
Rails and Revenue: Building a Screencast Business - ChanningAllen
https://www.indiehackers.com/interview/8999c7ac7f
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cseelus
GoRails really filled the gap Railscasts left as Chris Oliver himself also
states in this Interview.

He also mentions that for some people solutions to immediate problems are more
relevant than constant learning via weekly screencasts. I hope he finds a way
to offer these customers something, for example by selling course packages for
a reasonable price, like all the recent „Vue.js with Rails“ screencasts as a
package for XY$.

Overall GoRails is a great ressource for Rails developers, Chris Oliver seems
to be a decent guy and I wish him best of luck with his projects.

~~~
excid3
Thanks for the kind words! I appreciate the support!

I definitely am considering offering courses that either package up a series
or a topic. That seems to be a good way of solving that balance between the
different types of customers I see.

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merpnderp
What is the advantage of using Wistia over Youtube for video hosting?

~~~
davzie
Wistia is amazing for lead tracking and analytics about your customers'
viewing habits.

~~~
excid3
Primarily, I use it for just hosting paid content in a protected way. They do
have awesome lead tracking, analytics, email captures and things but your
bandwidth can cost a lot if you do that too much. It doesn't quite work out
financially with a low-cost screencast business like mine. Probably better for
marketing teams with a budget and higher cost products.

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albertgoeswoof
For those of you who want to run a 15k/month one person business, the most
interesting excerpt from this article:

> Since I had been publishing content to GoRails for a year before I launched
> the paid courses, I had the advantage of all the SEO and visitors I had
> built that year. During that time, I was collecting email addresses of
> people interested in learning more about Rails. This gave me an audience I
> could launch to from day one, which was incredibly important to give me some
> confidence as I launched.

> After getting some initial traction, I had to come up with a way of
> marketing my screencasts. The way I solved this was by pivoting to weekly
> screencasts and releasing a free one every other week. This let me share
> quite a lot of content on places like Reddit, Rubyflow, and to my email
> list. I knew those users would check out the other episodes I offered and
> hopefully subscribe to the paid content eventually.

> I would say the majority of growth of GoRails has just been from this free
> content. If I cover a popular topic, it often gets shared, and if I cover a
> library, the authors love to share the videos as well to get more usage of
> their own work. I'm uploading the free content to YouTube which not only
> gets me an audience there but also saves me from some very high video
> hosting costs that I would incur if all the free content was hosted on
> Wistia. It makes for a nice way of building the community and the customer
> base at the same time.

