Hey,

The Spells Master is back!

Welcome to the 162nd issue.

Today's topics:

1. Wes Bos' Marketing Playbook

2. A tool to Do Non-Profit Research

3. One recommended video on Why Athletic Greens Failed

Wes Bos' Marketing Playbook

Wes Bos has been creating websites for 17 years, starting during the MySpace era.

He learned coding by designing MySpace pages for bands and moved on to freelance consulting during high school and university.

Wes began teaching at Ladies Learning Code in Toronto and transitioned to creating blog posts, YouTube videos, and online courses. His first product was a book on Sublime Text.

In 2017, he had over 30,000 paid users across 4 main courses, with "React for Beginners" being the most popular. His free course JavaScript30 has over 682,363 signups.

Wes has a large following, with 165,000 email subscribers and over 388,062 Twitter followers. Wes Bos also has a developer podcast called Syntax.FM which has a massive audience.

He started a YouTube channel in 2011 focusing on WordPress screencasts and began blogging, gaining popularity with posts about the Sublime Text code editor.

Publishers approached Wes to write a book on Sublime Text, but he decided to self-publish instead, creating both a book and accompanying screencasts.

He had about 2,000 email signups for the book, with 300-400 purchases in the first few days.

1. Transition From Freelance to Full-Time Teaching

Wes moved to teaching full-time about 1.5 years ago.

He initially balanced teaching with consulting and freelance work but decided to focus on video courses rather than books as he preferred doing videos to books.

Now he has 7 paid courses and 6 free courses.

Free Courses by Wes Bos:

1. JavaScript30 - 682,383 users

2. CSS Grid - 163,739 users

3. What The Flexbox?! - 102,000 users

4. Command Line Power User - ??? users

5. Learn Redux - ??? users

6. Mastering Markdown - ??? users

Paid Courses by Wes Bos:

1. Master Gatsby - 9041 buyers

2. Beginner JavaScript - 22,491 buyers

3. Fullstack Advanced React and GraphQL - 32,361 buyers

4. ES6 for Everyone - 27,660 buyers

5. React For Beginners - 36,322 buyers

6. Learn Node - 21,433 buyers

7. Sublime Text Power User - 7747 buyers

2. Teaching Philosophy and Approach

Wes Bos believes in simplifying complex concepts to make them easier to understand. For example, he avoids unnecessary dependencies in React and Node apps and focuses on fewer files.

He learns from in-person teaching by observing students' reactions and confusion points. These insights help him improve his online courses.

Wes addresses real pain points developers face. His JavaScript30 course was created to help overwhelmed developers by focusing on vanilla JavaScript without frameworks or libraries.

He provides free content and uses the reciprocity bias so whenever he launches a paid course, his followers feel the obligation to buy the course. The free courses showcase his teaching style and convert some users to paid courses.

3. Course Creation Process

Wes generates course ideas over time. His JavaScript30 course took 1.5 years to compile 50 exercise ideas, which he refined to the 30 best ones for the videos.

Next, he polishes and prepares the content. This involves improving the HTML/CSS for exercises and ensuring the latest ES6 features are used.

Recording and editing the videos is a time-intensive process. Wes spent 3-4 months working full-time on JavaScript30 to create high-quality, polished content.

While creating the course, he markets it by sharing screenshots and GIFs on Twitter to build hype before the launch.

4. Marketing and Audience Building

Twitter is a key platform for Wes. He posts "Hot Tips" 1-2 times per week, engages in conversations, helps others, and tweets about 10 times per day.

He used to use 🔥 emoji a lot back in the day to stand out.

In 2017, he had over 165,000 subscribers with open rates between 30-70%.

For launching courses, Wes sends 1-2 hype emails beforehand. On launch day, he uses a "hard ask" for sharing and encourages public commitment and accountability.

A "hard ask" refers to directly asking your audience to take a specific action to help promote your product when launching it.

When Wes launched his free JavaScript30 course, he sent an email that included a "hard ask":

"Hey, I legit just spent four months working on this thing. It would mean the world to me if you could tweet it out, or if you could send it to a friend or a coworker."

He does clever Black Friday emails too that convert well.

Wes has built his audience by helping others. He answers questions on forums like Slack (previously IRC) and creates content that addresses common problems developers face.

5. Creating a Custom Course Platform

Wes built his own course platform because he wanted to host both book and video content. The design of all his course websites stand out.

He disliked the user experience and checkout flow on existing platforms, and desired full control as a developer. He recommends platforms like Teachable for non-technical creators starting out.

He also recommends to avoid marketplaces like Udemy because they don't provide student email addresses.

6. Email List Strategy

Wes emphasizes building an email list.

He initially collected 2,000 signups without regular emails but now sends updates every 3-4 weeks and during course launches.

He uses email to understand student needs and tailor course content accordingly.

7. Course Pricing and Discounts

Wes's courses are priced between $100-140, with occasional sales.

He implemented geocoded discounts based on students' locations, adjusting prices to match local cost of living. Also known as PPP (Purchasing Power Parity.)

This has significantly boosted sales from 3rd-world countries.

8. Free Courses for Content Marketing

Wes uses free courses to drive traffic and sales.

His free courses are available on YouTube and his own platform. His most popular free course, "JavaScript 30", crossed 105,000 signups within 6 months.

His courses have sold over 55,000 copies but that figure is lagging by 2-3 years. His last course was on Gatsby which itself got shut down on September 2023 and it was dwindling down for a long time before that. The updated numbers should be atleast +10,000 by now.

He transcribes course content into blog posts for SEO and accessibility, spending about $3,000 to convert transcriptions into 80 blog posts for one course. This was done before OpenAI's Whisper was released. Now it would cost him around <$300.

9. Traffic Sources and Marketing

Wes's main sources of traffic are free courses, word of mouth, and Twitter.

He experimented with Facebook ads, spending about $10,000 and making about $13,000, but it was not as successful as hoped.

However, it helps grow his Facebook page following.

10. Student Engagement and Support

Wes provides a private Slack group for paid students and encourages free course students to find accountability partners.

He manages support through Slack rooms for each course, directing questions to the community, and personally answering about 40 emails per day.

11. Course Creation Process

Wes spends significant time on course development.

His "JavaScript 30" free course took 4 months to build full-time.

He focuses on creating high-quality, practical content, building fun, real-world projects in courses, and explaining concepts in an easy-to-understand, sometimes humorous way.

Wes plans to continue to create more courses. His aim is to help as many people as possible learn to code and advance their careers.

Napkin Math suggests that Wes Bos has over $200+ LTV and a conservative estimate of 70,000 buyers suggest that he may have made $10m+ from courses alone. The real numbers should be much higher if you include buyers from companies.

Credits to Indiehackers Podcast and Phil Ebiner.

A tool to Do Non-Profit Research

Guidestar allows you to easily search 1.8 million IRS-recognized tax-exempt organizations, and thousands of faith-based nonprofits.

This allows you to see the financials of US based non profits to help you with market sizing and forecasting.

One recommended video on Why Athletic Greens Failed

This video covers the story behind Athletic Green's Failure.

Now, failure is a harsh word and Athletic Greens (AG1) is still too big. But, the narrative is changing slowly. Influencers get paid massive amounts of money for pushing AG1.

Top Tweets of the day

1/

With time, technology becomes cheaper.

2/

Elon Musk is phenomenal at marketing. This is the first time I've even heard of Lucid.

3/

Josh Waitzkin is a great case-study on learning how to learn. He has a great book "The Art of Learning: An Inner Journey to Optimal Performance" that teaches you how to learn.

Rabbit Holes

1. How to turn Reddit conversations into sticky copy - Every copywriter tells you to use your customers' words to write copy but no one gives an actual example. Well, this one did.

2. The Secret to Building Healthy Habits - TIL the reason why habit trackers don't work in the long term. Turns out, human brain gets dopamine on unpredictable rewards. Predictable rewards are boring and slowly decreases the dopamine for the human brain. I have used habit trackers but always find them not rewarding in the long term.

3. Writing Checklists (V2) - Checklists for writing on X, LinkedIn, Newsletter, and just about anywhere. Best ones are the specific keywords to boost organic reach on X.

Until next time,

Your Spells Master!

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Read all the old case studies here.

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3. Atomic Habit's Secret Marketing Hack (LINK)