I’ve hit my first major milestone for my Unit Testing AngularJS Course on Udemy. After 3 months – I’ve got 1,350 students, an average rating of 4.43 and made a profit of just over $1000!
When I first thought about starting the course I planned it as more of a learning exercise to become better at teaching and at AngularJS. Creating the lectures actually took much longer than expected (turns out I’m pretty horrible at screencasting!). Those 2.5 hours of content took about 50 hours to make, spread out over a couple of months. When I finally launched the course, I was just relieved that it was over and that I could shift my focus back to other projects that I had sidelined. I had no hope of making much money on it, and didn’t plan on following up with more courses any time soon.
But after hitting the first $100 in a couple of days, I thought that this could become a real way to earn some money. I’ve already covered the time put into making it, including the extra bonus lectures and answering student questions! On average, I’ve been earning about $10 a day. That may not seem like much, but at this rate I could earn over $3500 by the end of the year!
Looking back, I wish I would have done more to promote the course. When I first gave it away for free, I should have asked people to sign up to a mailing list. I should have created a Unit Testing AngularJS Facebook page for the students. And I should have uploaded the course to other sites apart from Udemy, such as Teachable. I didn’t do any of that was because I didn’t think I’d get such a great response from the community and wanted to minimize my exposure just in case the whole thing blew up in my face like microwaved porridge. But now that I’ve seen the potential, I’m excited to see how far I can take this project.
The first dollar earned, the first student review and now reaching $1000 in profit – hitting these milestones has been immensely satisfying and has made all the swearing and struggling with audio equipment worth it. Not only did making this course make me a better developer, it also showed me that anyone can learn to teach and make money online with little experience and reasonable hours. So if you’ve got an idea that you’ve been aching to try out and show to others – go for it. Listen and learn, be patient, be persistent, become better and be better off for it.
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