DeusExMachina

As a business owner, I can tell you this is next to useless. All you get for each entry is an amount of money and a link to their landing page. You have no idea how they make that amount.

Sure, you can get some ideas, but they are a dime a dozen. There is no guarantee you can replicate any of those. You might fail with a better product, or thrive with something not as good.

My business could be on that page. You can put me between 5K and 7K MRR. If you go to my website, you will see a landing page with an opt-in and a blog with some articles. If you join my email list, you will also get pitched my courses when I open them.

You would still not have the slightest idea about:

- how long it takes to write articles, or why I publish them (not) that often;

- the SEO strategies I use;

- how I get traffic besides blog posts;

- how much I spend in advertising and where I advertise;

- how big is my email list;

- my positioning;

- how I write landing pages, email funnels, and sales pages;

- why I have those courses and why they are priced that way;

- my opt-in and conversion rates, and the lifetime value of a customer;

- how long it takes to create a course and how I decide what to put inside;

- all the business and copywriting courses/coaching I took and I still take;

- what I discuss with other business owners in my bi-weekly mastermind;

- how much I spend to run the business;

- how many freelancers I employ;

- what are my plans to expand;

- what I tried already and did not work;

- why the things I do work for me but might not work for you;

- and more things that don't come to my mind at the moment.

I have friends who followed a workshop with him and had good results.

He also claims to have studies that support his method. I don't know if that's true, but I would look there more than the shows he's been on. If he wants to reach larger audiences, he will surely accept any invite.

I often see comments like this one that misunderstand value for how something is achieved.

Value is decided by the market according to the utility of the service. I happily pay $22 per year for Pinboard to keep a few bookmarks with tags. That's also storing "tiny text files" but I could not care less. I could even implement something similar myself. And yet, I find the value it provides worth paying.

Another, more extreme example. I am part of a $5000 business program. Last week, I got a single piece of advice that I consider already paid for the entire program. The delivery was 20 minutes long. It was not even something original invented by the lecturer, but it can be found in some books. And again, I don't care. The value is in the impact, not in how the advice that was discovered or delivered.

If I did it strictly for income, I would have gone out of business long ago. I am an iOS developer and I teach iOS development.

I obviously don't love every aspect of it, but still. Income is not a good motivator, especially when you are on your own. You have to like most of what you do, including the business side. I do write code, but most of my time is spent on text for articles, courses, emails, sales pages and video transcripts.

Regarding the technology, I use Wordpress with a couple of plugins. On Udemy you have to compete with a ton of low-priced low-quality stuff and you have no way to differentiate yourself from that.

i actually hate subscriptions like those, both as a customer and as a seller.

I prefer to buy/offer a high value course with a price that matches it. I bought several of such corses myself in the past years.

I do offer payment plans for people that can't pay a big lump of money at once, but that's not a subscription they can stop. They still have to pay all installments.

Yes, my basic course is $500. My advanced one is $1.000 and it's probably underpriced. Most of my students buy both courses.

> I have over 40,000 students taking my online courses and they have generated a few thousand in gross revenues.

I have 400, and I made a living out of it for the past couple of years.

Sure, I was earning more when I was a freelancer. So, I guess his point stands, I am losing money in that sense. And if money was the only metric, he would be spot on. But money is not the only reason.

It's also true that most people just wing it, thinking they will make easy money online. And then, fail.

But well, guess what. Business is hard work. Any business. Creating educational material is not any different. A lot of work goes into positioning, copywriting, marketing, and sales. I would like to see his.

I know many people making excellent money with online courses. A couple of them are in the bi-weekly business mastermind I attend. Heck, if Apple didn't introduce SwiftUI two years ago, forcing me to re-do my courses from scratch, I too would be doing great, instead of just OK. But well, that's just "cost of doing business".

So, saying "you are going to lose money with online courses" is the same as saying "you are going to lose money if you start a business". I don't think that's a sentiment shared here on HN.

Hi everyone. I have been an iOS developer for a decade now. I realized long ago that most iOS apps are made of the same parts, and most iOS development work is consists of building the same things again and again.

That became even more evident since SwiftUI came out, where I find myself typing the same code again and again. Code snippets somehow alleviate the problem but have never been entirely satisfactory.

I was frustrated enough to make a macOS app to take away all that repetitive work (which I made in SwiftUI). The app allows you to structure a full app with a few clicks and then generate code you can export and run in Xcode.

I released the MVP some time ago, which allowed only to structure an app's navigation flow. Still, that was already a huge time saver for me. I am now adding more and more features to the app, to include the most common code iOS developers write.

The app is not very flexible yet, so there are limits to what you can do, but I am slowly working towards a more powerful editor. My objective is to, at least, get to a tool you can use to build a wireframe quickly, which you can then transform directly into an app that needs only minor tweaks (at least, UI wise).

And, after that, the article proceeds listing all the reasons why our sun, planet, and species might be very different from what you might find in other parts of the universe.

Which is actually what would make us more interesting, not less.

When I was a kid, I wanted to be a game developer. I am happy I didn't go down that route, all I hear from the industry are nightmare stories.

The current app structure does not allow for community components. Not even for components created by me... But it's a good idea I didn't think about.

At the moment, it's all pretty straightforwardly coded. I first aimed at having an MVP in the app store, so the functionality for the app is now limited. In my roadmap though components will be rearrangeable, allowing for more complex UIs and I am evolving the codebase in that direction.

The rest of what you mention is indeed in my plans. The idea is exactly that: too much time is spent on those same things.

A macOS app to quickly create iOS apps and generate their SwiftUI code: https://purecreek.com/vulcan

I released the MVP in November, which only allowed structuring the navigation of an app. Since then, I released incremental updates adding more and more content, covering the most common iOS UIs.

The idea is to get it to be a full-fledged editor, but not as complex as to lose its initial purpose of creating apps quickly with a few clicks to save time on boilerplate code.

That could apply if they were raiding the house of some violent gang member, not a scientist from which they only wanted some electronics.

That's until the behavior becomes pervasive enough that scripts start stripping emojis from names.

It looks like bacteria that eat rust do exist: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/news/2010/12/101210-new-s...

This is not a paradox though, as your copy and paste states. It's just a theorem (as you stated) with a proof by contradiction. A paradox must be self-contradictory under all circumstances.

It would probably be simpler to add a second camera at the back of the player, showing is screen and surroundings.

I often read backlinko.com and ahrefs.com

Many agendas masquerade as "conservation of our ecology" when they are none of the sort and produce no results or even the opposite of what they claim.

The fact that you like it is no reason to not look at what's behind it.

The fact that you don't find anything that you need there does not mean it's the same for everyone.

In some circles, Facebook is the only way to communicate and organize events. If you are not there, you are cut out in real life.

I read a couple of comments here from people alleging that the judge is trying to protect Apple. According to Wikipedia, in the past, she "adjudicated various cases against Apple": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yvonne_Gonzalez_Rogers

I keep reading this analogy, but it does not make sense.

Apple is controlling access to customers with iOS devices. There is no alternative.

Epic is not. Any competitor can sell to the same people that buy from Epic's store.

> “Walled gardens have existed for decades,” said the judge. “Nintendo has had a walled garden. Sony has had a walled garden. Microsoft has had a walled garden. What Apple’s doing is not much different...

Shouldn't a judge look at what is allowed by the law, instead of being the devil's advocate and say "those guys have done it for years, so it's fine"?

Something might be a long standing practice and still be against the law. Something might have not been against the law in the past and be against it now. I'm not saying that it is, but that's what the judge should base his argument on.

Common and reasonable according to which standards? One of the arguments of Epic in court is that Apple set the standard and other stores are simply following it.

I put my phone in "do not disturb" mode for the entire day. Removing notifications altogether was a great improvement, without getting rid of the phone altogether. You go from responding to picking it up when you decide to.

I don't find it a particularly usable or appealing website, but I have been using it for a long time and I never hated it as the article implies.

> generate a report of broken links and allow me to update them manually just in case a site or two happen to be down when my build runs.

SEO tools like Ahrefs do this already. Although, the price might be a bit too steep if you only want that functionality. But there are probably cheaper alternatives as well.

> I'm sure the experts disagree on some points

That is quite an understatement, given that many experts made complete 180 turns contradicting what they said earlier.

But let's assume that they all agree on some point. Epidemiologists are still epidemiologists, i.e., people that know about diseases. They can inform you about how viruses spread, or what measures work best.

But they don't decide policy. Society needs to balance much more than just this epidemic. No intervention has zero unintended consequences.

Something that is getting clearer as numbers show more and more that the lockdowns so loved by the experts cause far more damage in other aspects of life, like premature death of untreated cancer patients, suicides, starvation, and so on.

Funny how any ideology can take our common beliefs and say: "See? You are one of us".

I didn't know who this guy was until he died last week and was celebrated as a great thinker. I am not familiar with his body of work. But if it's along the lines of "all good is on my side and all bad is on the enemy's side" he was not a thinker. He was just an ideologue.

Agree or disagree, none of those things in the list sounds like your "I like not having a choice." But I guess that's how you want to read them.