Product Creation

We have a really special guest today, he knows a lot about this platform called uDemy.com, his name is Alex Genadinik. He's a three-time Amazon best-selling author, creator of some of the top mobile apps for entrepreneurs, and a prolific online instructor with over 80 courses on uDemy. You know what Alex, I'm looking at your uDemy page and I'm seeing you have 66,000 students, you have almost 1800 reviews, that's pretty dang crazy so welcome to the show.

Alex Genadinik: I'm excited to share everything that I know about uDemy with your audience.

Robert Plank: Awesome, so just to make sure that we're all on the same page, could you explain to us what uDemy is?

Alex Genadinik: Yeah, uDemy is this really rapidly growing place where their model is anyone can learn anything. It's basically the idea of elearning that's been around for maybe the last 20 years, but they've really taken it to the next level and they're making it mainstream. It's high quality, really good learning, things like that. Whereas I think everybody is familiar with elearning here and there, but before it was kind of hacky you know, it was spotty, you didn't know what you were getting, maybe you got it in a university, but this is like ... uDemy is legitimately ... They have I think over 20 or 30 thousand courses on all kinds of topics and they're high quality courses so it's a fantastic marketplace for ... Literally anyone can learn anything but also anyone with expertise can teach and make money.

Robert Plank: That's pretty cool because I think that sometimes I'll want to learn a new skill or a new piece of software, I'll want to know Photoshop or Google Analytics and the choices in front of me used to be either to try to go through some free YouTube videos and I would get sometimes old information or I'd buy a Kindle book and sometimes get just words and no screenshots, or something like Lynda or something. I've used uDemy a few times as a buyer, like I'd pay $10 or $20 just to learn something really specific. As far as you selling on uDemy, what kind of stuff are you selling? What's your favorite course on uDemy, I guess, that you're selling?

Alex Genadinik: For me, my favorite course is, I have a course ... Mainly I teach people entrepreneurship, business, and marketing, and my favorite topic is marketing. The more advanced the marketing technique, the more they are my favorite. Because it takes more creativity and more insight and more experience to really become proficient at them. My favorite course that I teach is it's called "Marketing Strategies to Reach a Million People" and it's got everything, right? It's got social media, it's got SEO, and it's a really long, like 14 hour course with I think over 120 different lectures.

I really take a person from being a new marketer and take them through almost everything, like offline marketing, social media marketing, SEO marketing. Often the combination of those things, right? Because sometimes social media platforms have a big search component, right? YouTube for example, or iTunes for example, and not only search, but there's secondary algorithms like the recommendation algorithm right, like in podcasts. If you like this podcast you will also like this one, on Amazon if you like this book you will also like this one. I take a person from very beginner to pretty advanced and understanding how to leverage those SEO and even more complex algorithms online and really get as much traffic to their business as possible.

Robert Plank: Okay and I'm looking at that exact course and you had 6200 students take that course. When I see you doing courses on that and things like that, I've seen some people, and especially internet marketers put out uDemy courses and I see that sometimes the course has thousands of students have gone through it. Does that mean that if I'm looking at the page right now, 6200 times $20, does that mean that all of those thousands of students have paid you $20 or is there some kind of strategy to make it free first and then charge for it or ... What's the deal with that?

Alex Genadinik: You can make a course free. In the case of that particular course I only in the very beginning gave away a few copies for free so most of the students there are paid students. None of them paid probably exactly $20 because at different times this course was different prices. Sometimes this course used to be $500, and then uDemy said courses can only be $300 and then the course was $299, and then uDemy had another price change and now the top possible price on uDemy at the moment is $50. I think that might change soon too because they're also experimenting on their platform. I'm kind of just rolling with the punches of uDemy and what I do is often people who enroll in my courses, they get emails from me with discounts to my other courses. Usually if the marked price is $20, anyone in my other courses can get this particular course at a discount. I like to give discounts so it's nicer for people, there's less risk for them and they buy more and I'm happy.

Robert Plank: That's pretty cool and I think that when you look at platforms like this and uDemy and it's great that ... From what I understand it makes it easy to put some videos online, it's easy to have it hosted, so you don't have to make your own website, but I think that, and let me know if I'm right or wrong here, but it seems like the biggest advantage to uDemy is there's just so much traffic, right? There's so many people looking to buy something from you, right?

Alex Genadinik: Yeah, exactly. That's the main draw of uDemy as an instructor. By the way one point I forgot to make is that if it makes sense for your audience maybe on your show notes page we can post a link, I have a page on my site where I have a very steep discount to all my courses so even your listeners who are not necessarily students of my courses can get pretty steep discounts if they're interested in any of courses so maybe we can have a link to that.

The main draw is the buyers, right, because it's an elearning platform, but it's also eCommerce just like Amazon is eCommerce, and just like on Amazon, right, where are you going to sell your book? Of course you're going to sell it on Amazon or the Kindle so the same things happens for uDemy. uDemy is like the Amazon for courses.

Robert Plank: Okay. Speaking of Amazon, I resisted Amazon for a long time because I saw people selling books there and I'm thinking well why would I want to sell a book on Amazon for $0.99 or $2 and the same way on uDemy I say well why would I want to give away like ... You have that course that has twelve hours for $20 but I mean if you make $20 sales times, or $200 sales times whoever knows how many students then that's great. The other thing too is you don't have to live on uDemy. That kind of leads me to wondering okay, so you have a course on uDemy, for example, this marketing strategy to reach a million people, does that have to be specific to their platform or are you allowed to sell it other places?

Alex Genadinik: Their terms of service dictate that as an instructor you are 100% allowed to sell anywhere else.

Robert Plank: Cool. But it seems like from a marketing point of view you could, like you said, you have your discounts and things like that, you could have your same exact course for sale for $200 off of uDemy, but then someone finds it on uDemy and it's at a huge discount so they can jump and buy it, right?

Alex Genadinik: Yeah, exactly.

Robert Plank: Where did you specifically find out about this and find out how to put these uDemy courses online?

Alex Genadinik: Years ago ... I mean I've been on uDemy for over two years and years ago I had some apps for entrepreneurs that were successful and I wrote a book and people liked the book but a lot of people literally were telling me ... I got the same line from a lot of people, they were like, "Hey your book is great and your tutorials are great but can you make a video? We don't like to read." So I started dabbling in YouTube and it took me a while to become proficient with video and once I became proficient with video, to a degree, because video, it's almost endless, there's always room to become better, but I became kind of good enough. YouTube unless you're a mega star and unless you have millions and millions of views a month, it's really hard to make significant money there. You have to be like above the top 1%, right?

Robert Plank: Oh yeah.

Alex Genadinik: I was looking to monetize my videos better, and especially like I'm not viral, I'm not a cute cat, I'm not an elephant-

Robert Plank: You're not a hot girl, right?

Alex Genadinik: Right. There's not that much chance for a boring guy like me who talks about business to become tremendously successful. My channel has over a million views on YouTube, but still you need so much more there to do well. I just kept looking for better places to monetize video and I came across uDemy, which even at that time, I felt it was mature at the moment ... At that moment it felt mature, it felt competitive, it was hard to get ahead, not different from how I feel about it now. It took me a while to fully understand how uDemy works with all their ins and outs and all that stuff but I just stumbled upon it really as a ... It was necessary for me because I was searching for a better way to monetize video that's better than YouTube.

Robert Plank: Right, because I mean like we were saying a few minutes ago, usually when I'm on YouTube I'm looking to get some information for free. If you had your videos on YouTube and you made money from ads, like little two cent ... Two cents of income every little now and then. What I like about, we're talking about Amazon and uDemy, is that literally everyone on Amazon, everyone on uDemy, is looking to buy something, right, there's nothing for free on uDemy. I guess there are some free courses but in general, it's not like YouTube where's it an entirely free site. You mentioned some of these things about getting started. Is there a place to find out the rules or ... Because you can't just throw up any kind of video you make you have to abide by what they want, right?

Alex Genadinik: Yeah, there's a lot of rules. The most basic things are every course is a minimum 30 minutes of video and five different lectures, meaning five different videos. There's some topics that are off limits like something like guns are not allowed, porn is not allowed, but almost everything ... Gambling might not be allowed, but almost everything else is allowed. Once you get into creating the course, there's really a tremendous amount on how to create a good course, how to promote a course. uDemy has their own courses that they make to help aid instructors on it.

Also sometimes I actually coach people who are new to uDemy but they have some knowledge, maybe they're software engineers or maybe they know about business or some other life skill and they want to be able to monetize that but they don't want to spend six months learning uDemy, so sometimes I offer pretty affordable coaching. I do an initial consultation call for fifteen minutes for just $5 just for a person to get a sense if it's right for them. That's also an option because there's a lot more that I can explain in a conversation. There's also free resources like uDemy Studio Facebook group, where there's I think there's 30,000 uDemy instructors and aspiring instructors so it's a fantastic place for free and it's a community where anybody can ask any question and get answers to almost all their questions.

Robert Plank: Okay cool. I'm kind of clicking through some of the courses you have and I mean you have courses about podcasting and Kindle and stuff like that, but there's you know Bit Coin, yoga. Just out of curiosity what's the weirdest or craziest uDemy course you have?

Alex Genadinik: I don't do too many crazy things. I have some health and fitness courses that I did with a few of my fitness instructors. Just as an experiment and I think those courses came out okay, you know, people seemed to like them, but that's not really my focus. I do have one unique course that's really unique. When I was in college I really liked philosophy and I was a computer science major so I mostly had to learn on my own, it was a passion thing. I have a course that's like a philosophy course, it's a philosophy of religion, but it's not a religious course.

It's more like I took all the philosophers through the last 2500 years and I took their perspectives on religion, largely emphasizing existentialism, because that's where the big crux happened where instead of people asking, "What should I do with my life?" Instead of getting the answer from religion most people started looking inside themselves and looking for the answer ... There is no answer, right? Everybody has to create that. That was a big switch in how people thought about it. That course I really like because it's like a passion project from my own passion. I mean, religion can always get weird, but it's really a philosophy course first and foremost and it just talks about religion.

Robert Plank: I mean if you have the knowledge anyway and you were going to have a conversation about it anyway why not just make a video about it, or make a video course about it, right?

Alex Genadinik: Yeah, that thing I just wanted to share. That course doesn't, philosophy, doesn't make a lot of money, but it's just for me to kind of share something I myself was passionate about. I think it came out pretty cool. I quote different people from the best philosophers to Bob Marley, because he has some things to say about it in his songs. He has some good quotes there. I think it came out to be a well-rounded course and I aimed for it to be the equivalent of a couple of college courses. The main takeaways that you would get from a couple of college courses that I got. I think it came out okay.

Robert Plank: Awesome. Speaking of that, I'm looking, I mean you have courses on all kinds of crazy stuff like Android apps and LinkedIn. Is there a method to the madness? Do you just wake up one day and have an idea for a course or is there any kind of research involved or what's the deal there?

Alex Genadinik: Well largely I try to share things that I'm an expert in. Because how I got here is I made some successful mobile apps so I do have a deep understanding of the app business, I am a software engineer. It made sense for me to make those courses. Especially since one of my apps did really well on Android. If you search for the word business on Android my app has been number one for the last three years or something. I teach people how to do the same thing for them, right? But it's something that I literally accomplished on my own and I'm like here are the exact steps so that made sense. For the most part, my goal is to help people kind of start and grow their businesses. All the courses they kind of help people with some aspect of it. Maybe personal branding, maybe like you mentioned LinkedIn.

Lately I've been focusing on soft skills like motivation, and motivation is funny because sometimes people are not motivated because they chose the wrong path for themselves, right? Sometimes somebody else chose the path for them and suggested it and they just went with it, right, but it's not necessarily the right thing for them and then half of them is not into it so they're not motivated. They're wondering why am I not motivated, why am I procrastinating, you know? It's like goal-setting, motivation, how to find your own life purpose rather than having it handed to you by society or your parents or somebody else.

Because no one really knows as deep as you do what really will drive you and it's important to find that because if you, let's say started a business but it's not really your thing, or even if it is your thing, but you're starting a business in the wrong ... Dealing with the wrong people, in the wrong niche, wrong industry, you're not getting motivated and you'll be like why am I not motivated, what's wrong with me, why is my business failing? It's not even any hard business skill, it's like a soft business skill, almost like life skills first. Now I focus on that because I see a lot of people failing in business precisely because of a mental issue, mental process, motivation issue, right, nothing to do with the actual business.

Robert Plank: Right, it's like they have a bad foundation so no matter what they do, the foundation's still bad so they're still failing.

Alex Genadinik: Precisely.

Robert Plank: I mean, this is crazy. I thought that uDemy as far as it got was like PowerPoint, like as far as it got was like photography. I didn't know that you could make it as, like you said, as soft skills as, like motivation or philosophy, and it seems like what's cool about those topics is that they stay evergreen, right? As opposed to if you teach like WordPress or Facebook or Android apps, five years later the whole video has to be different, right?

Alex Genadinik: Yes, it's totally right. Although, you know, there's something to be said about the balance of evergreen versus super, hyper demand, right. Every year iOS development has some change, right, so it's not evergreen, but at the same time it's the most lucrative niche on uDemy, I think. Programming, things that are super current and things where people can take it and get a job, that's the most lucrative and money-making thing on uDemy so if you know anything technical from JavaScript to HTML to WordPress to Android development to whatever, all those things. That's the number one niche. The software engineering kind of tech, that's the number one niche on uDemy so it's not evergreen at all but that's actually ... It's hyper in demand, you know.

Robert Plank: Is there a problem with that? If you want to make a course about Android apps and you go and look at the existing courses and there's hundreds of courses already, do you just go ahead and do that anyway or do you try to make yours unique or what's your thought process there?

Alex Genadinik: Any time in the marketplace you want to be unique. What's your differentiation, right, like in any business. That's an important part. You want to have something catchy, for example like my course "How to Market to Get a Million People," well, that course used to be just "Marketing Strategies," it used to be just called "Marketing Strategies" which is like a name that does not stand out as well, and it wasn't selling. As soon as I renamed it to the million people thing it became very catchy and started selling. You definitely want to stand out and be catchy at all times. That's not it. You also want to be discovered, Boolean search, all that kind of thing. There's a lot of components, really, to making a course successful.

Robert Plank: You keyword stuff the title so that it shows up on search. You kind of add a hook or a promise so that when they're scrolling through the search yours kind of grabs the attention, I guess.

I mean, what are basically the steps to putting something on uDemy, is there a special link to click, is there a fee? I guess you have to upload videos and get it approved. What are the steps there?

Alex Genadinik: It's really easy. You really just go on uDemy, you have a profile there, you say you want to become an instructor, you start uploading your videos, you click I want to make a course called XYZ, they take you through a step-by-step asking for your experience and filming experience and then they just take you to a screen where you start uploading lectures and it's really that simple.

The hardest part is to come up with a good course topic and create the lectures that cover the course well. You have to be relatively good at presenting it. Make sure that when you plan the course that you cover the course in a complete way so that when a person ... They start at maybe zero but when they finish your course they feel accomplished, they feel like they know what they're doing. You really took them from a to b. That's really important to achieve for the student.

It's really important and it's something that I guess took me a lot of time, is to cut the fat from a course, so I used to repeat myself a lot, I used to adjust to make sure people really picked up on the important details, but that kind of made the course longer. It added extra time in the course and then people got bored and then they quit the course. Now I also focus on making the course kind of quick and delivering information really quickly and moving on and moving forward and moving along so that it's entertaining for the student and not boring, that's important as well.

If you're starting out, you've just got to get the recording equipment, which is not expensive, you can record with your computer, so you don't even need recording equipment really, like you don't need a camcorder, it's really cheap to start, uDemy charges nothing. All you do is just upload the lectures, submit your course, they have a review process, most of the time your course will pass the review process. For a first time person there's another process of becoming a premium instructor, but that's also only a day or two that it will take and then you're off to the races with your course.

Robert Plank: Along those lines, what big mistake are you seeing these other uDemy course sellers making?

Alex Genadinik: There's two mistakes that I'm seeing right now that are very flagrant. First, poor quality courses. Let's say if you're making YouTube marketing course, there's over a hundred YouTube marketing courses on uDemy so you better make a really great course or something really unique, because if you just give the basics of YouTube, then-

Robert Plank: They've already done that, yeah.

Alex Genadinik: Yeah, any kind of intermediate student, half of them have probably already either taken other YouTube courses or they've gone through the whole thing themselves and they're going to be irritated by your course. Your course doesn't offer that much value and they're just going to give it a bad review. That's one thing, so your course ... It's in a marketplace, it's not in a vacuum, so you're going to have to make sure, do your market research. What are the existing courses and how can yours stand out and be different and what can it really deliver? That's one thing and it's very important.

The other thing is sometimes people teach for the purpose of making money rather than really teaching something that they're really an expert in. Because I see sub par experts, novices teaching, saying hey I'm an expert, and making a course and teaching ... Again, in a marketplace that doesn't hold up. If you're a novice and maybe you're delusional or maybe you're hoping it will squeak by, you can't teach half a topic or the basics, it just doesn't fly anymore. I see a lot of people teaching something where they're truly not an expert in that. It probably can be said something like that about my courses, like am I a philosopher? No, right, am I a PhD in philosophy? No, but I did take ... That course I think the defense is that there's almost no ideas of mine in that course. I just took a survey of the great thinkers, so I didn't need to be a philosopher myself. I just summed up the works of other philosophers, but if you're trying to show your stuff, you better be a super expert.

Robert Plank: That makes a lot of sense and it's like you're teaching philosophy because you know it and you love it and you've done it for years. As opposed to if someone said, "Hey I'm going to make a philosophy course," and they open up Wikipedia. Or you have your course on WordPress and I saw that there's things about how to hire someone to get it developed, how to do technical support, as opposed to if someone said ... They just opened up WordPress and clicked through the tabs and said, "Check out this tab, check out this tab," I guess that's the big difference, right, is that you kind of have a mastery to some degree?

Alex Genadinik: In WordPress, my course doesn't promise a lot from the get go, for example. I'm not the number one WordPress guy and my course didn't intend ... That particular course is a very niche WordPress course, it's basically how to get up and running in a day. Just how to get your hosting set up, how to get the domain name, how to get it all set up, how to be up and running in a day or two. That's the goal, because I see a lot of people taking months to get their website up or something.

By no means did that course intend to be some super duper WordPress advanced course. It's a very beginning course so I only promised a certain amount and I delivered that limited amount in that course. It's for some people. For people who are intermediate for advanced, it's not for them. That's another thing, you should be clear in your course what your course promises. Because a beginner, like a super duper dense course, it's not right for them, it's going to overwhelm them, so my course is like a niche WordPress course for my audience because my audience specifically they struggle with setting up their business. For them it made sense because they need to set up all the basics. I either kind of limit the premise of the course or make it a niche course. Sometimes some topics, they're limited, in WordPress you literally can just walk people through how to set it up to a certain degree and it's black and white. Here's how you do it, follow the steps, but what about, some topics they have more gray areas.

Social media marketing, why does something go viral and another thing does not? That's more like a voodoo slash gray area slash a lot of creativity involved there and there's so many different approaches to it. Different courses you really have to approach them in different ways. Some are black and white, some are totally gray area, but in all cases you have to be an expert enough to teach to the degree that your course promises.

Robert Plank: I like that way of thinking and I like a couple things about uDemy and about the way you title your courses. First of all, I like on uDemy that when I search something I can narrow it down by beginner, intermediate, or expert, so that if I'm searching on YouTube, I guess there's boxes to check where I can be like okay only get the expert courses. The other thing I like about the courses that you have, you have your courses like ... I saw one somewhere where it was like how you got on like fifty podcasts or something. If I get that I'm like okay, Alex is going to show me exactly the steps that he took to get this result, but it's not like you're saying, "how to get a billion views," and it's just some kind of foggy idea, right?

Alex Genadinik: Exactly. If there is some promise that the course makes, I make sure that the course really delivers on the promise. That's super important. Otherwise people will just complain. If you bought a watermelon at the store and it was blueberries ... It's an impossible example but you know what I'm saying, right?

Robert Plank: It's a bait and switch.

Alex Genadinik: Yeah, certainly people should get what they think they are getting, at a high degree of quality.

Robert Plank: I mean, that makes a lot of sense. If you sell a lot of courses on uDemy and if you're courses get rated highly, does uDemy reward you? Do they kind of make you appear higher in the search results, kind of like Google and stuff?

Alex Genadinik: Kind of, yes. It's interesting. On different websites like Amazon, YouTube, there's different paths to generating a lot of sales and views or whatever. One way to think about it is on YouTube, and Amazon too, there's on the right side of YouTube other people liked these videos, right? You might also be interested in these videos, and very often videos which get a lot of views, it's not from search. Because if you think about it, search always has a limit. You cannot get more views than the number of people searching.

So search actually, it's something that we see and it's something that's on the forefront of our minds because we see it and we want a rank, but the true secret of getting a lot of views on YouTube, a lot of sales on Amazon, a lot of sales on uDemy, or any of these kinds of things, even a lot of discovery in podcasts, or whatever, even apps. Almost all of these things work on this principle that the stuff that's really good gets recommended a tremendous amount. Because all the search terms have a certain limit. You're not going to get past that but there's almost no limit to how much the platform can recommend you.

If you become one of the top sellers within your category, like one of the top podcasts or one of the top books on Amazon, your book is always going to be recommended in your category, like people who bought this book also bought this book and that recommendation will appear on thousands and thousands of pages everyday. That's the better thing than SEO but almost nobody focuses on it because it's not as visual, we rarely see our products there and we don't picture, it's not viable for us, we don't aim for it, but that's really where people become wealthy.

Robert Plank: I like that, and I hadn't thought about that before. You're looking to get ranked on recommendations not on searches. As far as you moving forward with uDemy and making your courses and things like that, do you have any big plans, you have anything coming up that has you really excited?

Alex Genadinik: Yes, I have a couple of things. I am slowing down my new course creation and I'm going to be focusing on improving my existing courses and really improving my own speaking, my own presentation style, because it's infinite how much you can improve that. That's one thing I'm doing.

One really exciting thing that I'm doing is I've set up a coaching program of sorts where I kind of set people up with a website, an eCommerce website, and allow them to license courses from me and sell them on their site so they can have their own mini uDemy. Basically it's, like I mentioned earlier, it's an eCommerce business so it's directly, somebody buys something, they get revenue. It's transactional, money comes right away. Essentially I set people up with their own small uDemy and all they have to do is just sell the courses and keep the profits. I think it's a great business because elearning is a rapidly growing young market.

I kind of equate this market to maybe how the mobile apps were in 2009, people were like what the heck is this? They kind of knew what it was, but the people who got into it early, a lot of them made significant money. Then of course once the app marketplace became crowded and everybody else got on it, but it was a little late. Now I feel like the elearning market is that early time, like 2009 for apps.

This is a way for people to get in on having their own eCommerce platform which they can grow, have more courses or grow their students and just make a lot of money out of it. I think it's a lucrative business and I'm excited because I can help people get set up with the whole thing, the courses, the website, and even teach them how to sell.

Robert Plank: Do you have a web address for that?

Alex Genadinik: It's really just people have to email me and like I mentioned I do that fifteen minute, $5 consultation, and during the consultation I have to talk to a person and ask them what they want ... Do they want to teach themselves, do they want to license existing content? I have to get a whole bunch of things in a conversation from a person to really see what makes sense for them. I really should make a written program for it, almost like a coaching program. I don't have that at the moment, but I'm in the middle of going through it with a few people, but I really should make it more formal.

Robert Plank: Well there's only so many hours in a day, right, for you to do those fun things? Well cool, I'm really glad we had you on the show, Alex, and we'll put the links that you want at robertplank.com/102. Pretty much every course, especially of yours, that I click on, I'm just seeing thousands and thousands of people took these courses and so there's got to be crazy traffic on this and I'm just blown away by how many reviews things have and how many people are clicking around. It just seems like a huge marketplace where it's still growing.

Alex Genadinik: Yeah, it's a fantastic market to get into. Either by teaching on uDemy or having your own small uDemy of your own. It's one of the good businesses of today. One of the things that's still growing. It's saturated but it's not saturated at the point where it's over. There's still room.