
Ask HN: How about creating an indie alternative to Udemy? - bernhardwenzel
The landscape for online course creators is not satisfying.<p>The most significant player is Udemy. The problem with Udemy is that I can&#x27;t build my own audience and have no control over the sales price due to ongoing discount offers (the price setting is a joke, regardless of what amount I set I rarely sell for more than 10$. I&#x27;d have to opt-out of their marketing channel but then why host with Udemy at all?)<p>The other problem with Udemy is the low barrier of quality. They do some quality control but only checking the sales page and sound or video quality but never the content itself.<p>There are other providers with higher quality control, like Pluralsight, but here the barrier is too high (plus you still can&#x27;t build your audience).<p>Then there&#x27;s the option to self-host using a Saas provider. For example, I found Teachable quite useful. But of course I&#x27;m on my own here, there&#x27;s no network effect I can take advantage of, and I can&#x27;t have a public review system to gain customer&#x27;s trust.<p>Are there any other alternatives I&#x27;m not aware of?<p>I wish there were a platform where independent creators come together to build a brand. It would have some voting system to control who can publish, and a creator would have to pay some small percentage to keep the platform running but retains control of everything else.<p>There would be a public course review system for students ala Amazon or Udemy.<p>What are your thoughts on that?<p>To get started I could imagine finding a small group of creators who come together to build a common landing page with a review feature that then just redirects to each of the creator&#x27;s self-hosted site. If interested contact me.
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duxup
> It would have some voting system to control who can publish

With money at stake I suspect you'd be dealing with voting, and quality issues
up the wazoo.

And as a n00b myself, the n00b developer community eats up just about any
garbage, and as you see on reddit will vote it up like crazy with at most some
thought of "thanks for posting" Every programming sub is now
r/learnprogramming to some extent, and there's no way for the n00bs like me to
really KNOW if we learned something right, we just learned a thing and we
think it is great so upvote! If a platform gets popular at all they're going
to have those issues.

Measuring quality... even just viewing it on the administrative side would be
a mess, and community participation would be a real pain.

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yayana
To me it is all a grey area of MOOCS when you get into unaffiliated
instructors and paid only content.. I don't think it is possible to go very
far with that without kind of sketchy companies like Udemy making decisions on
what won't get too many chargebacks, etc.

My suggestion for a platform for MOOCS themselves would be hosting an open Edx
setup. But in terms of marketing and payments, I think you would end up
hosting a different commercial site that competes with Udemy and end up
driving rather minimal change through competition.. Or you would need to move
to more of a nonprofit with free content and donations..

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eberfreitas
Take a look at Podia: [https://www.podia.com](https://www.podia.com)

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CommanderData
How is Udemy supposed to review 'the content itself'?

It is not possible unless you plan to hire or pay professionals from every
subject or specialism, to do this.

How it works is good - allow the market decide if the content is worthy.

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horsecaptin
I liked Udemy until they launched the nerd ad campaign on YouTube. It made me
wonder:

\- Is that what they think most prospective developers look and talk like?

\- Is that what most developers really look and talk like?

~~~
d3sandoval
You mean this commercial? [https://youtu.be/O0QB-
b_s2pY](https://youtu.be/O0QB-b_s2pY)

~~~
horsecaptin
You know it.

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humptydumpty001
I recently came across Plural Insight they are good. Although best is you can
open your own website and sell if you want full control.

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exolymph
[https://leanpub.com/](https://leanpub.com/) might work for you

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amorphous
It's just for books, isn't it?

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tmaly
Is says also courses
[https://leanpub.com/create/course](https://leanpub.com/create/course)

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lsiebert
I know some people are crowdfunding online courses through crowdfunding sites.

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wishinghand
What do you mean you can't build your own audience?

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provlem
Is your discussion related to this -
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17884327](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17884327)
?

Creating own brand learning solution by team of multiple creator/authors ?

~~~
bernhardwenzel
I don't think so, that looks like a software package to create a Teachable
clone.

I'm talking less about the technical solution and more about how to make a
living as an independent content creator in 2018 and fill a gap in the market.

