I have been working on my website and course, Vue.js: The Composition API since early 2020. Here is the timeline, how much money I made, and some of my learnings.
Check it out my on website, Vue.js Course.
The Idea
I had the idea to create a course for Vue.js 3; it’s new (still in release candidate at the time of this post) and people will be interested in learning the new features.
The main changes are
- better TypeScript support
- some new components (Suspense, Portal)
- the Composition API
I enjoy fast paced, technical content, so that’s the style I am going for. The main thing that makes my course different is the emphasis on unit testing; most courses don’t go into this.
Marketing
I made a basic landing page; it was just a single .html file on GH pages. It has a little form for people to submit their email for notifications. I got around 100 emails/month. I’d say 95% of traffic comes from my book, the Vue Testing Handbook. It averages about 80k views a month.
Preparation
At the time (Jan/Feb 2020) neither Vuex, Vue Router or Test Utils had Vue 3 support. Vuex and Vue Router had maintainers, but Test Utils not so much. I ended up becoming the maintainer of Test Utils, and spend a ton of time updating it to work with Vue 3. This also makes me reputable; I think people will be more likely to puchase a course on Vue testing from the creator of the official testing library.
I also practiced screencasting by making a new screencast every week. I also paywalled them after I had a decent amount - this validated whether people would buy my content. More on this later.
Content Creation
This took a long time. I spent about 2 weeks building the demo app. I then planned all the modules.
Recording was slow at first. It would take me around 1h to record a 5-8 minute video. My standards were (too) high. That said, I got faster and better.
Marketing
I finished 4/6 modules by May, and decided to do an early release at a discounted rate to see if my product was going to sell. See below for results.
I also posted regularly (usually once a week) on reddit with free screencasts. I left a link in the description about my website and course.
Sales
Here are my sales. I went live around May, and released the full course at the start of July. Sales were quite consistent. I did a few email campaigns. Once on prerelease (May, first 4 modules) one on release, and 1 more including a discount code as well as some free content to boot.
Figure 1: Aggregate Sales over Time
Figure 2: Sales by Day
So far things are going well. You can see the spikes in May and July where I did my email campaign. I’ve made around $2600 USD in 4 months or so. The amount of actual time invested into this was significant - I really started in January.
Retrospective
I had a ton of fun making the content and learned a lot. I am working on another course, the Vue.js Complete Crash Course. Recording this is much quicker for a few reasons:
- I’m faster and recording and make less mistakes
- Not as much of a perfectionist
- Less time planning, more time DOING
I spend too much time planning my previous course. I should have just had a basic outline and gone with that. That is my current approach for the Complete Vue.js Crash Course. I am going to try putting that one on Udemy. I also started a YouTube and am trying that out as a promotion channel.