#Preface I'll start this by saying I'm not a framework developer. In fact, I have little to no experience in open source software. If you asked me to recreate Lo-Dash I would deliver something laughable, surely. I'm just a guy who enjoys learning & building things, am always looking for better ways to build them and I've grown to enjoy writing JavaScript on the front and back end along my journey. It's a happy place to be.
Now, with this said, I'm sure there are factors I'm not taking into account when I think about the cash value of a video tutorial set- I'm merely going off of what I've seen and paid for in the past. It could be that I'm thinking about it all wrong, in which case I will see to rectify this situation.
#Initial seeking When I think about learning a new framework I first look through the docs and the github issues to see what's to be expected. Typically there's a learning curve which involves a week or two of 'getting into the mindset' to how things are done with that particular framework, so it's great to have a video tutorial from someone who has experienced the major gotchas and knows the ins-and-outs (if the video is made by the creator themselves, obviously this is the best scenario).
##Video sources There are a slew of video tutorial sites. Most of them distributing the courses for the developers as a joint venture deal, giving them a percentage based on views, popularity, etc. These sites cost ~$25/month for full access to all of their videos, 'buffet' style, if you will. Lynda/Nettuts/etc. fall into this category.
There is another form of providing video tutorials like CodeSchool and Treehouse who have all of their content created in-house. In my experience, the video is much more clean and highly edited. Not something I particularly look for, but it's nice icing on the cake. These are ~$25/month also.
Finally we have the raw developer-entrepreneur style tutorials. Perhaps you have seen an episode of Ryan Bates' RailsCasts, Derrick Bailey's WatchMeCode, or Joe Maddalone's EggHead.io. These guys produce content every week and offer a monthly subscriptions of $9, $14 and $25 respectively. This style of video tutorial is my favorite to watch because the content is more intimate rather than manufactured. Also, these seem to cut the cruft and get straight to the point; being succinct is important in case I want to rewatch the video. These guys know "Once I start making shitty videos, people are going to go somewhere else", and the content reflects this; they care about the content and work hard on delivering great videos. There's a reason Ryan Bates is considered the 'Bob Ross of video tutorials'- he cares.
Going along with this style of content, you have people posting videos on YouTube for free. Nothing beats free, but depending on the topic covered and I've found it's a bit harder to find what you want to learn on YouTube- it's very random and a lot of times it's just an intro video not teaching you anything you couldn't have read on the documentation site in an effort to get you to their blog or somewhere else to sell you something you don't want.
#Human JavaScript - Video Course: Build an App with React and Ampersand ##First impressions I searched 'ampersand & react' into Google to see if people were talking about using the two together, if there were any example projects to look at or possibly any blog posts talking about moving from Backbone + React. When I saw the title I said to myself "From Henrik himself- Perfect!" and then read 'buy access to the rest for $199'. My eyebrows pushed together in confusion. I scrolled up and down the page to be sure I wasn't missing anything (grab tea with Henrik in person, free &yet T-shirt, something) and read the text on the page in full and read the price again to make sure I didn't read '$19.99' the first time.
##State of confusion; a need for answers (This is the part when I sent you the tweet and went to grab some food while I made sense of this) $199 tells me you don't expect a lot of people to purchase the tutorial and this is the price you need to charge to cover your time spent with a bit of profit. This doesn't make sense to me either. With &yet sponsoring NodeUp regularly, you doing a number of talks lately and blogs talking about Ampersand and moving from Backbone, I would imagine there is a substantial following of developers to market this to. Especially with a lot of developers taking a serious look at React these days (if they haven't already).
Now, the number $199. After seeing the Gaslight Ember $499 course, I was wondering if you felt that Amperand + React would be taken less seriously if you sold it for less than this price. Honestly, I think $499 is ridiculous considering you can't ask a video questions; if you're going to pay that much, you might as well join a mentorship or bootcamp. It's one thing to work through a tutorial with a team, it's another thing to do it by yourself with nobody to bounce ideas off of for clarity.
###Thinking hypothetical numbers I wasn't able to find any stats on the number of subscribers to podcasts or number of developers in the world, so I'll keep things conservative.
- 100 ratings on NodeUp (not sure of the rating to listener correlation, perhaps 2k listeners)
- ~7,840 views on YouTube (first 6 videos that come up searching your name, rounded down)
- 6,627 Twitter followers
- 660 Github followers
We'll just use a chunk of the YouTube views as there are likely a lot of the same people in all 4 of the categories above, but it's highly likely you have a reach of 10k+ people.
- 5,000 people come across the tutorial set
- Let's say only a quarter of them are actually interested in using Ampersand with React: 1,250
- Of this number, they're pretty much already in the mindset of building something without a framework full of black magic, want to build with minimalism & modularity in mind, and know who Henrik Joreteg and &yet are. (fans). This means high conversion rate, especially if the price is a 'no-brainer'.
Magic price of tutorial set * 1,250 * 75% conversion
The higher the price, the lower the conversion. Yet, with a super low price there's a cap to the conversion- 100% conversion is close to impossible. If you're selling this for $20, that's the same amount of money &yet may charge a client for a typical real-time project. Maybe more.
##Evangelism All frameworks need the evangelist. Or, perhaps a team of evangelists (the community) can do it for them, as we've witnessed with Angular.
If I'm buying a video course, I'm much more apt to share the source with someone if I felt I got a lot of value out of it for the price I was charged. I'm not going to share the Ember course above simply because I don't know anyone that would pay for it. I imagine the dialog going something along the lines of:
Me: "I know you've been wanting to learn Ember, here's a course I found"
Friend: "It's $500 man. Seriously? What do you want me to do with this?"
This is like how your mom calls and tells you that you're on the right track with software development after she heard about the Facebook IPO 4 months after it happened. "Thanks mom" is the feeling here, but you're only nice because it's your mom.
Or on Twitter:
"I just finished this course, recommend to anyone wanting to learn Ember! (link)"
Every person that clicks on that link is going to see the price, and close the tab. Now I just look like an asshole for posting this link and it looks like I'm doing affiliated marketing for Gaslight. Another one of those dudes... gross. Unfollow.
Alternatively, on Twitter:
"Get in with the times, build an ES6 + Ampersand + React app with Henrik Joreteg (creator of Ampersand.js) for $27 (link)"
People that might not even know about Ampersand or have looked at React might find this interesting and now Ampersand becomes the default model layer to use with React. Now, I probably wouldn't post something so salesman-ey, it would be something more like:
"@HenrikJoreteg ES6 + Ampersand + React = awesome. Thanks for this (link)"
I'm much more willing (and likely) to post something like this, and the tutorial set will likely still be making money this time next year. When someone reads a tweet like this, they're going to click it to see what's going on- nothing cheesy about it. Me giving you a sincere thanks. Exponential reach depending on the person tweeting it.
#Final thoughts I understand you're not in the business of producing weekly video tutorials, which intuitively means that you can't just sell your set for $30 because it's the only one you plan on making. But I'd imagine that the more people that use Ampersand.js, the better for you and your business; and it's going to make money until something new/better comes along (it's gonna be a while). Now that the JS framework dust is beginning to settle, developers are now seeing that Backbone is still relevant and these monolith frameworks may bring hours of frustration down the line when their application grows larger.
I've only been writing JS for a few years but I'd say that Ampersand + React is finally a step in the right direction, and the more people and companies that adopt the minimalist approach the better for the community as a whole. Working 9-5 with a horrible architecture and nasty code is a nightmare and developers take this anxiety and frustration with them home to their families. Organized code is happy code, thus makes for a happy development environment and more stuff getting done.