Ask HN: Anyone making money with online courses? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: Anyone making money with online courses?

#21

Post by xenopticon » Mon, Nov 09, 2020, 3:49 PM UTC

walkingriver wrote: post #19

Udemy has been a bust for me. In fact, I went on a mini-rant on Twitter this morning about it ( https://twitter.com/walkingriver/status/1325772355449344001 ). I've had decent success with Gumroad selling directly ( https://walkingriver.gumroad.com ). I also sell book versions of the same content on Gumroad and Amazon ( https://amazon.com/author/mcallaghan ). I think you should shoot for an hour or two of valuable con…

Wow, so on Udemy you cannot reach your students on an ad-hoc basis? That's both clever and evil.

Re: Ask HN: Anyone making money with online courses?

#22

Post by jventura » Mon, Nov 09, 2020, 4:14 PM UTC

xenopticon wrote: post #20

jventura wrote: post #18

I do have a Python course at educative.io [1] which nets me around 100€/month. I was approached by one of the founders because of an ebook I did and shown here on HN [2]. I do have a personal blog [3] where I have some articles on Python and related things but I think I don't have an "audience". I'm also working as a teacher btw. Next year as my current contract gets downgraded (no more exclusivity - less salary), I'…

Thanks for the input anyway João! I didn't know about educative.io, how hard was it to publish a text-based course there?

They made me two proposals! On one of them, they would build the course themselves from my materials (30% cut for me, 70% cut for them). On the other I would have to build it and handle all the marketing myself. (70% for me, 30% for them).

I chose the first one..

Re: Ask HN: Anyone making money with online courses?

#23

Post by walkingriver » Mon, Nov 09, 2020, 5:17 PM UTC

xenopticon wrote: post #21

walkingriver wrote: post #19

Udemy has been a bust for me. In fact, I went on a mini-rant on Twitter this morning about it ( https://twitter.com/walkingriver/status/1325772355449344001 ). I've had decent success with Gumroad selling directly ( https://walkingriver.gumroad.com ). I also sell book versions of the same content on Gumroad and Amazon ( https://amazon.com/author/mcallaghan ). I think you should shoot for an hour or two of valuable con…

Wow, so on Udemy you cannot reach your students on an ad-hoc basis? That's both clever and evil.

You have no visibility to your courses' students or their contact info.

You can send a couple of "marketing emails" per month for each course. Inside those emails you may only have links that go back to Udemy, so they are used primarily to market your other courses on Udemy. If you try to include a non-Udemy URL, the system detects it and won't let you send.

Plus, someone on Twitter just pointed out that every one of my Udemy courses is available on multiple pirate sites. So, at this point, I think I'm just going to shut those courses down. I certainly won't be expanding them anymore.