I just bought it. The UX of the purchasing process was smooth like butter, with minimal amount of clicks, even with a link to your gmail with a magic search to find the confirmation mail. Pretty nice.
My honest opinion is that I'm a little disappointed with the content of the course itself, I feel like it's way too basic and offers too little insight as of now. But maybe more sections will be added later?
Maybe I missed it, but I haven't seen any explanation of VIM's combination of verb and nouns? I think thats the most important part to understand when learning VIM.
Ah sorry about that. The course is aimed more at people new to vim.
Good feedback around needing better explanations of the verbs and nouns. I try to teach it through the examples but maybe I could add a better explanation :)
I think in the future I’ll add more lessons but it might be a while.
I’d be happy to refund you or upgrade you for free (when the new lessons are available) if you want to email me. My email is at the bottom of the vim home page.
Love the follow up on the success of Vim.so with Slip. Slip looks great!
One thing I would suggest creating as a marketing tool is interactive guides on books that don't have alot of excersices or are more 'text-booky'. Like a no fear shakespear for some technical book.
One of the things that made me think of this is my current rabbithole that is learning the rust programming language. There are generally two answers when you ask someone how to learn rust, "Learn C++ and read The Book, or read The Book". "The Book" is dense... but i found this program called "Rustlings" that makes the experience much more enjoyable.
Rustlings is essentially a list of exercises, tests and quizzes attached onto the rust book and some of the documentation.
With Slip, you could be the genius.com of open source technical books on top of courses. More detailed explanations, quizzes, courses, etc.
Also, Another field that needs to be disrupted is paid webinars. There's alot of people who give talks on topics and get paid per attendee. If you could centralize that, i'm sure it'd be a good business to get into. I have a friend who gives webinars on certain topics and he uses onlyfans lol.
>*Also, Another field that needs to be disrupted is paid webinars. There's alot of people who give talks on topics and get paid per attendee. If you could centralize that, i'm sure it'd be a good business to get into. I have a friend who gives webinars on certain topics and he uses onlyfans lol.*
Most courses online have terrible completion rates but the point is education. No other platform incentives for that KPI.
I have no idea how you'd do this besides Maybe Live courses, or somehow creating a social-dynamic between creator and consumer. This would be an invaluable vibe to cultivate to increase completion. Continuing to just throw ideas out, maybe you could give a % refund if you actually complete the course, or you earn back as you complete the challenges.
cute product! BTW I'm not 100% sure on the "I missed out on an additional ~$1200 in revenue" claim you make though - increasing the price would probably have dropped some users off who would pay $15 but not $25. I'd still guess you left a bit of cash on the table but not the full sum.
I can imagine it's an awesome feeling - congratulations!
As a developer, it'd be great to hear from you (or someone similar who's reading this) about the business side of how you got started. How do you set all that up? Any gotchas?
I’m getting distracted by titles with specific dollar amounts. It feels like FOMO (“This programmer made 10k in one month, here is how”). I’d prefer “How I made a profitable Vim course”.
Yes, and the site guidelines ask submitters to drop magic numbers from titles:
If the title begins with a number or number + gratuitous adjective, we'd appreciate it if you'd crop it. E.g. translate "10 Ways To Do X" to "How To Do X," and "14 Amazing Ys" to "Ys." Exception: when the number is meaningful, e.g. "The 5 Platonic Solids."
... although I notice that it's worded more restrictively than I remember. It should cover magic numbers in general, not just at beginnings. (Edit: fixed now!)
Can I please get insights into your stack to launch? I’m thinking to do something similar for another programming language and have a mental block right now on which stack to use / get up and running on an MVP without spinning my wheels :-)
Sure but, if you look at all the products the author has launched over a single year there's something we're missing. Just saying "JS" doesn't answer how that is.
When I wanted to learn vim I started with https://vim-adventures.com/. But since only the first section was free I decided to suck it up and use vim tutor instead.
Seriously just sit down and dedicate a week to typing solely in vim. It feels extremely weird at first, and you'll keep wanting to use the arrow keys. But after that you'll never want to go back to using non-vim mode editing again.
You should make a $25 tutorial on how to use vimtutor :)
But in all seriousness, sometimes people just need to pay money for something to feel committed to learning.
Also, some people dramatically prefer the format of a human talking to reading text. You also get insightful tangents, from listening to an expert give an intro, that are sometimes worth the price of admission themselves.
I personally love to watch high performing programmers work, you learn so much just from the nonverbal parts, get workflow inspiration, etc.
The internet and HN in particular, are full of stories of people who became rich overnight. But they never mention how many people tried similar things and failed.
The author didn't become rich. He made $10K, but spent several months trying to, so in effect his salary certainly wasn't more than if he worked as an employee for a FAANG company.
I'm grateful for the story for exactly the reason you mention: it's a datapoint from someone struggling, not from someone who made it. And like you say, we need those datapoints just as much as the survivor stories.
That’s not true at all. Stories like “How I f’ed up this” and “How my business failed” are popping up all the time. Those are also discussed very much, because there is lots to learn from it.
If at all, HN is much better at showcasing failures than the rest of the interwebs.
"Prior to launching vim.so I was heads down for about 4 months working on an online interactive Python course called Deliberate.
[...] I was working on Deliberate in the early mornings before my day job for 4 months and I had made $0."
My honest opinion is that I'm a little disappointed with the content of the course itself, I feel like it's way too basic and offers too little insight as of now. But maybe more sections will be added later?
Maybe I missed it, but I haven't seen any explanation of VIM's combination of verb and nouns? I think thats the most important part to understand when learning VIM.
Anyway, very cool product and a nice experience.