A friend asked "Swiz, why do you even have a job?" referring to my pretty successful sidebiz around books and courses for software engineers. I couldn't stop thinking about it so here we are.
The business has gone through a few iterations since I started taking it seriously in ~2015 with the first React+D3 ebook. Since then it's made almost $500k in revenue (no ads), grown into a small team, launched several products, and has been wildly profitable in most years.
My pulling back started in ~2023 after 8 years of thinking, 24/7, "what's the next thing I'm gonna write about?". I was tired and the biz wasn't sparking joy like it once used to. Burnout is grind with no reward.
The business stopped being profitable almost immediately. That's the strongest sign I have that this is a bad business. It's more like owning a job than running a business.
PS: you can read and share this online
How a content business works
Every content business follows a formula. Sometimes folks stumble into this by accident or they learn it by osmosis. But lots has been written about this, if you know where to look.
I've bought $2000+ courses to polish my formula and it paid back 50x easily. A lot faster than stumbling through on your own :)
Here's how it works:
- You spend most days "building an audience"
- This is your distribution channel
- You then create products
- Periodically you "launch" products
The launch is an intense marketing push with a component of artificial scarcity. Something that gets people over the activation energy to make a purchase. Limited time offer, special goodies, actually new product for the first time ... doesn't matter.
You make a bunch of sales and 80% of your buyers never open the thing. Then a few months later you launch it again. This may sound annoying, but it's not. A growing audience means many of them are seeing your thing for the first time and think it's new.
You do need to launch something actually new regularly.
Ryan Holiday's Perennial Seller is imo the best high level strategic take on this approach (everyone else is tactics).
Smol content to remind people you exist, big content to make sales. Like a comedian doing nightly shows followed by a big netflix special. Or a musician doing concerts followed by a big album. Or a podcaster releasing episodes followed by a book. Or a creator writing tweets followed by a course.
Two types of content
There's two types of content:
- Entertainment
- Insights
Entertainment is any content you read but don't apply. This includes listening to podcasts, watching documentaries, and reading books for a lay audience. You can learn from this content and it can even be useful, but you didn't seek it out with a specific problem in mind.
Insights are content aimed at solving a particular problem or sharing a novel discovery among peers. Tutorials, academic papers, technical books that sort of thing. You read this to level up your skills or to keep up with your field.
You'll recognize entertainment because it's monetized by ads or merch. Insights are monetized by selling products and the free stuff is for audience building.
In both cases the best content is a side-effect of the person's main activity.
You can't do good insights content full-time
Angela Duckworth has a great podcast because she's a psychology professor/researcher and applies those insights to answering audience questions. Tim Ferris and Lex Fridman podcasts are great because they step into the journalist role and dig into lessons learned by experts.
The journalist is a full-time creator, but the content they create comes from experts in the field.
Many coaches and consultants share fantastic insights because they work with real world problems every day. After the advice has been battle tested on a bunch of clients, it becomes a book or whatever. This is gold. And it helps sell their services.
Practitioners share great insights, too. The best books come from folks who go "Okay I've been working on this type of problem for 5 years here's what I learned". That's experts sharing insights with fellow practitioners. The juice comes from hard-won battle scars, not toy projects built to explore a technology.
Lots of tech out there that doesn't show its warts until you're 12 months into a product.
Pro content is a grind
Creators are the disposable cannon fodder of the content industry. Communities go through influencers like underwear. One day you're hot, the next day you're last week's news.
Publishers, platforms, tools, and shadowy people in the back make the big money.
You think Gary Vee is rich because of his youtube videos? No, dummy, it's the influencer marketing agency he runs. The media persona is a way to recruit new influencer grunts.
This has always been true. The TV network or movie studio gets rich, the actor gets famous. And maybe rich if they survive long enough.
But you're only as good as your last hit. You can never stop. The business will milk until there's no more milk to give. Even if it's your own business.
Edutainment and ads dominate the market
Now here's how all this applies to software engineering content.
The large majority of stuff you see is edutainment. Meant to stoke up drama (cough Theo cough) or aimed at newbies who aren't even in the field yet. The content sells a dream that anyone can do this, learn to be an engineer, and make the big bucks.
Most people consuming this beginner content should turn off youtube, think of a project, and go write some code. You learn best by doing and exploring. Look for specific tactical insights content when you get stuck.
The other 90% of software engineering content you see is written by ~~professional marketers~~ developer relations folk. It's meant to teach you how to do something with a technology they sell. Same as my mom's old cookbooks that always asked for Dr Oetker baking powder because no other brand would do.
Yes they taught me how to bake ... and the brand is seared in my mind forever.
As an indie educator/creator devrels are hard to compete with. They have VC funding, entire teams of backup, and they're paid to do this. The content is a loss leader to drive SaaS subscriptions and enterprise contracts. They will out-spend and out-effort you like it's nothing.
Worse, they'll pay influencer types to try their product and talk about it. You don't even need experts, if you can pay today's famous dude to pretend!
Note that neither the famous dude nor the ~~professional marketers~~ developer relations folk are deep experts sharing their opinions. They hype the tech that pays.
The other type of ad is more useful – learn from an expert coach/consultant. But what they really want you to do is say "Wow this is hard and they know so much, I'll just hire them to do this for me (or come teach a workshop)". The real business is the coaching or consulting service, the content again is a loss leader.
Share your sawdust
None of that is to say you shouldn't share your insights.
Please, if you learned something deep or earned a new battle scar, share what you've learned! Write about it. Talk about it. Tell anyone who cares.
This helps you put your intuitions into words. Makes it easier to explain why you're right next time the issue comes up and helps you mentor others on your team. Remember, the best senior engineers start with: "in my experience ..."
And it's a good learning exhaust. Helps you solidify your learnings and makes sure you grok what's up.
But don't try to go full-time. Little good lies down that path.
Cheers,
~Swizec
PS: like I said in early 2023, The programming tutorial SEO industry is dead. ChatGPT and friends can answer all newbie questions customized to the problem at hand. The future is in hard-earned deep insights that are hard to fake or buy.
PPS: there's a lot more that didn't fit this article, I could write a whole book. But that's not the market I'm in. See the lesson? 😉
Continue reading about It made me $500k but I think content is a bad business
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