

Show HN: An e-course creator for hobbyists my wife and I built - thenduks
https://www.coursecraft.net

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kalid
As an e-course creator, some quick feedback:

* My very first question: What's your cut? Have a FAQ page listed prominently.

* Have a public, no-login, sample course so I can see what it looks like end-to-end. How are courses branded?

* How can I access my customers, esp. ones I refer from my site? Do I get an email list? Will you be sending them info on your own mailing list?

* Can I sign up with Facebook/Google/Twitter (I don't want yet another account)

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thenduks
Hey thanks for the notes!

Our cut is 5% (like kickstarter), it's on the 'getting paid' faq page which we
should make more prominent (it will be a big button on the confirm-your-email
page).

Public no-login sample course is on the way!

Accessing your customers, they are listed in the participants page you get on
the 'my courses' dashboard. Probably a csv export or something would be good,
yes?

Working on signup with twitter.

Thanks again!

~~~
kalid
No problem. I'd just add the 5% thing right on the homepage (step 3), don't
make me wait until signing up :). [Or rather, I won't bother signing up until
I know the cut]. 5% is really good by the way; udemy takes 30%.

Customer export would be good. Might want to have some aweber / mailchimp
integration but that's a good v1.

~~~
thenduks
I think you're right, there's no reason not to explain our fee on the
frontpage, and just link right there to the help page that goes into detail (
_update: added :)_ ).

I'll also definitely add a csv export to the participants list, and do you
mean some kind of mailchimp integration so you can send announcements and
whatnot to your participants? That's an interesting idea we've thrown around a
bit already.

As for Udemy's 30%, wow! Udemy is much more of a full-service sort of thing,
it seems to me. More formal, they appear to do a lot of promotion and have a
ton of community tools and so on. I think ultimately while both are about
e-courses, they aren't really in the same market.

~~~
kalid
This is against my interests, but I was trying to imply that you are
undercharging :). 5% is very cheap for hosting, charging, handling customer
service, etc. You could probably charge 10-15%, and reduce it to 5-10% in
volume (course sells over $xxxx for its lifetime). Gumroad, which is a simpler
use case, charges 5%.

For the mailing list, I'd want a mailing list I own to be auto-updated once
the user opts-in (vs me having to export then import into MailChimp
separately, redoing confirmation emails, etc.).

~~~
thenduks
Well, thanks a lot for your thoughts/insight on the subject. We
discussed/thought/slept on it at length and still think the price is right.

The biggest single piece that convinces us is that the people we're aiming at
are hobbyists. They are already using free tools (often wordpress + plugins,
or similar) and only pay PayPal fees. We want them to stop screwing around
setting up custom blogs and password protecting them (posts are 'lessons',
upload videos to vimeo and password protect those too, etc) and use something
end-to-end/hosted instead, for which they pay a small cut of their revenue.

As I mentioned earlier it's the same fee structure as kickstarter, and it
seems to work well for them.

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junto
I worked in e-learning for several years for a company that sold into
corporate clients. Here are a couple of things that struck me from that
experience:

* How do you integrate with my Active Directory users?

* I want to import these courses I've designed into my learning management system. Can I do that?

* Do you support SCORM or AICC? Hint: Focus on SCORM. :-)

* Can I test users at the end of the course / during the course?

* Can I let users re-take a test, or block them from retaking a test?

* Every client wants to track and test in different ways.

Finally, when times are hard, the first thing that gets a budget cut in large
companies is training (and e-learning expenditure as part of that).

I've seen various "successful" businesses fail in this market niche, usually
when the economy is getting hit hard.

If you can make a success of this during the hard times, you'll be golden for
the good times!

~~~
thenduks
Hi there thanks for commenting! I think there's a bit of a disconnect between
the stuff you mention here and what our target market is going to use/need.

We're aiming squarely at hobbyists/independent people who want to share/sell
their knowledge of things like: knitting, painting, gardening, cooking, small
renovation projects, setting up a home theater, and so on. There's no testing
at all, in fact!

Ultimately I don't think myself or my wife are in a position to make an
appropriate product for the corporate e-learning market. Long story short -
neither of us lasted long at the corporate/cube jobs we had after finishing
school years ago, and stuff like Active Directory and corporate training
programs are pretty far from our minds at this point :)

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arscan
Great concept! I was just thinking about how I don't truly master something
until I attempt teaching it... and it would be helpful to have a platform that
provides a little structure to that process. As an enthusiast (vs. an
academic), this seems like more my speed than other sites out there which have
a much more "serious" view of education.

I know that the pretty "easy as 1-2-3" welcome page is all the rage these
days, but my recommendation is to try to get people exposed to and using the
site with as little work on their part as possible. Having step 1 be "sign up"
means that many people won't ever bother getting to step 2. Ideally, they
wouldn't even need to click anything before seeing the product in action. Just
a thought...

~~~
thenduks
On 'mastering via teaching', this is exactly what we're talking about! The
formal sites look great, but it can be a bit intimidating to a hobbyist with a
blog who wants to teach knitting.

On the homepage. You're right. We need a 'this is what it looks like' front
and center. This is early on still and we just finished the product, so next
step is to make a 'how to make a coursecraft course' course which will also
serve as an example of what a course looks like/what you can do with the
product.

Thanks for the comments!

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xauronx
Others have said it but I believe a demo of the end product would be key here.
I'd like to see "hey, let's say I master their tool, what kind of awesome
lesson could I create?".

Very well done though! I'm curious how powerful your creation tool is. You
might want to take a look at what apple did with their book creator and get
some ideas from them. I think they put a lot of time into making it dynamic
enough to handle all kinds of interactive lessons/books.

~~~
thenduks
Hey, yea the example course is important, and in the works, as I mentioned to
some other people.

About the editor, it was definitely one of the harder parts of the app, and to
be honest it's not exactly iBooks Author :) We based the capabilities of the
tool on some of the courses Sara (my wife) has taken that used
(misappropriated?) a blog engine + some plugins to make courses. Really fancy
layout controls and stuff is probably a ways off, but something we would
definitely love to consider eventually.

Thanks!

~~~
xauronx
Thanks for the reply! Yeah, haha, I wasn't implying that it should have all of
the features of iBooks Author, just an idea if you needed a muse. Very nice
project and as always, congrats on shipping something!

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hipjiveguy
super idea.... if this doesn't make you $$$, _and_ make it so anyone who's an
expert in something can sell what they know, then there's something really
really wrong with... something ;-)

~~~
thenduks
Haha thanks, I agree! There are some existing solutions out there (udemy,
coursera, etc) but they seem to cover a different use-case and market
(coursecraft being much more informal/hobbyist type stuff). I'm hoping it's
just a matter of getting infront of the people who have something to teach
(which is often the hardest part :)).

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zura
You should definitely add some short video or other type of media to quickly
showcase the whole process.

~~~
thenduks
This is absolutely something we're working on right now. Both a 'how to make a
coursecraft course' course, and a landing page video are the first things on
our mind. Thanks!

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mrchess
"How to make a coursecraft course" course. This would be gold.

Sidenote -- the draft -> publish mechanism is very unintuitive.

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thenduks
You know, we had some internal struggles with that. We originally were going
for a bunch of scheduling vs manual publishing options and it got really
complicated.

Can you clarify what about it is unintuitive to you? Should there maybe be a
way to publish right on the lesson edit page? There is a help doc on
'different ways to run a course' that suggest how you might use that option
(<https://www.coursecraft.net/help/running-a-course>).

Thanks!

~~~
realrocker
Why can't you just follow the Wordpress model? They do it all right.

~~~
thenduks
Interesting. I haven't used wordpress much myself, but you're right it's
likely pretty well understood by most. I'll look into it.

~~~
mrchess
Yes check out that or Blogspot. Their method of Draft->Preview in a lifecycle
is more or less what people expect IMO, and also scheduling (you can schedule
blog posts to be published at certain times).

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realrocker
"Preview" instead of "Visit"? Sorry, wordpress effects. It just feels better.

~~~
thenduks
We flip-flopped between those two ourselves.

Consider it considered :)

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pbojinov
great site, I like the layout and feel it has. Planning on putting together a
lesson when I gather my resources for it.

also a short video describing your vision/product would be extremely
beneficial.

~~~
thenduks
Sara (my wife) is very happy to hear you like the look/feel! :)

Right now we're working on a 'how to make a coursecraft course' course, and a
video is definitely on our xmas list, although it's a much bigger undertaking.

Thanks!

