I'm John Lindquist. Joel Hooks and I started egghead.io. AMA!
Hi, I'm John Lindquist 👋. Many years ago I bought the domain egghead.io and started posting lessons. Joel jumped in and turned it into a thriving business. Over the years, many other instructors and employees have joined us on our journey of creating high-quality content that fits nicely into your time budget.
I’m happy to answer questions about egghead, teaching JavaScript, getting started with making lessons, and lesson creation workflow. I’m a huge fan of automation and recently released automatoes.com. I’d love to discuss tips and tricks around optimizing dev workflow as well!
egghead: egghead.io
personal: johnlindquist.com
twitter: twitter.com/johnlindquist
AMA starts on 16th September 2020, 12PM ET or 4PM GMT or 9AM PT. Add your questions below.
Founder Scotch.io. DevRel DigitalOcean.
do you think you could start egghead.io today and it would be as successful as its become?
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?
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.
Freelance Web Developer
Hi John! Thank you for the AMA! I wanted to know
- How do you map out the topics or the syllabus for your courses?
- What is your process of writing posts?
- Your Pro-tip to become a successful content creator?
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.
Full-Stack Web Developer 💻 | Always Learning 📖 | Love for Plants 🌱
Hey John Lindquist
Thanks for the AMA!
What sort of challenges you have faced on making Egghead.io a thriving business and what steps did you follow to overcome them?
I see you are using Foam for your automatoes.com website. I love the Foam community. Do you have any resources you followed to publish your foam repository using Gatsby?
If you had to become an inanimate object for a year, what object would it be?
Hi Corey, thanks for the thoughtful questions:
- 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.
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.
My wife's wedding ring.
Developer Advocate at Commerce Layer
Hi John Lindquist, thanks for AMA!
You've been creating video content for years now, can you share a getting started guide, plan resource, and tools you used when you got started?
Co-founder & CEO, Hashnode
What are the five things you wish you knew when you started Egghead?
🙂 You can add more than 5 points if you want to
- Learner Advocates
- How to run a community
- Cohort/club/group learning and how to support it
- The principles of "Understanding by Design"
- Our instructor on-boarding process
Co-founder & CEO, Hashnode
Hey John 👋
Thanks for hosting this AMA. What's the process of registering a new instructor for Egghead? Can anyone sign up? Or is it an invite-only process?
What advice do you have for entrepreneurs who are just getting started and are trying to build an online business?
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.
Frontend Web Developer
I have a lot of things to teach to others,
I want to start a Youtube channel, but i'm procrastinating because of perfectionism. I want to produce perfect video tutorials. Platforms like Egghead.io set those standards very high!
Please give me some advices to get started and to overcome perfectionism.
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!
Hey John, thanks for the AMA.
What's Egghead's current ARR and MRR? I love the product and the tutorials.
There's a great podcast/article over at Indie Hackers that goes deep into our history and financials.
Tech Education Operations
Hey John! Thanks for doing this, I think Egghead is great. Two questions from me:
How do you make sure that your lessons are the right quality?
In online learning it is notoriously hard to sustain interest and retain students. What have you learned about this?
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?
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.
Web developer, & senior cloud manager
How many instructors do you have on the platform today? And who's your personal favorite and why?
Web developer, & senior cloud manager
What's an ideal lesson creation workflow according to you.
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.
Web developer, & senior cloud manager
Hi John, how did you come up with the name Egghead? What was the thought behind purchasing the domain name? Many users found it easy to remember the brand because of the name.
"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.
Hey John, congrats on making Egghead a success. I am a fan of the website.
What's your future goals with the website? Do you see yourself competing with Udemy and Coursera in the future?
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.
UI Developer making courses
You mentioned "we're not 'competing' with anyone. We're 100% bootstrapped". I love this mindset. Could you elaborate more on this and how you arrived at this model?
I think it's really easy for beginners to think they are competing with everybody for attention and feel bad because so many people are putting out great content.
I was chatting with Joe Eames about this, and his take was "the internet is huge. Even if you only have 1% of the market, you're set". My takeaway was that there is a giant pie and plenty of room for quality educators.
Any thoughts on this?
Hey John!!
What is more important to you, broadness (do a lot of things) or consistency (do a couple of things for a long period of time) ??
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.
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