Qvault is a code-in-the-browser education platform with a focus on computer science (not just coding or web development)
My name is Lane Wagner I'm the technical and only founder. I work in Go and JavaScript mostly, and want to empower students that never went to university to be able to learn the fundamentals they probably missed out on in boot camps and other online courses
I know many developers personally who never got a CS degree, and they struggle to move up in their career or to move to more techincally challenging positions
I released the first course "Go Mastery" in June 2020. Since then I've been doing my best to build out the entire curriculum, with the goal being all the content you would consume in a CS degree at university.
I currently have 2,400 students signed up, and we are growing faster every day
My biggest struggle has been marketing and UI/UX. I'm a technical guy, and I do backend work at my day job. Trying to learn how to build beautiful customer experiences has been a huge learning curve.
I have a day job still, so I'm only able to work 2-4 hours/day on Qvault. I typically spend 25% of my time writing courses, 25% writing blog posts (seo marketing), 25% building out the platform itself (coding) and 25% doing other marketing/business development type work.
Getting 1,000 sign ups. That was such an awesome day, it proved to me that there is a need for this kind of platform.
Launching new courses and doing promotions in existing coding communities has worked fairly well. I'm still trying different strategies to see what works best. Qvault's blog also has lots of followers and they regularly convert into students and customers.
I built the product, then I laucnhed it, then I promoted it organically.
Yes... but it was super underwhelming, I think I did it too early and with not enough experience. I'm hoping to relaunch in 2021 on those platforms after I've made "significant changes"
Direct sales of gems. Gems are the currency of Qvault, its a gamified platform where you can buy gems for cash, earn them for completing assignments, or y unlocking achievements. Those gems are then used to purchase courses.
Biggest challenge has been trying to break out of a linear growth pattern. I have been growing, but not at an exponential rate like I had hoped. It's been a slow grind. I've recently released refer-a-friend and affiliate programs to try to combat that slowness.
Seo. Seo. Seo. I've tried paid advertising, and it just hasn't worked for me. The cost per click is waaaay to high for what I want to price-point of my courses to be. With that in mind, I blog away and pay some other freelance writers to blog as well.
Our Google traffic has been the main source of growth.
Yeah, I should have had a better model sooner though. The main two ways are through our Discord community (the link is on our contact page and is the "help" button in the courses) and then recently I've had a google form that students can fill out to get some free gems.
Market and get feedback first. Before even launching the product. This was hard for me because I'm a coder and engineer. I'd rather just build the damn thing.
AWS, golang, javascript, Vue, netlify, github, wordpress, mailchimp, stripe
I guess me by default
Hmmm.. I haven't read any business books in a while to be honest. Back when I did though I really liked "Thinking fast and slow"
Get so much feedback. Launch a sign-up form before you have a product. Offer rewards for feedback.
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