Transitioning from Udemy to Leanpub?

[Sebastien ARBOGAST]

Hello,

A friend and I currently have a video course on Udemy about blockchain application development, we have 13000+ students, but it's becoming impossible to keep up-to-date in video format because the tools and techniques change so often, and video production requires way too much work compared to the revenue it brings, especially with Udemy's business model and in the middle of crypto-winter.

On the other hand, we script everything we shoot, so we have detailed written scripts complete with screenshots and links for every single lesson of our 16-hour course. And we figured we could recompile those scripts into an eBook on something like LeanPub and market it in a text format instead of a video format, which would make it easier to update.

Now there are 2 things we really like about Udemy and we still don't see how to port those to something like ePub:

1- Udemy does a lot of the marketing for us, including Facebook ads, SEO and so on. They basically sell our course for us and any attempt we've ever made at trying to get our own organic growth failed miserably, maybe because we're not good marketers, or maybe because Udemy are so good at it and have so much data. Does LeanPub help with that side of things, or would we have to figure out our own marketing to keep getting the eBook into more hands

2- One of the things we are really adamant about is supporting our students. We didn't want to release the course and leave it to our students to figure shit out on their own. We answer every single question they ask on Udemy's Q&A forum within 12 hours tops (often much quicker thanks to Udemy's instructor app push notifications), and this also help us identify where we have holes in our content, and how we can improve it in subsequent updates. I watched Armstrong's talk and he also insists on the importance of gathering feedback and establishing rapport with your reader community. My question is, does LeanPub offer something to create this kind of persistent discussion forum about an eBook, exclusive to people who bought the eBook, where we can answer their questions quickly and completely? And if not, what do other authors typically use to build such a community?

Thanks in advance for any answer.

Sébastien

[Len Epp]

Hi Sébastien,

Thanks for reaching out. We have recently been approaching Coursera course creators to see if they'd like to try Leanpub, and we were going to start reaching out to Udemy course creators next, so your message is timely.

The tl;dr answers to your questions are:

1 - We have monthly and weekly sale newsletters that reach thousands of potential readers, and we have a podcast, but other than that we don't do any active marketing outside the usual social media.

2 - We have robust forums for books and courses, using Discourse, which you can enable for a book or course after you publish it.

If you'd like to schedule a brief call on Skype or Zoom, I'd be happy to talk to you about how Leanpub works, to see if we'd be a good fit for you. You can email me at l...@leanpub.com to set up a meeting.

Kind Regards,

Len

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Len Epp
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@lenepp

[Paolo Amoroso]

Hi Sébastien,

in this post a Leanpub author tells how he put together a book from the scripts of an online course: Writing a Book as a Programmer.

[Sebastien ARBOGAST]

Thanks a lot for the link. Interesting read, even though a little overkill. Thankfully I scripted everything as if I was writing a book since we knew it would be in our plans some day.