Having a large audience was my unfair disadvantage

I started blogging about code in 2018.

My very first post about elliptic curve cryptography blew up on Medium, and I leaned into that success. For a couple of years, I kept blogging about code, and that blog now has over 90k visitors monthly.

The feedback that I consistently was getting from readers was along the lines of "Thanks, you have a talent for explaining complex topics simply." Unfortunately, I let this go straight to my head and decided that it would be a great idea to start an edTech side-project. After all, I already have an audience of learners!

I launched v1 of Qvault.io in the summer of 2020. It had a single course, "Go Mastery", where students could learn the basics of the Go programming language by writing code and running it in their browsers. I made ~$100 in the first 3 months and foolishly thought the problem was that I didn't have enough content. In the coming months, I published another 4 courses about different topics with similarly poor results.

While I had problems with monetization, UI, UX, long feedback loops, and distribution, all of those problems paled in comparison to the one thing I never understood well enough: The members of my audience had almost nothing in common.

For over 5 years I had been thinking, discussing, and working on solutions to the huge problems that new developers face when trying to learn enough about code to get their first jobs. These are serious problems that largely go unsolved today. Unfortunately, I started building too quickly, and I built a generic code-in-the-browser course that didn’t solve any specific user problems.

A great example of this is that I should never have started with the “Go Mastery” course. The problems I believe exist in programming education have nothing to do with learning basic Go syntax. I chose that course lazily because I’m a go developer and a lot of my blog posts are about Go.

Anyhow, fast forward to today and I’m doing a lot better. Qvault remains a side-project, so it’s still a slow-going side-project but I’m up to ~1.5k MRR, and I’ve niched down to the point where I have about 20 “true fans” of the project. When I was at $500 MRR I didn’t know even a single user by name.

I’m taking “It’s easier to build something a small number of people love than something a lot of people like” from Y combinator to heart. If you’re curious, here are some of the recent changes I’ve made:

My product persona is “JavaScript devs that already know how to code, but are struggling to land their first dev job”.

I’ve become super active in the Qvault discord server where I interview my target users and chat with them daily. I’ve actually started pointing users who don’t fit my target persona to competitors who will serve them better, something I was terrified to do initially.

Having a large audience with members that don’t have a problem in common threw me off track for a long time. I’m now doing my best to figure out how I can continue to narrow down my target audience until everyone in that market loves Qvault. At that point, I might think about expanding again, but maybe not.