Lessons learnt from publishing my programming course
Tags: course, lessonslearned, go, coding
Published: 2022-02-05 16:46:29

---
title: Lessons learnt from publishing my programming course
published: true
date: 2022-02-05 16:08:04 UTC
tags: course,lessonslearned,golang,coding
cover_image: https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/lwpw07mlglfwoe350sci.jpeg
canonical_url: https://pmihaylov.com/learngo-lessons-learnt/
---

I’ve been working on my course — [Learn Programming with Go, One Game at a Time](https://www.udemy.com/course/learn-programming-with-go/?referralCode=305C0004BD6402F88FC3), for nearly a year & made many mistakes along the way.

Nevertheless, I finally published it & earned $2,158.25 in a month:

![](https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/464/0*wkSTkLWaqR_5jTtz)

Here’s what I’ve learnt along the way 👇

### Getting started is scariest

One of the scariest things of making my course was getting started.

I’ve been teaching programming to 2000+ students since 2015 in bootcamps & universities, but I never felt ready to make my own course.

I realised that I never will be & took the leap. Best decision ever!

### It’s harder than it looks

Initially, I thought designing the curriculum & recording the videos is the bulk of the effort.

There was so much more — choosing the right platform, video editing, marketing, designing the logo, etc…

I thought that making the course would take me ~3 months in total. I ended up spending more than a year working on it.

But most of that time was lost because I had no clue what I had to do & missed many opportunities to move efforts in parallel.

For example, I first spent 3 months recording all the videos & just then started to look for a video editor to edit all of them. If I do this again, I’d rather do both of those in parallel — record one week’s worth of content & send it over for editing.

What’s more, I started thinking about the course poster only after everything else was ready. Little did I know that would also take more than a month because the illustrator I hired had too many orders in their queue.

If I had known all this & optimised my workflows, I expect I would have been able to finish everything in 5–6 months.

### Choosing the best platform

In terms of platform, I thought about building my own at first, but quickly realised that’s infeasible, unless I have a year or so to spare.

Hence, I decided to use one of the existing teaching platforms. The ones I was considering were [Teachable](https://teachable.com/), [Slip](https://www.slip.so/) and [Udemy](https://www.udemy.com/).

The first two looked good but I thought they were more suited for creators with established audiences.

I chose Udemy because I could keep most of the profits from my channels but they also offered free marketing on my behalf for a bigger commission, which was fair.

### Pitfalls to watch out for when recording

Recording the videos seemed trivial but there were some pitfalls to watch out for:

- Maximise your IDE/Browser/etc font size.
- Record at max possible quality.
- Don’t record \w low energy. Hard to fix later.
- Have the video editor in mind. Don’t make them guess.

### To video edit or not

At first I thought about doing it myself.

And I did… for a single lecture, which took me more than 20 hours.

Totally not worth it. Hire a good video editor who’ll do it much faster at a reasonable price.

[Fiverr](https://www.fiverr.com/) is a great place to find one.

### The beautiful course poster

Fiverr is also the place I found an amazing illustrator for the course poster.

Some might consider this micro optimisation, but for me, it was totally worth it. I don’t care if it brings more engagement or not, I just love it.

![](https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/960/0*leAc74DRn5DCVPw7)

### The dreadful marketing…

In terms of marketing, I shared the course \w my inner circle first — friends & family who gave me good initial reviews.

Next, I shared it via Linkedin to my professional circle.

But what worked best was [sharing it](https://www.reddit.com/r/golang/comments/rz0bjz/learn_programming_with_go_one_game_at_a_time/) to the Golang community on reddit.

What didn’t work was using twitter promotions. [My tweet](https://twitter.com/PreslavMihaylov/status/1479460688028487682) got good engagement, but not many actually bought the course.

I spent around $115 for a single day, which lead to 3 people buying the course.

I’m probably just a marketing newbie ¯\\_(ツ)\_/¯

### Conclusion

Finally, no matter how optimised my setup is, the most important thing for me is delivering very high-quality content.

I’d rather grow to be a niche instructor with courses students adore vs. pushing my way through with growth hacks & delivering sugarcoated money-grabbers.

If you wanna learn more about my journey, follow [@PreslavMihaylov](https://twitter.com/PreslavMihaylov) on Twitter.