John Lindquist

John - I guess I saw it as, if someone launched Egghead today would it be more challenging due to the scale of the competition? Or does 2020 and all it has brought present a great opportunity for people looking to launch in this kind of area?

Benjamin Miller

The thing is, we're not "competing" with anyone. We're 100% bootstrapped and have always been playing a long game. We're just doing the best we can with the resources we have and the people we're connected to.

Our success is measured in "Can I wake up each morning and do what I want?" I believe we could replicate that success with the processes and values of egghead today.

Hi Subha, great questions!

• We're currently re-working this entire process based on the concepts of Understanding by Design. We're starting with an internal group at egghead with a few instructors to go as a group through a new process to set this all up. Our goal is to go from "publish what we want" to "research needs and provide materials that lead to maximum success for the subscribers". We've tradionally allowed instructors to publish lessons based on whatever they're using at work, but we'd like to make our content even better for the community and we know we need to do the eductional research to get there.

• For blog posts, I stick to a general "share what I've learned" formula. Sometimes that comes from research someone else's questions. Sometimes it comes from whatever I'm working on.

• Create content ;) But seriously, we have a guide up at howtoegghead.com that walks through our process for creating content.

Thank you John 😊

Hi Corey, thanks for the thoughtful questions:

1. I deal mostly with the "Instructor" side of things for egghead, so I'll touch on that. Our instructors have full-time jobs and personal lives. They're very busy. We help a lot of people get started on the instructor side of things, but then their lives get busy and we often lose contact with them. We've sunk a lot of time and effort into lessons that never happened.

We overcome this with patience and following-up. Sometimes years later. Instructors have always been grateful for our follow-ups.

1. I just used the Foam Gatsby Starter :D. I'm seriously considering moving to Next.js though as we're rebuilding egghead with Next.js and I'm absolutely loving it.

2. My wife's wedding ring.

1. Learner Advocates
2. How to run a community
3. Cohort/club/group learning and how to support it
4. The principles of "Understanding by Design"
5. Our instructor on-boarding process

This is so helpful John Lindquist. Thanks for sharing!

absolutelyJohn Lindquist

It's invite-based. You can read about getting invited here

We played (and are still playing) the long game. We worked on egghead on the side for a couple year before we had enough income to work on it ful-time. We never took VC money. We're 100% bootstrapped. We own the business and have complete freedom over what we do with it. It's wonderful.

Hey Aissa, great question. The best way to overcome perfectionism in content is by producing in the smallest bits possible. Can you make a perfect 3 minute video? Probably not. Can you make a perfect 20 seconds? Definitely!

Add up enough 20 seconds and you'll have a video you can post and be proud of. You got this!

There's a great podcast/article over at Indie Hackers that goes deep into our history and financials.

"egghead" is defined as "a person who is highly academic or studious; an intellectual." It's a bit pretentious as a brand, but I hoped it could be a term people would aspire to.

I also like the ".io" aspect. Input/output from one egghead to another since we all learn from each other.

Coming up with a great demo. Clear A->B before/after path. A quiet hour to record and go through the steps to get from A to B.

309 instructors. They're all my favorite!

Future goals all revolve around helping the community succeed. Higher quality material. Well-planned learning paths. Elevating anyone who visits the site.

We're bootstrapped. We're not competing with anyone.

John Lindquist

Thank you!

A wee follow up - do you use or have you considered using a third party learning management system or are you building everything on your own platform?

Benjamin Miller

We've looked at LMS's and more recently diving into SCORM, but we'll build out our own thing as we integrate exercises/progress/etc into our courses.

Yo Horacio,

Consistency, by far. Kind of like taking care of your health, doing a little each day goes a long way to take care of all the big things.

Amazed to read your journey of creating high-quality content that fits nicely into time budget. Alyssa, Essay editor at Secure Assignment Help - secureassignmenthelp.com in Australia.