How Peter is promoting his video course platform

Meet Peter Ullrich who lives in The Netherlands.

Peter is a senior Elixir developer and bicycle activist. He is also the creater of Indie Courses.

The story told Peter

I came up with the idea for Indie Courses after publishing my first video course, Build an MVP with Elixir. I was unhappy with the existing video course platforms and decided to fill the gap between basic ones, like Udemy and Gumroad, and the professional ones, like Kajabi and Thinkific.

Indie Courses helps creators sell their video courses with the most advanced tooling and lowest costs. It tailors towards professionals like software developers who want to monetize their expertise through video content without much hassle. On Indie Courses, they can just drag and drop their content, set a price, and start selling.

It took me 7 months to build the platform in my free time. My goal for the MVP was to build the must-have features and at least one feature that my direct competitors didn’t have.

The platform was first called “Yellow Spaceship”, but I rebranded it to “Indie Courses” to have a better name-product fit which made marketing easier. It’s a good practice to name products after what they do if you don’t have the marketing budget to educate buyers.

I started promoting Indie Courses on my social channels the day I left my day job to pursue the project full-time. An example below from X when Indie Courses was still called Yellow Spaceship.

Two weeks after I launched on Product Hunt, I had 60 newsletter subscribers, 30 user sign-ups, 6 draft courses, and 1400 unique visitors.

I also invited the students from my video course to join the platform and 115 students accepted. That gave me valuable user feedback and I improved the viewer experience significantly. So, within just one week, I had more than 100 users.

Another great lead magnet and SEO enhancer was a directory of indie video courses hosted on other platforms. I added 25 external video courses like this one or this one and sent every creator an email. That opened up multiple valuable discussions about the creators’ needs and current problems.

3 months after the launch, I had 80 creators, 200 students, and 5 published courses. My platform handled $7000 in sales and I earned $4500 with my existing courses. The platform’s MR is around $250.

Initially, I struggled to market the platform. I tried writing for long-tail, low-competition keywords - like this one:

“How much does YouTube pay for 1 million views”

That generated a few impressions but no clicks or sign-ups.

I eventually started writing technical blog posts about challenges I encountered while building the platform and the solutions I found. That generated a lot of traffic and quite a few sign-ups. My goal was to attract software developers from outside my bubble and it worked.

I also created a new video course within just 3 days and it made $2500 in its first week. That generated a lot of buzz and led to another 10-15 sign-ups.

My next steps are to finish a few features that nobody else has and then to approach creators directly through social media and email.