I decided to try self-employment in early 2023, and I had a contract cancelled at the very last minute. While I was on holiday, in fact! I wanted to make use of the free time I had, so I decided to write and publish a Udemy course. I’ve always enjoyed learning about programming languages or the cloud, and most of that has been through Udemy courses. So, why not!

My experience with tutorial videos

It’s worth noting that prior to creating this course, I’d already filmed a number of tutorial videos for programming. I’ve always enjoyed making them, and so I’ve been through a fair few failed attempts while I tried different ways of filming videos. My personal approach is to create a rough outline of each video and then to try and film it all in one take. I often make mistakes, so I leave enough time to easily edit out that chunk and then start again repeating the last ~15 seconds.

If you haven’t ever tried creating tutorial videos, I’d suggest filming a few and uploading them to YouTube. If you’re anything like me, it’ll take some time to get used to hearing your own voice and overcoming the desire to perfect what you film before you upload it.

Choosing a topic

Part of my motivation for creating the course was my experiences working with people learning AWS’ CDK. I wasn’t happy with the documentation that was available, and I felt it left out a lot of important tips, tricks and workarounds. At that point in time, CDK had a lot of rough edges, and I wanted to share the methods I’d found to make it easier to use.

If I could give you only one piece of advice, it would be to create a course that’s related to something you’re living and breathing every day. I’ve tried to make tutorial videos in the past for topics I was less excited about, and they were nowhere near as good.

How long did it take to make the course?

End-to-end it took me around three full weeks to film and edit the course. I was working on it full time, and spent a number of evenings getting the last few videos over the line. I didn’t have to spend very long researching any topics as I’d been working with CDK daily before starting. Expect to spend a lot longer if you need to brush up your own knowledge first.

I ended up with around eight and a half hours of content to upload to Udemy.

How much money did I make?

Udemy is very clear about how the revenue split works, and at the time of writing they pay 37% of the transaction value if they bring the user to the course. If you refer a user with your own link, you get 97%. The real learning here for me is that external marketing or using your own network is vastly more effective than relying on Udemy to bring in sales that don’t earn a huge commission. If I were to create another course, I would explore doing my own marketing or using agencies. If you go that route - let me know how it goes.

All in all, I made just over $1,000 dollars in roughly a year of sales with the course. At just over £6 an hour, it’s certainly not the best paid job I’ve ever had, but I really enjoyed making it and got a lot out of the process. Let me be an example of the fact that selling the course on Udemy requires work.

What advice would I give you?

There are a number of things that I would do differently if I created another course:

Editing software and video storage

I used iMovie to edit the course, and in reality would have been better served by using something with more functionality. I would normalize audio volumes across videos and found iMovie’s concept of projects quite clunky.

I also underestimated how much storage space would be required. I reached just shy of 900GB of video files, which isn’t super easy to store on a laptop with everything soldered in place.

Removing noise from the audio

I manually edited out most of the “mouth noises” I made while filming the video, but would’ve been better served by finding a way to automate that and investing in an audio setup that makes it less likely to happen. Take it from me: it’s a time-consuming and boring job.

Marketing

It’s mentioned above, but I’d explore ways to market the course myself. Any customer acquired for around seven pounds or less would’ve been a win.

Conclusion - would I do it again?

As I’ve mentioned, creating video tutorials was an existing passion of mine and so the lacklustre sales figures wouldn’t put me off from trying something again in the future. If I were to create another course, I would most likely release it for free on YouTube, and then build a community first. I’ve worked with some extremely talented people who’ve successfully built a following by consistently putting out really high quality articles around AWS. I think they’re very well positioned to do something like this with more commercial success.

For me, it’s much more about doing something that keeps my passion for tech going than creating a high-performing side hustle. Udemy users get a lot of value for the small sum they pay for courses, myself included, so you have to make your own judgement about if it’s worthwhile.