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Everything I Did Wrong While Launching My Free Online Education Platform
Six months ago I first publicaly posted about a platform I had built to deliver free online training on computing and security fundamentals. As of today, Roppers Academy has 400 registered students and is averaging growth of 30 users a week.
During the last six months, I have done just about everything wrong in terms of running a startup I can imagine, but this story does not start six months ago.
This story starts back in 2015, because I spent four years making the single worst decision a startup can make... waiting for the product to be perfect.
The story begins back in college, where I was assigned to be the training officer for my school's competitive cyber security team. We were faced with a challenge: how do you train a large number of newcomers to the team without taking up all of the training time of the more advanced members?
To do that, I decided that the team needed a curriculum that put a new student on railroad tracks, gave them exactly what they needed to learn and how to learn it, and then the only thing the teachers would have to provide would be answering questions.
Easier said than done.
I started with the simple part, creating the list of topics that I wanted students to learn. Then I went and looked for the best resources on the subjects. Then I found more things that I wanted to teach. This cycle lasted for two years.
[ Hindsight 1: there is literally infinite information on the internet, and new stuff is being created every day. Trying to be on the cutting edge and reading every article/list/resource that comes out is not making you or your material better, you are procrastinating. ]
By the end of my time at school, I was sort of happy with the curriculum and was ready to get it to students. At this time it was sitting in a GitHub repo, ready to go. After a bit of research on which platform I should go with, I decided on using the Moodle LMS because it was open source and infinitely customizable. I felt like I needed that as a hacker.
[ Hindsight 2: I could have had all of the material I made ready to go on a platform like Teachable in under a day. However, I didnt want to host my material on a platform I did not control, and felt that I needed access to everything to teach the way that I wanted to. (With that said, I love the custom platform I have built now and while it is still up in the air, I am very happy to have total control.) ]
With all that work left to do on making the Moodle platform suit my needs, life got in the way and I spent the next two years driving boats in San Diego. I used some of my free time to work on the project and fiddle around with content, but for the most part I was occupied.
Finally I came back from deployment (round 2: ballistic boogaloo) and started making the moves I needed to get this done. I went and registered the domain and made the webpage.
[ Hindsight 3: I wasted, and continue to waste a ridiculous amount of time on my damn static website. I should have gone with a sitebuilder like Wix or Squarespace from day one. The site in it's current state is not professional or well designed, and figuring out front end dev has been hell. I am writing my blog post in HTML right now like some sort of animal, and next I will have to make a design decision on howto implement blog posts to the site.]
I also finally went and built the Moodle server. Personalizing and adding the courses wasn't terrible, but then I went and wrote a bunch of custom code to make the site do what I wanted it to do. I need more thoughts here. ____[ Hindsight 4: This is the only part of my entire journey so far I am glad I did the way that I did. Preferably I would have started on Teachable and moved here once I had the time to do custom dev. If you are interested in owning your education platform, click here for more information.]
I still hadn't launched. At this point I felt very confident that I had the best course on the internet for teaching computing and security fundamentals. But I still did not have a single person registered. I had been working on this for about _______ months, and the material itself for ______ years.
At this time, I finally realized that I had an opportunity to transfer out of the boat driving side of the navy and into the Navy's Cyber Warfare engineer program, a highly technical developer program. I needed to spend the next few months preparing for the interview because I hadnt done anything technical in years, and if I didn't launch now, it was never going to happen. (I'm working on some courses that go over my prep process here)
So on Nov 6th, not a day I chose for any real reason, I went and launched to my Twitter audience of 150 people I didn't know and two Slacks I participated in.
[ Hindsight 5: I barely used my Twitter before this (and I still don't, which will be a topic in another post) and I didn't have a mailing list to email out to. If fact, I only created a mailing list and added ways to signup the day after I launched.]
But for a wrap up of the first four years of the existence of this project, let's go over where I went wrong again.
1. I spent too much time getting the material perfect, when it reached Pareto efficiency of 80% probably about a year in. 2. I didn't believe any existing solution was good enough to host my vision, so I delayed making the material available anywhere for TWO YEARS because of the work I still "needed" to do. 3. I did all the front end development for my website myself, despite having zero ability or design sense. 4. I launched to an audience of less than 300 people, of whom nobody cared about me or had any reason to listen.
I likely could have had a course better than anything else on the internet on a Teachable site with a Wix site pointing to it and collecting emails for my mailing list by the middle of 2017. Instead... it is launch day, Nov 6, 2019.
Click here for part two: the first 6 months.