Congrats! Some quick thoughts, then I've got a few questions for you...
Let's face it, there are many platforms out there already which are ideal for publishing a programming course. There are obviously pros and cons with each.
I'm glad to see Slip has such a straightforward and open revenue model. Some course platforms work on a royalty model where you are paid by minutes of your course videos watched... which can make it difficult to estimate how much you'll earn for all your hard work.
It's also nice to see that you're handling taxes and VAT obligations. Few do that. Udemy springs to mind as a platform that also handles tax, but there are others. I think going forward that more and more platforms will need to help their merchants handle tax, so kudos to you for thinking about it from the start.
Some of the platforms like Scrimba.com, Tuts+ and egghead.io are invite-only. I'm really glad to see you didn't go that route. However, those platforms will tell you they do it to ensure course quality and happier outcomes for students.
Which brings me to my questions...
Q1) Since you've created an open course marketplace, how do you plan to ensure course quality?
Q2) In the spirit of openness and transparency, I'm not seeing any links to terms of use, privacy policy, or policies that apply to instructors (licensing, payouts, dispute resolution, etc). For example here's Udemy's Instructor Terms (https://www.udemy.com/terms/instructor/) which references their promotions policy and various instructor obligations. Are your versions of those documents still in the works? If they already exist, are they only visible after you register (that would be an anti-pattern, but maybe there's a good reason)? Are you planning to make those viewable before someone signs up to the service?
Q3) Programmers aren't always natural course creators and effective teachers. Are you planning in the future to offer educational materials to help guide programmers on best practices for planning, producing, and publishing their course?
Q1) Right now, we're manually approving/denying courses for publishing based on a subjective quality bar. Our aim is to be more of a premium course marketplace for career developers.
Q2) Ah yeah we have a ToS, i'll add it to the home page rn. It's still evolving.
Q3) Yup we want to help more developers realize they can be teachers. Figuring out how to better take a dev from Never teaching -> Making money while creating real progress in their students, is a big goal
VERY interesting! Reading the README first paragraph, I see you mention this doesn't make sense for apps where anon users can see data. But what about when anon users can sign up for an account, THEN have access to sensitive data?
It might work, if you truly trust whoever signs up. The fundamental issue is that there's just one encryption key for the whole database, and you need to provide it to everyone who you want to have access to encrypted data. If you stop trusting someone for any reason your only recourse is re-encrypting the entire database, which is a painful offline operation. (You might also be able to support multiple encryption keys -- one per user, say -- but the library isn't really set up to make that convenient right now.)
We have aggregated supply and kept some on waiting list; we are focused on aggregating demand now! As we move on, we will have demand aggregation and supply aggregation teams
Did you look at Draft or Notion? I’d encourage you to give them a look (if only to see what your competitors look like)
To the points you mentioned above (word counter, privacy, etc)…
I do a similar exercise, but using Draft (https://draftin.com). Draft has a word counter, and is private.
Another option I’ve been exploring for this type of exercise is Notion (notion.so). The nice thing about Notion is it can replace Evernote, Draft, and Trello for me, is private, and works on desktop (native), web, and mobile (native). You can also create a calendar view where you can see your progress building your Seinfeld chain of consecutive days of writing.
Anyway…
Congrats on launching! Now the real work begins. :)
1. "Upvotes don’t give you anything unless they are from the people who are really interested in what you are offering."
Such a great point! Your goal isn't to game the upvote system, it's to get your product in front of interested people. All tactics you choose along the way have to keep this goal in mind, first and foremost.
2. This tip was fantastic: "If journalists don’t reply to your email 3–5 days after you pitch, it doesn’t mean they’re not going to cover you. I recommend sending a follow-up email in the evening of your launch — not the same pitch — with the result. You could even do it the next day so that you don’t bombard the journalist with the same press release over and over."
It sounds simple, but it's often overlooked. Follow up with journalists and media outlets (even if they didn't respond to your initial outreach) soon after your launch to brief them on your launch results.
