Udemy as a Business, Part 3: Mark Price
Welcome to part 3 of our series on Udemy as a business. Next up, we hear from Mark Price, another super-successful Udemy pro (15 published courses; more than 120,000 students) who has translated his online success into a successful business.
Mark is one of the popular instructors who’s already put together an iOS 11 course, so keep an eye out for more news about Udemy’s many hot-off-the-presses iOS courses in more than 10 languages coming next week.
(Missed previous installments of this series? Here are part 1 and part 2.)
What milestone/event made you realize your Udemy success could be extended offline as a business?
I told myself that, when I launched my course, if I made my same monthly salary that I get in my full time job in my first month, I would quit my job and do Udemy full time. I knew one thing: sales only ever go up. So, when I hit $8,000 in my first month, I knew it was just the beginning. Keep in mind, this wasn’t magic. I worked and marketed like crazy that first month.
How did you approach this challenge? Describe the timeline for building your Udemy-related business and what it looks like now.
I released three courses in four months before I started working with team members. At that point I had some extra money and was paying some people as contractors to start building my Learn to Code platform. My first employees were hired 10 months after starting on Udemy, which is also when we opened our first office.
From Day One, I planned on turning this into a business, so branding, website, etc., were all up from the start and ready to go for the future. Today, one year and eights months since starting on Udemy, we have 10 team members. They help build our tools and help me teach courses.
Describe briefly how you manage your time and efforts between your offline activities and Udemy content?
Teaching is core to my company, and creating courses is foundational. The real challenge now is splitting time between producing courses and coding on our platform. We have to maintain minimum sales on Udemy to keep moving forward, so that is always considered when deciding whether to add more features to our product or produce more courses.
Any advice for other instructors who hope to translate Udemy success into a full-blown business, as you’ve done?
The best advice I can give brand-new instructors is to treat this as a business from Day One. Assume you will NOT have overnight success. Assume that nothing good is going to come your way (because it doesn’t on its own). Then work to solve those problems.
Don’t be one of the instructors who complains about Udemy or bad reviews. Take everything in, learn, and improve. Learn how to work with Udemy to become successful. Work like crazy. I’m 100% confident that anyone who works like crazy to turn Udemy into a business can’t get there any faster by trying to do it off-platform on their own.