
Ask HN: Making money with ebooks and video courses vs. writing apps? - facepalm
I&#x27;ve been browsing Udemy courses yesterday and I was floored to find that some programming courses might have sold in excess of a million dollars (unless Udemy hands out coupons all the time and few people actually pay the full price for a course - I don&#x27;t know that).<p>There are also courses like &quot;how to create a bestseller on Kindle&quot;.<p>Now I am thinking of creating my own programming course, but I realize I can not really make such a promise as helping people earn money with programming (except getting a job, but that also seems a but much for a single video course). It would be cool to make a course &quot;learn programming language X and earn 1000$&#x2F;month in passive income&quot; but it seems a very doubtful proposition to me.<p>Is it harder to make money with programming than with other content creation (ebooks, video)?<p>Udemy says the average course earns 7000$ - not a lot, but I think still more than the average income for iOS or Android apps? And it seems to me a course or ebook might be much simpler to create than a good app.<p>Of course those &quot;make a Kindle bestseller&quot; courses might just be fake &quot;get rich quick&quot; schemes, but I am not so sure. I can imagine having a good title and reasonable subject a book can become a bestseller easily.
======
patio11
I happen to have done both, and am friends with a lot of people who have done
both. Birds of a feather and all that.

If you are good at writing / good at teaching, it is much easier to ship a
book or course than it is to ship almost any SaaS applications. SaaS apps have
a suite of challenges which solving _does not make you any MRR_ , such as
maintenance, security, server administration, devops, deployment workflows,
customer support (orders of magnitude more time than "Reset my password
please" or "Send me another receipt"), etc etc.

 _Typically_ , people use a launch-centric approach to promoting books and
courses, which results in them getting a spike of sales around the launch
window and then fairly little residual value. You can do better than this, but
you have to be savvy about it. (Savvy, in this context, basically means "doing
email marketing very well in an ongoing fashion.")

I will happily show you actual graphs of sales over time, but the most common
patterns among my friends are, for books/courses, a sales spike during the
launch window and then it declines to an asymptote close to the Y axis. For
SaaS, "the long slow SaaS ramp of death", where MRR grows by some amount every
month, and it may well take you years until it is worth your time, depending
on your ability to make sales. (The fastest solo-founded SaaS I'm aware of is
Baremetrics, and they hit $20k MRR in 6 months. That's _meteoric_ compared to
almost every Internet buddy I've ever swapped numbers with -- more typically,
you hit $10k in ~18 months of full-time work. I'm aware of at least five
people who hit $30k with their first book, which generally requires a fraction
of the effort to get out there and a fraction of a fraction of the post-launch
time to support.)

As to whether books/etc can be worth it for customers, the short answer is
"Yes." There are plenty of get rich schemes on the Internet. You don't have to
be one of them. Local examples of savvy value-producing authors include Nathan
Barry (design and authorship), Brennan Dunn (business topics for freelancers),
Sasha Greif (the Meteor book), and another dozen or so HNers at least.

Your chances of producing something of value go radically up if you do not
teach non-technical people how to make a software business (expected success
rate of people who buy that book: < 1%, if that) but rather produce something
which makes a professional in your field better at one specific additional
thing that you know very well. For example, I'm a Ruby on Rails developer and
have no decent integration tests. If you write the book on integration
testing, there is at least a 50% chance that I will be at least somewhat
successful at learning about and successfully executing on integration tests.
The price of your book is denominated in minutes of my time -- attention is a
scarce resource but money is not, so if you can trade me "I'll save you 12
hours of Googling and reading Free Information On The Internet (TM) and it
will cost you $50", that's a _great_ trade for me.

~~~
jrs235
Here's a link to the video/talk that coined the term "the long slow SaaS ramp
of death" for those that want to learn more. I highly recommend watching it.

[http://businessofsoftware.org/2013/02/gail-goodman-
constant-...](http://businessofsoftware.org/2013/02/gail-goodman-constant-
contact-how-to-negotiate-the-long-slow-saas-ramp-of-death/)

~~~
patio11
That is still the best presentation ever on the SaaS business.

------
alexyang21
I'm a Udemy instructor and now create video content full-time (baserails.com).
I remember doing the same math (e.g. 10k students x $200 each = $2M!...and in
only 6 months!). I was floored that these instructors were making so much
money. In hindsight, I realize that I made 3 key mistakes in my assumptions:

1\. Even if it's a paid course, that doesn't mean that all students paid
money. Udemy instructors have the ability to give out free coupons to help in
marketing their courses. Since it's in Udemy's best interest to boost their
displayed course enrollment numbers, signing up a free account and
'purchasing' a course for free is really easy. I wouldn't be surprised if some
instructors use a script to automate this process and enroll thousands of fake
students.

2\. Even if people do pay, almost no one pays full price (and the price you
see may not have been the price at launch). Udemy gives frequent and deep
discounts ("50% off all courses for Udemy's 4th birthday!", "70% off because
summer's out and the school year ended!", "90% off select courses just because
it's October!"). Many Udemy users are 'course collectors' \- they'll purchase
a bunch of courses at once when it's on discount, in case they may want to
learn those skills in the future.

3\. Udemy gets a bigger cut than you think. While instructors keep 100% of
revenue from customers they bring to Udemy, the majority of your students will
be Udemy users you don't know. For these purchases, instructors receive 25% or
50% of the purchase price (depending on whether Udemy did any marketing), with
an additional discount if the course was purchased on a mobile device.

Don't build a course to 'get rich quick' \- do it only if you actually like
teaching.

~~~
facepalm
Thank you for the insight - I actually suspected there is a lot of couponing
and so on going on. I guess like in the iOS or Android app store (or
presumably all markets) people try to game it. I would probably do the same
and try to sign up free subscribers until I have 1K or so to make my course
look good.

But don't worry, I am genuinely interested in creating such a course, and I
don't want to rip people off. I plan to have fun while making it, so there is
not much too lose.

Actually I had decided recently to try to write ebooks as a means of learning
stuff myself (in that case it was AngularJS). I think of it as an additional
motivation and I think it could work for me, if not for everybody. Making a
video would probably be supplementary to that.

~~~
alexyang21
That's great - definitely do it for the learning/experience and let the money
be a side benefit. If you have any other questions or need more tactical
advice on getting started, I'd be happy to share here or via email
alex@baserails.com. Good luck!

------
zrail
Buy this book. Read it. Implement it.

[http://nathanbarry.com/authority/](http://nathanbarry.com/authority/)

Doing those three things have directly led to me earning approximately $40,000
from book sales in the last 16 months from my book Mastering Modern
Payments[1], and I'm not even Nathan's best case[2].

Writing and editing and publishing and promoting a book, even a short one, is
a difficult thing. It's one of the hardest things I've ever willingly done.
That said, it's been one of the most rewarding projects I've ever undertaken,
both financially and for consulting and contracting prospects.

[1]:
[https://www.masteringmodernpayments.com](https://www.masteringmodernpayments.com)

[2]: [http://nathanbarry.com/authority-case-
studies/](http://nathanbarry.com/authority-case-studies/)

~~~
maxmwood
Can anyone else vouch for this? I've never heard of the author and $39 is
steep pricing for a book.

~~~
s3cur3
You can buy it in print for $23: [http://www.amazon.com/Authority-Become-
Following-Financial-I...](http://www.amazon.com/Authority-Become-Following-
Financial-Independence/dp/1612060919)

~~~
yitchelle
The audible version is for free if you are willing to trial audible.com
membership, right now..

------
ivan_ah
Why think of it as online course _or_ ebook, rather than online course _and_
ebook?

The way I see things, the value the author provides is in the distillation of
information---rather than learn from 20+ random HOWTOs on the web, readers
will pay for a single coherent source, that explains and organizes knowledge
for them. This "distilled knowledge" can be offered either through a printed
book, an ebook, an online course, a screencast, an audiobook, etc. The medium
is not the important factor but the quality of the teaching.

I wrote a blog post about my experience in the book business a while back [1].
TL;DR writing books is a LOT of work (1yr/book=writing,editing,selling), but a
definitely an area that will grow.

If I can give some advice for how to start your book writing is to tutor
someone live before getting down to write. Looking at your students (in a one-
on-one or one-on-few context) is by far the fasters way to receive feedback
about the quality of an explanation. After giving a few such tutorials, you'll
just have to put your in-person-explanations into words.

Good luck!

______

[1] You can read about my experiences bootstrapping a textbook publishing
company here: [http://minireference.com/blog/techzing-
interview/](http://minireference.com/blog/techzing-interview/)

------
ayrx
> And it seems to me a course or ebook might be much simpler to create than a
> good app.

Citation needed. I think you are seriously underestimating the difficulty of
creating a course or ebook worth paying money for.

~~~
facepalm
I'm sure it is some effort, but so is writing a good app.

And I remember the quote from the "Rich Dad, Poor Dad" author: "I'm a
bestselling author, not best writing author".

Anyway, I will try in November.

If it is something like "Introduction to JavaScript" I think it might almost
write itself. One could even take the structure from some book that already
exists.

~~~
Hates_
Thinking back to some example eBooks that have been popular and have done well
are those that are quite niche. Off the top of my head some that I can think
of are "Working with Unix Processes" and "Mastering Modern Payments". I don't
think writing another intro to Javascript would be a good idea.

~~~
facepalm
I think somebody wrote on HN a while ago that if a book for 50$ solves an
urgent problem, it's a nobrainer for a company to buy it. So I can imagine how
"Mastering Modern Payments" could have become a hit.

I was surprised that JavaScript courses are not that popular (or so it seems),
and the most popular I have seen so far are Python courses (in terms of
general programming courses - not sure what the most successful courses are
overall). I've seen a Python course with 40K viewers, at 99$ a pop.

------
3838
Udemy discounts like crazy - someone i know was featured in a video course and
gave me a free code for it and encouraged me to hand it out freely

they regularly email offering 90% off and other crazy discounts

~~~
mstolpm
Very true. I can confirm that Udemy is discounting courses all the time. There
are time-limited offers for selected courses (that are regularly priced for
149$ to 499$) for 10$ oder 15$ at least once or twice a month. At least one
teacher I know of has left Udemy for that practice, stating she feels kind of
robbed because she can't deliver quality for a few bucks, but can't complete
against all this bargaining offers effectively as well. Many teachers will
offer participants of their other courses steep discounts as well, especially
when starting new courses or updating older ones. The numbers of subscribed
students seem heavily inflated for many courses by these practices: Just
compare the number of (useful) reviews with the number of students subscribed.

~~~
alexyang21
I agree - the deep discounts lower average engagement by a lot. From what I've
seen, most students who binge-purchase don't actually start learning from the
courses they buy.

------
strategy
I have written ebooks and was considering courses, so let me offer an opinion
too. I opted to develop YouTube videos to promote my brand MindYourDecisions.
The reason is YouTube has many more users and you have a chance to establish
your authority and market books. If you get over 10,000 subscribers on
YouTube, you can also make paid subscriptions which you can use to sell
courses.

------
mkz
Looking at all the 'negative' comments about Udemy's marketing/discounts, I
get a feeling there is a _maybe small_ market for a niche Udemy (high cost
courses/ no discounts/ gimmicks)

~~~
fadzlan
Yup there is, especially for something niche.

One that I can think of is "Selenium 2 WebDriver Basics With Java". The the
topic is niche, and the course seems comprehensive. And for the price tag, it
somehow never gets to the discount bin(I know this since its been on my
wishlist for so long).

If the price is cheap, I would bought this as a casual learner, but if I am
really into testing with Selenium, I would not mind at all paying the full
price.

With the price, that course garners something like 800+ students. So if you
are into supporting your student when they are going through the course,
charging high is the way to go IMO.

