🎉 2021 in Review 🎉

The past year has been challenging for soo many different reasons both personal and professional, for myself and I’m sure for everyone reading this post.

Whilst things have been challenging, I always enjoy taking a moment at the end of the year to take a step back and recap on the challenges that have been overcome and the progress that has been made.

The Challenges 🏋️‍♂️

The challenges below represent just some of the challenges I’ve faced over the last year growing TutorialEdge.

• My own inexperience 👀 - At the start of this year, I had very little experience when it came to offering a premium subscription service. This past year has very much been a trial by fire scenario in which I’ve had to deal with all the new and unexpected issues as they arose.

• Bugs Galore 🐛 - At the start of the year, there were a number of bugs with the system that would allow for a number of strange edge-cases that ended up needing manual intervention to fix. Thankfully, I’ve been able to remove most of these edge-cases and the amount of support tickets I now receive is fairly minimal.

• Content Creation 🤔 - Figuring out how to improve my courses is an ongoing challenge that I’ll constantly be facing. I’m hoping that in the new year I’ll be able to bring on some additional help to ensure that all new content is the very best quality, but this in itself is a challenge that will require a lot more thought.

• Work-life balance ⚖️ - When you are the sole-founder of a business, it’s incredibly difficult to enjoy downtime when things are on fire, or when you have ideas you want to implement/courses you want to write.

  I’ve tried to ensure that, at all stages of my journey, I don’t fall into the trap of becoming one of those #hustleporn people who advocate for everyone to wake up at 5am to go to the gym and respond to emails.

The Wins 🎉

• 900+ Customers 🕺 - If you had told me a year ago, that I would be able to sell my courses to over 900 people, I would have had trouble believing you. The first month I started offering my courses, I saw maybe 1-2 people onboarding onto the site every week.

  As the selection of courses on the site has grown, the value proposition for people has changed and with that, I’ve seen a surge in people willing to purchase my courses.

• Over 1 Million Unique Visitors 🤯 - In terms of traffic, the site has received well over 1 million unique visitors over the past 12 months. It’s likely that this number is even higher, however I migrated away from Google Analytics to Plausible at the end of March to improve user’s privacy on the site and these numbers are only taken from that point onwards.

• $2,000+ MRR 📈 - growing from a measly $90MRR in January of this year to over $2,000 MRR has been quite a journey. Ensuring that growth has been consistent every month has been a challenge, but it’s incredible to see how far this has grown. I’m hugely grateful for all the support from everyone in the community and I’m hoping that in 2022, I can continue to serve you all with a better experience and improved content!

2022 Objectives 🎯

Going forward into 2022, I have a few objectives that I’m going to be focusing on.

• Improved Content Selection - I’ve mainly focused on Go this past year, however, I want to start branching out and focusing on different technologies. Ultimately, I want to have a clear selection of courses that I personally would have found useful when I was just starting my software engineering career.

  I want to start building courses on topics like Unix Fundamentals, Mastering Git, as well as on topics like Kubernetes and Docker. This, in itself, will be a lot of work, but I’m hoping that these efforts will help others in accelerating their tech careers.

• Improving Site Engagement - I want to improve the amount of value each and every person is getting out of the site. I want to improve the number of lessons watched every day and also increase the number of challenges being completed.

  When it comes to achieving this, I have a few ideas in terms of improving the way notifications work for the site and also increasing the number of challenges, as well as the quality of challenges.

  This is definitely one of those topics that I’m still actively researching and learning more about, however, if you have any suggestions about how I can improve on these things, then please let me know!

• Increase the site’s discoverability - Free content has been my biggest source of new customers over the past year. This free content has ranked highly on search engines and brought in thousands of developers a day onto the site.

  In 2022, I want to continue to expand on, and improve this selection of free content to help increase the “marketing funnel”. More free, high-quality content == more developers discovering the site and ultimately this results in more conversions onto premium subscriptions.

Of the 3 objectives, the first and second are arguably the most important. I want to ensure that I’m serving my existing customers, to the best of my abilities and continuing to provide value to them month-on-month.

Bringing in new customers is important to the continuing growth of the site, however, it’s arguably more important to ensure that existing customers feel valued to ensure they don’t leave the site forever.

Conclusion

Overall, 2021 has been incredible for TutorialEdge and the community around the site has grown tremendously.

I very much hope that everyone is enjoying the courses and finding value in them, and as always, I’m open to all comments/critiques and suggestions. If you’d like to get in touch, then you can reach me directly by emailing support@tutorialedge.net.

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