I made a video course and I want to share some tips with you

Peter: 00:07

What's up, everybody? Welcome to another episode of the PW podcast. I'm your host as always, Peter Witham, and you can find the podcast atpwpodcast.com. In this episode, I'm gonna talk about a course, a video course that I've been working on and some lessons learned and maybe some tips if you're thinking of doing something similar or it may just be of interest to you if you have ever bought a video course and you wonder what's involved in making it. So when I started learning the Godot game engine, I realized very quickly there was an opportunity here for me to make a course for folks who know nothing about making games, programming, anything at all, but have always wanted to do it.

Peter: 00:49

Now I felt that I was in a position to do this even though I didn't know anything about Godot engine at the time because I knew what I was building. I was taking a game that I had built using Apple Technologies, my analyst hurdles game. There's a link in the show notes if you're curious and wanna play it for free. And as I'm porting that over to the Godot engine and learning the Godot engine, I thought to myself this is great. I should do this and then make a course to help other people out.

Peter: 01:19

Now the course is as good as complete and I think that that's really the best way to describe this. The content is there. There's 25 videos full of content for folks, including the source code as well. All I've got left to do is the introduction video and the wrap video at the end. Now, I've left those till the end because that way I can incorporate content throughout the course and speak to it in the videos and that gives people a preview of what they can expect.

Peter: 01:51

Right? And that's tip number 1 right there. Always show folks what they can expect from a course and the best way you can do that is to make the introduction video after you have completed the course. That way, you've got all this rich content to pull from and you can repurpose that video any way you need to, social media, whatever it may be. Right?

Peter: 02:12

Now there's a lot more goes into making a video course than you may think. You may be thinking to yourself, well, that's easy. Right? You know the subject, so you sit down, start recording videos, and put them together, and then add clean them up, add a little bit of text or something, and and ship the videos. Well, yes, but mostly no is the answer to that one.

Peter: 02:36

Because you will find it is very very different when you are sitting trying to record a video and make it as short as possible and get a concept across to somebody even though, you know, you're very familiar with the topic. Right? It's actually pretty hard to do and even harder is to make it sound fluid. Right? I like to do all of my videos in one tape because that way it has a nice fluid consistency throughout and there's no weird jumping around on screens or you know, in the case of my product, files that suddenly appear in the file system and you leave the user wondering what's that?

Peter: 03:15

Where did that come from? So this and my obsessive compulsive, I guess, to detail and consistency meant that a lot of the times I would go back and redo the videos again and again and again until I was satisfied that I had enough to edit together the the nice fluid video and if you watch them in order, it makes sense to the user. Now that said, of course, you also have to design them that the user can jump in at any spot they want. For example, think of YouTube. Right?

Peter: 03:49

People watch videos and they they, you know, especially developers. We're like skip ahead skip ahead to the bit that I'm just, you know, whatever it may be need to skip the piece that they know. Otherwise, what you'll find is they'll probably abandon it because it'll take so long to get past the content that they already know to the piece that they need. So that's how I ended up breaking this into 25 unique videos that I feel like you could watch each one in any order and pull out of it the content that you need. Right?

Peter: 04:33

But at the same time, it's crafted that someone who knows nothing can start at number 1, go all the way through to the end, and it'll make sense to them as well. Now, the other tip here is if you're doing something like this and it's a technical thing in my case, provide the content as you go. So, in my case, what I did was, any time I made a video or 2 or 3 videos that felt like they had completed a milestone in the project, I would then zip up the source code and put that in a file and attach that at the end of the video so that folks can pick up from there. Or if they struggled with something, they can pull down the code, relate it to the video and it'll hopefully make sense to them. Now all of these things take time, like I say, because, yes, you can hurry them and you can put them together very quickly.

Peter: 05:28

Folks might look at my course and go, wait, you need 25 videos just to show me how to make this? Well, yes. And that that in a way is part of the problem. Right? When I'm designing a course, I have to allow for the fact that there will be people who may know 75% of the content and there may be people who know 0% of the content and I have to try and cater to all of them.

Peter: 05:53

And so that's how I've crafted this course. And along the way, you're gonna find that, you know, it's not a simple case of, okay this video is 10 minutes long. It took me 10 minutes to record it. No. That is not how it works.

Peter: 06:05

If a video is 10 minutes long, I may have recorded for an hour to get that 10 minutes that I need that I can put together in post production and edit together, take out the bits where I tried it again, you know, until I got that perfect 10 minutes that I was happy with. So it's never a one to one problem. And that's why it's taken me months to do this course and finish it because it's not as simple as, you know, oh, if if the entire course is, let's say, 3 hours long, it's just 3 hours of recording. Never works that way. Right?

Peter: 06:40

I'm sure most of you know this, but it applies to anything. Right? If a book is 300 pages long, it's not like you start at page 1 to keep typing until you get to page 300 and you're done. It's not how it works. Go to a music studio.

Peter: 06:54

Record an album. Not like you play all the songs perfectly first time around and ship it. It's not how it works at all. So be prepared for that. It is going to take you a lot longer than you think it will to make whatever the material is that you're hoping to either give away or sell to folks.

Peter: 07:13

And that's the next topic here. Yes. There are plenty of courses out there and plenty of videos on YouTube's that will teach you the same concepts that I'm teaching in my course and they're free. Okay, fine. Fantastic.

Peter: 07:32

More power to the folks that have done that and and hey, you know, lucky you as the viewer and the learner who gets to learn for free. I got no problem with that, but I also feel that the amount of effort I put into this warrants a paid course and therefore that's the route I've gone. Okay. I am sure there are folks who are gonna probably come along and give me a hard time because it's like, I can do this for free on YouTube. Great.

Peter: 07:59

You go do that. This is not targeted at you. This is targeted at folks who want to take it seriously. They wanna learn just enough to make what they wanna make. In this case, an endless runner style 2 d game in Godot and that comes with a price tag because you're also getting not only the videos but the source code.

Peter: 08:20

Right? And I'm also committing to updating those videos and everything, and probably adding some extra feature videos over time. That essentially at that point you're getting for free because you've paid for the course and now you're getting all these updates. And I Yep. Sure.

Peter: 08:39

Probably some folks do that on YouTube, but others put them out there and and sort of I don't wanna say abandon them, but they are what they are. Right? And then you find, oh, this doesn't work with the latest version of some game engine because it's now different compared to their videos. And that is something that drives me crazy. So that's why I want to do something that I can commit to and update over time.

Peter: 09:02

And these are things you have to think about. Right? It's the same with technical books, for example. A lot of the time authors update the books and give those updated versions away essentially free to the folks that have bought it and that's their commitment. And that's what you're really buying into is a commitment here to help you learn something and to continue to try and support you going forward.

Peter: 09:27

Now it doesn't always work out that way, of course. For all I know, the Godot engine could be abandoned tomorrow, seems very unlikely. But, hey, that's the way it goes. Right? So I took all of these factors into account when I decided, no, I'm not gonna give this away for free because I do give away a lot of free content and a lot of people tell me that I I give away too much for free and, you know, hey, you should should earn from the skills that you have that you're trying to pass on.

Peter: 09:54

So I thought I would give this a go. I don't know. Maybe it won't work at all, but maybe it'll work out great. So that's just some tips here I wanted to share with you in this episode. If you're thinking about making content like this and putting it out there, especially something that has a long term commitment and you're asking people to pay for.

Peter: 10:13

Right? Really take your time and get it to a point that you think, okay, I think it's ready to ship now. Don't go for perfection. You're never gonna get perfection. Just get to the point that you think this is now good enough that I can put it out there.

Peter: 10:30

And that's that's almost where I'm at. Like I say, I gotta record a couple of videos and then I'm hopefully done. So hope this has been helpful in this episode, especially to those content producers out there. Like I say, this is not an easy thing to do. It sounds easy and people wonder why these things cost what they do.

Peter: 10:49

Well, it's because there's a lot of effort goes into them. Right? And, you know, you should reward the folks that make content to try and give you what it is that you're looking for. If you have any thoughts about this, I'd love to discuss this with you. You can reach out to me at peterwydham.comforward/contact and we can take it from there.

Peter: 11:09

Come on the podcast and we can discuss it. I would love that because, you know, at the moment, it feels very lonely right now since this is my first course and I've had some excellent advice from folks that have made courses, but it's very much a new territory for me and, you know, kind of that apprehension and excitement that goes with it. Anyway, folks, I'll put some links in the show notes. That's it. I'll speak to you in the next episode.