The next iteration

[koaning]

This is a place to discuss/give feedback about the recent announcement on the blog.

[louisguitton]

I think it's a great idea Vincent @koaning . I just caught up with it in your email today and tried to gather my thoughts.

What you've built here is a tremendous resource for juniors learning new skills, for seniors to help them articulate their mentoring (or brush up), and for managers as well to structure a learning and development path for their teams. This is my inarticulate way to list out the "personas" your "product" serves. I'm sure the direct user feedback you've received over the years can (has) help(ed) you build a much more precise idea of them.

If you're looking for people "who've done it before", take a look at what https://roadmap.sh/ did. They started as a free resource + 1-man show too, and recently the founder quit his day job and went full time on this, as well as introduced a login system.

Concerning monetizing streams, the 2 options you allude to seem fair and natural: Advertising or "SaaS-ifying" (subscriptions or 1-time payments for courses or products). Although in your case, rather than Advertising, I would call this Influence because I guess you'll want to be calm. Does calm = picky? advertising only tools that you endorse can help you find your path. Check what https://www.youtube.com/@t3dotgg does in the web development space, he has a lot of similarities with you (although at a bigger scale): great youtube content, great open source work (e.g. https://create.t3.gg/), a day gig (for him it's his own business https://ping.gg/ not his employer but it's the same) and endorsing only brands that he can advocate for.

In both cases though, I think the login wall is a great and cheap/easy first step, because it will give you data to learn from about engagement of your users, that you can show to advertisers or use to learn your market fit for your SaaS. So in terms of feature or work prioritisation, I would just go for that instead of investing more into content short term.

Lastly, I'm sure you've got great data from your newsletter, but nothing beats a few Customer development (or User research) calls. Those can be expensive in terms of time, but they will help you test your hypothesis. I'd suggest reaching out to a few of your newsletter followers for a 30 min chat. Or wait for the login wall and reach out to a sample of users that engage differently.

Keep on the good work!

[plattenschieber]

When I encountered calmcode the first time, it reminded my of https://www.destroyallsoftware.com - Gary also provides some free content and is a one-man-show and merely relies on word of mouth.

I enjoyed his video lectures as I do yours, but when he came up with the execute program platform, it immediately struck with me. I think it's about the way of learning new skills. His engaging platform uses spaced repetition. You'll get rewarding feedback, which ultimately made me stick to the subscription for a longer time. So far, it's the only working learning approach which is backed by research. There is little so engaging as the direct reward getting from a computer 😅

I would love to calmly exchange Ideas with you ✌️