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Udemy S-1 IPO

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Re: Udemy S-1 IPO

#61

Post by ai_ia »

ironmagma wrote: post #57
ai_ia wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

- Blog on the niche and build reputation It's amazing to see how instructors like Wes Bos, Kent C Dodds and Josh Comameu's CSS Course pulled off. - Create youtube channel and drive traffic from their to your course

YouTube has a lot of the same issues as Udemy with regard to creator treatment. Building your own audience sounds like the ideal, but obviously there are network effects to being on a platform and those can’t be simply written off.

I agree 100%.

What does, in your opinion, an ideal course platform look like though?

Genuinely curious.

Re: Udemy S-1 IPO

#62

Post by avelis »

Wow. Crazy journey for Eren Bali. I remember when he was a Sr. Engineer at SpeedDate. When I was let go he was casually discussing Udemy around the office. At least the beginning ideas for it.

Re: Udemy S-1 IPO

#63

Post by ai_ia »

plondon514 wrote: post #36
nickjj wrote: post #18

One thing that's worth mentioning is Udemy is a completely different type of company based on you being a watcher of courses vs being an instructor on Udemy. I was an instructor there for 5+ years (with ~30k enrollments) and in my entire professional career I've never met a worse company in terms of how corrupt they are and how little they actually care about instructors unless you happen to be one of the few instruc…

If anyone is thinking of creating an interactive coding course I'm working on https://codeamigo.dev/ to help. I want to create a free and open marketplace for coding courses. I'd love to talk with anyone about good/bad experiences at other course platforms. My email is in my profile.

I checked out your application. Looks cool.

Are you planning to add other languages interactive environments as well?

Re: Udemy S-1 IPO

#64

Post by plondon514 »

ai_ia wrote: post #63
plondon514 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If anyone is thinking of creating an interactive coding course I'm working on https://codeamigo.dev/ to help. I want to create a free and open marketplace for coding courses. I'd love to talk with anyone about good/bad experiences at other course platforms. My email is in my profile.

I checked out your application. Looks cool. Are you planning to add other languages interactive environments as well?

Hey Siddarth! Yes I have support for C, Elixir, Java, Python, Ruby, and Rust at the moment. I'm going to be adding more courses and languages over the next few weeks! If you'd like to follow along with the progress checkout https://twitter.com/codeamigo_dev

Re: Udemy S-1 IPO

#65

Post by ai_ia »

plondon514 wrote: post #64
ai_ia wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I checked out your application. Looks cool. Are you planning to add other languages interactive environments as well?

Hey Siddarth! Yes I have support for C, Elixir, Java, Python, Ruby, and Rust at the moment. I'm going to be adding more courses and languages over the next few weeks! If you'd like to follow along with the progress checkout https://twitter.com/codeamigo_dev

Awesome. Followed you on twitter. Will be following your progress.

Re: Udemy S-1 IPO

#66

Post by belter »

skeeter2020 wrote: post #49
jstx1 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's more than just new users - I've gotten larger discounts from logging into the same account through a different browser.

yep. open the same page in a private session and watch prices plummet 90%+. Pretty annoying.

Grounds for a lawsuit?

"Price discrimination is a commonplace practice that is presumptively lawful, save under special circumstances discussed below. It occurs when a seller of products regularly offers lower prices to its preferred customers and higher prices to the others when selling them the same or similar products at around the same time."

https://www.markhamlawfirm.com/law-articles/unlawful-price-d...

Re: Udemy S-1 IPO

#67

Post by chrisfrantz »

buf wrote: post #39

Udemy is the reason why I helped start Reforge and Closing Credits. I can't believe I'm seeing the S1 and it fuels me even more. Curated cohort-based live instructors that give revshare to industry experts > static unqualified mess.

Reforge has far better content for the overlapping disciplines, it’s not even close.

Re: Udemy S-1 IPO

#69

Post by nickjj »

open-source-ux wrote: post #35
nickjj wrote: post #18

One thing that's worth mentioning is Udemy is a completely different type of company based on you being a watcher of courses vs being an instructor on Udemy. I was an instructor there for 5+ years (with ~30k enrollments) and in my entire professional career I've never met a worse company in terms of how corrupt they are and how little they actually care about instructors unless you happen to be one of the few instruc…

The self-publish course route works best when the instructor has a following on social media and can appeal to their followers (Twitter, YouTube or even on GitHub). Without followers in some form, course discovery can be hard via the self-publish route. That's why Udemy remains an attractive option (despite how badly Udemy treat authors as you say). It's a bit of a chicken-and-egg situation.

> That's why Udemy remains an attractive option (despite how badly Udemy treat authors as you say). It's a bit of a chicken-and-egg situation.

It is but at the same time it's not.

If you make a course in a category where there's 500 other courses which is the norm for a lot of tech niches you'll be on page 30 and no one will ever find you. For new courses Udemy might decide to show your course to a tiny percent of traffic in a higher search ranking to see if you gain traction but unless you drive your own traffic to Udemy from your own site / resources you're going to have a hard time competing with folks who do. Their algorithm very much prefers instructors who send their own audience to Udemy.

If you don't gain that initial traction you're basically dead in the water. Plus it's going to be a hard sell to get someone to sign up for your course with 4 enrollments and no review vs courses who have 100,000+ enrollments and a 4.4+ rating.

With that said, having no audience won't help much on Udemy vs being on your own platform. You're still going to need to grow an audience and send traffic to your course landing pages no matter which platform you use (a 3rd party marketplace or your own site).

Re: Udemy S-1 IPO

#70

Post by htrp »

lquist wrote: post #28

Interesting that the founding CEO owns only 1.5% of the company while the current CEO owns 2.5%. Wonder if this is because of secondary or dilution? How much does the other cofounder (Gagan) hold? I would have thought this was a huge success story for founders but it might not be?

They probably required massive rounds of dilution in each round to fund all the user acquisition to get to the next round.

Per Crunchbase, it looks like they raise every quarter or so, and they lose anywhere between 10-20 million a quarter (amateur numbers compared to something like uber).

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