SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
785: He Makes $500k+ From Udemy Helping You Code
17 Sep 2017
Chapter 1: What is DevSlopes and how does it help beginners learn to code?
Evan, again, he's leading, really designed the experience at really the company leading the way in terms of learning to code, going from nothing to an expert at devslopes.com. They do most of their revenue. In fact, 600 grand in 2016 through other platforms like Udemy.
Now they're building their own technology where you can go to their own site and sign up for $20 a month kind of subscription courses. They have 130 folks signed up for that. They're only a month in, so doing about 2,600 bucks a month there. Their goal is to do a million dollars this year with, again, their team of about five, or sorry, about eight people.
This is The Top, where I interview entrepreneurs who are number one or number two in their industry in terms of revenue or customer base. You'll learn how much revenue they're making, what their marketing funnel looks like, and how many customers they have. I'm now at $20,000 per talk. Five and six million. He is hell-bent on global domination. We just broke our 100,000-unit sold mark.
and i'm your host nathan latka many of you listening right now don't have time to listen to every b2b sas ceo that i've interviewed if you want to get access to the database i've created with year-over-year growth rates customer accounts margins and many many other data metrics and data points you can go to getlatka.com here's the thing though this that database
Chapter 2: How did DevSlopes transition to a SaaS model?
I keep it to myself. It's so freaking valuable. And to preserve the quality of the data and make sure that the people that have access to it have a true advantage, I'm only letting 10 companies on each month. So we're full this month, but you can go to getlatka.com to get on the waiting list for next month. And look, there's big people on the waiting list.
I mean, the biggest VCs you've ever heard of, you've probably heard of them. They're big, private equity, billions and billions under management. So it's an impressive waiting list. Go get on now at getlatka.com. This is episode 785. Coming up tomorrow morning, Mitchell Reichka joins us. His company is called JuneGroup.com.
His ad tech company used $1 million in mezzanine debt to grow really profitably. Tune in to figure out how you can use this mezzanine debt to grow your company as well. Hello, everyone.
Chapter 3: What are the revenue streams for DevSlopes?
My guest today is Evan Leong. He's the VP of product at a company called DevSlopes, a learn-to-code platform focused on taking beginners to paid professionals through curated project-based videos. He was always involved with startups since 2015 when he took the leap from a corporate job to join the startup world full-time. Evan, are you ready to take us to the top? Absolutely. Let's do it. Good.
All right. What is DevSlopes and how do you make money?
So DevSlopes is a learn-to-code platform. We're available for iOS, macOS, and tvOS. We're going to come out with Windows soon, but basically we deliver videos to you with tutorials on how to code.
And so, I mean, it's like Code Academy?
Sort of. It's almost like Treehouse, but we think we're a little more down-to-earth, and we're really effective at taking people, like you said, from beginner to paid professional.
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Chapter 4: How did DevSlopes successfully fund its initial launch?
Okay, and how do you make money?
Uh, we, so we've been around for around a year, year and a half, and we have been selling our courses online, um, and through our platform. And then more recently, like in the past month, we just coded, uh, our subscription model. Um, so we're starting to convert over to a SAS.
Do you have any customers yet that are SAS?
Yeah, we do. So we launched last month and out the gate, we garnered around 130 subscriptions.
Okay. And what do those people pay on average and what are they paying for?
Um, on average they pay around, uh, 20, a little over $20 a month. Um, cause we have, uh, plans ranging from, you know, like $15 a month for the year or, you know, $25 a month, uh, for the month. Uh, and they're paying for all access to, to our content.
Well, some of them, some of them, you know, give access to some of the content and then the higher priced ones are, you know, you get everything that we ever make.
And are you guys funded or have you, or are you bootstrapped?
We are funded.
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Chapter 5: What strategies does DevSlopes use to retain customers?
We raised money on Kickstarter, and then we got a private investor for a little bit more. How much on Kickstarter? We raised around $190,000. We're actually really surprised because you know how software projects normally don't fare that well on Kickstarter, so we're really blessed to have that happen.
How did you make sure that happened? I'm sure you guys did some stuff to make sure it did well.
Yeah, so first of all, our CEO, Mark Price, is a really, really good salesman, and he's good at getting to the heart of just what kind of makes people tick. And we had a pretty strong community before then. He kind of set up a little chat room when he was selling his courses a la carte, and people just kind of came, and they talked code, and they established relationships with other people.
So we already had kind of this... fostering community brewing and then when we did the kickstarter we all we really did is like blasted it out um to our community how many people were in the community at that time i want to say around 10 000. okay and then you said you raised additional capital on top of that how much uh we raised a
An additional $300,000, roughly, from, it's really funny, from Red Fu, from LMFAO.
That's so funny. Okay, so in total, between Kickstarter's $200,000 and that $300,000, you raised about $500,000 so far. Correct.
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Chapter 6: How does DevSlopes create and distribute content across platforms?
Okay, and what year did you launch the company in?
We started in, I think, March of last year.
Okay. So 2016. And then sometimes it's an embarrassing number. Sometimes it's not. But do you remember what first year revenues were?
So we're actually, I think we did 600,000. Okay.
And what's your goal for this year?
Uh, well, our goal is, is a million, um, hopefully between the SAS model and selling our courses on the cart, we can, we can get there.
Yep. And why is the, like, one of the things that I wonder about a platform like yours doing SAS is you're like, I think your churn monthly is going to be through the roof because people would pay 20 bucks for one month, get all the content they want, then cancel the month after that. How do you make sure that doesn't happen?
Yeah, so since we've launched our SaaS model for only a month, we're only thinking about it in theory.
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Chapter 7: What role does the team play in content creation at DevSlopes?
We haven't really put any of these to practice. But what we're doing is we have these large courses that kind of rope people in. So they're like 30, 40 hours of content that'll take you from beginner to professional. But more recently, what we're doing is pumping out what we call target topics, which is basically like two to three hour courses on very specific things across the board.
So, uh, that's, that's one way we really want to try to keep people in and engage as the, you know, like, Hey, every week, every month we have, uh, new courses that they can, you know, dive right into.
And what is your, I mean, how many employees do you have to be able to make sure you're pumping out new content like that every month?
So we, we have, we have eight guys, um, on the team currently, and it is a challenge because we're also, we're coding the platforms and, you know, we're coding as well as making the content. So, um, Yeah, we have around, I would say, you know, three or four guys consistently making content on top of doing their regular duties.
Yeah. And so, like, what was the debate going on where you decided to launch the SaaS model? I mean, if you did 600 grand in 2016, how many and across how many students was that?
Um, it's hard, it's hard to say. So we actually, we got started, our CEO got started on, um, on these like, you know, e-learning marketplaces.
Like Udemy and CreativeLive, things like that.
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Chapter 8: What insights does Evan share about his entrepreneurial journey?
Yeah. Yeah. And, um, uh, at the time, uh, when we, when we started, when we decided to start, it was, he had 40,000 students on, on Udemy. And now that's, I think a little north of a hundred, uh, Okay. Yeah.
So just to be clear. So the 600 grand that you did last year, was that also like a lot of it was affiliate commissions from these other places?
Uh, yes.
Yes. Got it. Got it. Got it. Got it. Okay. So, okay. That makes way more sense. So, so the way that you're getting customers is through creative live Udemy, these like Alina, Linda, et cetera. And then you're just taking whatever cut that you negotiate with each of those and all that added up along with whatever you sold through your own website came to 600 grand last year.
Correct.
Correct. Got it. Okay. And so, okay. And you had about 40,000 students. So why not just keep doing that model? Like why try and build your own like monthly recurring SaaS, you know, model? Why not just keep pumping content into these big ecosystems?
So we are still doing that to just get the students. And, you know, it's kind of like free marketing in a sense. But there was two main reasons. The first is we wanted to really dial in on the learning experience. We couldn't go in and, you know, like custom change or custom code all the things that we wanted to curate this, to bring this content to people on other sites.
So we decided to build it ourselves. And Secondly, we really like the idea of having it all in one program instead of opening up a web browser so we can really customize things, test things on our own platform rather than be at the helm of all these other websites. Secondly, if they went away, all of our revenue stream is just completely gone. We thought this was a good move.
Interesting. How do you decide what kind of content to keep to yourself versus what to publish into these larger marketplaces?
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