Indie Courses goes into Hibernation
Hey folks,
I have made the decision to put Indie Courses into maintenance mode until further notice.
What this means to you
- Everything will stay as it is right now. Don't panic.
- Indie Courses will continue to function as-is and you will be able to sell your courses without any action required from your side.
- You can still sign up and start selling courses too!
- I will keep the servers running and fix any bugs that you encounter.
- I might even implement smaller feature requests and - maybe - even bigger ones too, if they are super important.
- I merged the Indie Courses newsletter with my personal newsletter. If you receive this, you're subscribed to it, so no need for further action.
But why?!
I love Indie Courses and it has been going well so far. However, I hit a bump lately that led me to rethink whether Indie Courses is the best use of my time going forward. And that is the "How to get new creators onto the platform?" question.
Now, as a first-time founder, my natural instinct when I started the business was to focus on the product. I wanted to build the best video course platform for software engineers, period. And that's what I did (at least to the best of my capabilities).
The feature set isn't complete, but the Indie Courses of today offers unique features that you won't find anywhere else (e.g. auto-invite students to your GitHub repo) and from your feedback, it seems that you like the platform too. I am super happy with what I've built and appreciate your support tremendously. But love and support don't pay my rent.
The Problem
When I announced Indie Courses, quite a few of you tested it out and created an account. But only very few uploaded some videos and even fewer actually published a course. This didn't surprise me because, I mean, who just has a complete video course lying around, right?
Over the months, a few creators switched to Indie Courses from other platforms and some even signed up for a monthly subscription! A few creators created a whole new course and published it on Indie Courses exclusively! All super exciting stuff and it showed me that if you're a video course creator, Indie Courses is attractive to you, which is great product validation!
The problem is that video course creators are few and far between. Creating a video course is hard, takes a lot of time, and not everyone feels comfortable enough to talk to a camera. That's why it wasn't surprising to me that only few created one.
How to grow
When I researched my idea of Indie Courses, I looked at existing platforms, their (estimated) revenue and thought: "Well, if I just make 1% of what these big, but not great, platforms make, I have enough" and I still believe this today. The problem is: How can you reach enough creators to get to the 1%? The answer is: "It's incredibly hard" and that's what I've experienced in the last months.
Unfortunately, there's no single community where all video course creators of the world mingle and where you can easily find and contact them. Instead, there are many communities which have only a handful of creators, so trying to find creators is like finding Waldo on a football field full of fans.
This is still a feasible business model if you have the funding to reach out to all these communities and to plug the creators from them. All of my competitors have that kind of money since they are all VC-funded. Alas, this isn't possible for a bootstrapped founder like myself.
After trying out many different marketing things, I realised that trying to find - and convert! - enough creators to make Indie Courses financially viable would either take a very long time or a lot of money. I don't have the money, but would invest the time, if there wasn't one other thing that recently came up.
What's next
I have recently partnered up with a good friend of mine to start another venture together very soon. I can't reveal anything yet, but you'll know about it by the end of the year. This venture shows so much more potential than Indie Courses, especially when it comes to the distribution model, that is: how to acquire new clients.
My experience with Indie Courses has made it painfully clear to me that distribution is many times more important than the product. You can make millions with an okay product if your distribution is on point. But a great product without - at least - an okay distribution is dead in the water.
That's why I decided to put Indie Courses into maintenance mode for now. If this new venture doesn't work out, I'll certainly come back to it. In fact, I'll still work on it a little here and there, but my main focus over the coming months will be elsewhere.
I'm not sad about this decision or think that I've wasted my time. Building a business is incredibly hard, and only first-hand experience can make it easier. I've learned an incredible amount while building Indie Courses and gained a whole new respect for anyone who's even remotely successful with their own product. Your support has helped me so much to become a better product manager too, and I appreciate it a great deal!
It seems to me that the best way to keep learning is to continue to trial-and-error with new projects until I reach a level of success that I'm happy with. I am sorry to put you in this situation, but I hope you understand. At the end of the day, we all have to eat.