company (OMG, so exciting 🙀, I'll be fined for late registration, maybe not that exciting 😀), I'm about to launch SQL Habit blog and many more features (and products). This is truly exciting.
Atm there are 600 students and 4 companies learning how to use data and SQL with SQL Habit. The most frequent feedback I hear sounds something like "It's the best course about X I've ever taken". X being Marketing Analytics or Product Analytics. I still don't know how to present (or sell) the course.
It's a simulation of 3 months of a startup company where you'll solve Marketing and Product challenges with data and learn SQL to Data Analyst level. Still too long 🙈
Anyways, I would love to share anything I've learned throughout this journey. Hit me with a question!
P.S. While we're all under the lockdown I'll keep a 50% discount for the course. I hope we can spend this time enjoying the company of our families and learning something new. Stay healthy! ❤️☀️🙏
STATS 📈
Last week has been truly remarkable! Look at these stats:
- 2427$ in revenue 💰
- 800 unique visitors 👥
- 250+ users 😎
- 4000+ SQL queries made 📊
- 1555 lessons and exercises completed by users 📚
It was sad to see SQL Habit not being featured on Product Hunt (read more in the previous post), but my post on Facebook and love from friends and colleagues made this launch very successful and memorable.
HOW IT ALL HAPPENED 📖
The biggest impact came from the LinkedIn post of my dear friend and CEO of Blinkist Holger Seim: https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:6601077814835855360/
He is the big inspiration for creating SQL Habit. Holger learned SQL himself and for a long time was 1 man BI team at Blinkist, gathering tons of insights from our data. He summarized the importance of learning SQL for business and the idea of SQL Habit perfectly.
My post on Facebook also had a good traction: https://www.facebook.com/anatoly.makarevich/posts/10216106219870734 (it's in Russian). I see a lot of signups from Russian speaking users.
NEXT STEPS ✅
Atm I receive a lot of feedback from real users. Everyone loves the structure and exercises, that's really amazing.
The next big thing is to finish all bonus chapters about Product Analytics, AB-test analysis etc. My vision for SQL Habit is that it would cover all (literally) topics in the life of a company.
Another thing is writing, namely English grammar and writing style. I write all the content myself and being non-native English speaker I sometimes drop articles (there are no "a" or "the" in Russian) and mess up commas. So if you know a great resource where I can learn about it – please share.
Have a great weekend ❤️
BAD NEWS 😥
Today I launched SQL Habit – announced it on Facebook and ProductHunt: https://www.producthunt.com/posts/sql-habit.
I was 100% sure that I'll become #1 product of the day or at least TOP-5. The point of doing this – being featured on the homepage and get a lot of visibility, allowing people to discover SQL Habit and purchase the course.
In the first couple of hours I got 50+ upvotes from friends & family, colleagues but SQL Habit didn't appear on homepage. After talking to ProductHunt support (btw they respond within 15 min, that's a A++ class support) I figured out that SQL Habit is classified as a "course" and couldn't be featured: https://help.producthunt.com/en/articles/2710689-can-i-post-a-course
That is sad, very sad. But it's not the end of the world, just unmet expectation. Why I had this expectation anyways? 🤔
Let's make it clear – ProductHunt is amazing way to get initial users for free but it's just a one time thing. I need a way to market SQL Habit to reach thousands people on a monthly or even daily basis.
GREAT NEWS 🥳
I sold my first team subscription. Marketing and engineering teams of one medium sized company will learn analytics and SQL with SQL Habit 🙀📈🍾Oh. My. God.
Some details: it was a cold sale. A friend of a friend reached out to me and asked for a consultation about how to run marketing with data (basically moving to the next level from Spreadsheets).
After 30 minutes I was standing next to a whiteboard ready to dance, because SQL Habit was a PERFECT match for this company: how to track things, how to organize data warehouse and how to employ SQL to measure marketing efficiency. I was blown away and now I'm so excited now! 💥
NEXT STEPS 🤔
I've built a blog and will soon write about data and SQL – what SQL clients to use, more high level thoughts about data in marketing and product etc.
❓👉 Is there any data/SQL related topic you would like me to write about?
See you at the next milestone 👋❤️
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Whats the mechanism for ensuring that ensuring your the number #1 product of the day? - Post at 12:01am and get 20 of your friends to like it?
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I think that's required but not a guarantee. PH Support wrote me smth like "There're many factors which determine which products are featured on the homepage, not only upvotes".
Many people say that upvotes from direct link (like if you send it to your friend via messenger) don't count or have lower weight.
Anyways, I think hacking product hunt is too much of a big deal. Great product, nice photos and clear copy should do it.
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Wow! Thank you
1️⃣ SOFT LAUNCH STATS
99 users
929$ in revenue
users took 400+ lessons
users wrote 1000+ SQL queries
tons of feedback
2️⃣ FEEDBACK HIGHLIGHTS
- The name is not clear: SQL Habit
Yeah, that's bummer and I'm working on a better copy atm.
The course is only partly about SQL. It's more about the habit of making data driven/informed decisions in product and marketing.
- What one will learn from the course?
Totally missed that point. A big learning for me!
Working a new copy to explain that one will learn about how data is collected and stored in web and mobile apps, what metrics exist in product and marketing, how to measure them and finally – advanced SQL to work with data.
- What level the course teaches?
So glad IH community helped me with this one!
The course starts at 0 knowledge about data or SQL and ends in the very very advanced. Thinking about the new copy atm.
- People started typing SQL in the text input of the exercise result.
That's a very interesting design issue! Added a detailed explainer on how to use SQL editor on the website + planned a couple of lessons on what happens when one runs SQL query.
3️⃣ COURSE STATUS
September: 40 / 220 lessons are published
October: 117 / 240 lessons are published
Planning to finish the course in the late November.
4️⃣ NEXT STEPS
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I've lowered the prices by 40% and will keep an early bird sale till the moment I finish the course.
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Working on the email flow atm – I'll include a welcome survey to get feedback why and how people are using SQL Habit for a bigger discount.
Stay tuned and thanks a lot for help ❤️
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Nice stats - any numbers on conversion rate, number of visits that got you those 99, or marketing budget?
Also, seems like you learned a lot from the feedback, which is great - those points are definitely important. It seems like most of them revolve around getting into the head of the buyer/user, so maybe that is something you should try to practice going forward 😊
Lastly, cool that you have the number of queries made, numbers like those always get me excited when I visit landing pages.. so maybe consider displaying a counter somewhere - it would convince me. I think it indicates credibility/social proof, like its own form of testimonials.
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I'm totally blown away by these numbers too, seeing people actually learning with SQL Habit. Thanks a lot for the idea of showing those numbers – I will add a section on the homepage!
Marketing budget is 0, I just posted it on Twitter + IH, got a couple of retweets from marketing influencers.
I don't focus on signup conversions yet (funny because a lot in the course is about it). Now I focus mainly on building a product and finishing the content. Since I don't have a team I have to prioritize: content and product first, everything else is out of focus for now.
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Glad I could help 👍🏼 That's good traction at $0, do you have any idea about where people mostly came from, IH, or twitter?
Make sense about focusing on content; it's always a balance though of course. ⚖️
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That's amazing, congrats!
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My startup for sure will be called noSQLhabit.com.
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name ideas for you for free $$$
SQLMASTER
SQLPRO
SQLNINJA
SQLSAMURAI
SUPERSQL -
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This comment was deleted 7 years ago
Took me 3 months to finish SQL Habit course MVP:
- design homepage
- a website with SQL editor
- lessons and interactive exercises
- payments
- user ratings and feedback
- write 45 first lessons
- publish full course agenda
- tiny content management tool
Is it really MVP?
I'd have done everything different now: I'd find 20 people on LinkedIn/Reddit/Twitter, charge them 199$ and start writing weekly PDFs and share it with them. After 3 months I'd have:
- fully finished course
- 20 happy people whom I taught everything I know
- 3980$
#alwayslearning
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Hey there I like the project and it is probably much more than an MVP. I could imagine that your idea about contacting people on Reddit/Twitter is not that easy. However, you would have a very early validation of your business model, which is really important. So probably yes this would have been a leaner and more time-saving approach.
Concerning the landing page, I think it looks pretty good. Maybe I would put more icons to text passages so that they look a bit more inviting. I really do not like changing headlines, but this seems to be modern now and is probably a matter of taste.
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Thanks a lot for feedback! I really like the idea of adding icons and making copy work better on LP, thanks a ton, working on it!
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Idea of SQL Habit course was always right in front of me, I just couldn't see it 😎
I've been working with data and SQL for years. For work or as pet project I've built recommendation engine for Github repos (using collaborative filtering), content analytics system long before it was available on Medium and many more.
A lot of friends, colleagues or entrepreneurs approached me with questions on how to set up data warehouses, how to set up tracking solution to run product or marketing etc 📈
After a couple of years (haha I'm glad it wasn't 50 years) of people asking me I've realised that sharing my knowledge about data and SQL could be a product itself 💡
I've interviewed colleagues who taught themselves SQL. It was clear that the real habit and deep understanding comes only when you work with real data and challenges.
This is why SQL Habit is based on a story of a fictional startup (which totally could be real) and during the course you'll learn how data is modelled, collected, stored and you'll have to write actual SQL to solve business problems). 🚀
This is how the idea of SQL Habit came about 💥
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