I don't know if I'm actually gonna share this and publish this, but I've kind of seen this interesting trend of other people that I follow in the SaaS space where they've gone away from, like, the more scripted, you know, here's my podcast where have a guest or whatever. And it's just like, hey. Let me just share stories or ideas or thoughts or whatever, kind of like the messiness of running businesses. And I specifically wanna talk about Teachery because I think many people who listen to our podcast, they have heard about it, they use it, they know about it. I mean, our podcast isn't that big.
Jason:So I would imagine the crossover of people who use Teachery or know Teachery is pretty big in the the Venni, the Venn diagram between, our podcast listeners and, like, users or knowledge of Teachery . But just a very, very, very quick, overview of kind of, like, where Teachery has been and then also kind of where I'm envisioning taking it. So I I had the idea for Teachery back in 2013, and it actually was not an idea to build a course platform. The idea was actually just to design a course that, I could build in WordPress because there were, like, four course platforms at that time, and all of them were super expensive. You had to pay by the student or whatever.
Jason:None of that really matters to you listening to this. But, I showed this design that I did in Photoshop to a handful of my entrepreneurial friends. I was like, hey. Like, what do you think about this course design? Like, I haven't seen a course look like this.
Jason:And they're like, oh, yeah. Sure. Looks good. But, like, what what course platform is this? Like, this this looks really nice.
Jason:And I was like, oh, interesting. People don't care at all about the course design. Specifically, they would wanna use this to make their own courses. And so that was actually where the idea of Teachery was born. And so it actually was a WordPress plugin to start.
Jason:I hired a developer for, like, I think it was, $1,200 to build the first version, and then I could just give the plugin to other people. I didn't even know how to sell a plugin. I basically just had a had friends pay me via PayPal, and then I would just have the developer install the plugin on their site. I mean, you know, their people were selling WordPress plugins before this, but also I have no idea how the wind is going to affect the sound. But again, I may not publish this, so it doesn't matter.
Jason:Anyway, fast forward a year later, I was at a conference and a guy came up to me and he was a developer and he was like, hey, like, I am a developer. I tripped on some rocks. Real time walking and talking, you know, whatever. And he was like, if you ever have any projects, I'm always looking to, like, work on stuff. And and so I was like, oh, well, I have this kind of, like, course plug in thing that's not very good of an experience as a course plug in.
Jason:Maybe we could build this into an actual, like, course app. And this is before Teachable didn't exist in the time. It was actually it did exist, it was called UseFedora, and it was, like, very, very, very rudimentary. This is before Kajabi really existed. This is before Thinkific.
Jason:I think these companies were started, but, like, no one knew of them or they had different names and, like, just all of us were, like, kinda flailing about. So I was like, yeah. Sure. Let's let's build this. And so about, I think, like, three or four months later, we had the very first version of Teachery built, and it was just this developer, Gerlando, who was working on it, and we would just, like, kind of, like, hop on Skype calls, I think, at the time because Zoom wasn't even a thing.
Jason:This tells you how longer this was. And we were just, like, trying to figure this out. Like, there was no blueprint to follow. There were no other course platforms really to dig into. I was too cheap to even sign up for the other ones to, like, see what they look like.
Jason:I was just like, I just wanna make the one that I want. And that has actually really kind of, like, stuck with the the story of Teachery for, you know, the past thirteen years now is I don't look too much into what other course platforms are doing. I mean, I do try to keep up with, like, the thing that all course platforms do that every customer who sells courses wants to ensure that they have a good course experience. You know? So that's like building things like the, you know, transactional emails.
Jason:When someone signs up for a course, they get a welcome email. That's having things like being able to create landing pages within a course builder, create payment pages, etcetera, etcetera. Like, all that stuff has just been added because, you know, everybody wants it for their course business. So that's kind of like the history of of Teachery , and Teachery's gone through essentially, like, three big iterations. We have the the beginning that I just talked about.
Jason:Then we have there was kind of like a big redesign, what I would call, like, Teachery maybe two point o, if you will. And this was essentially like a dark mode before dark mode was actually a thing. Like, I didn't even know what dark mode was, but I just liked the dark aesthetic for it. And that was, you know, I think that was, like, 2015, 2016. And then 2020, we did a gigantic overhaul of all of the UI, which is basically what you see if you use Teachery right now, which Caroline, designed everything herself.
Jason:She's not a UI designer or UX designer by her trade. She just learned all that stuff along the way. And I think what we came up with was a really great step forward. And, obviously, this is before AI. This is before a lot of, like, super flexible building.
Jason:Obviously, Squarespace, I think, was paving the way for, like, drag and drop builder and just, like, beautiful, simple editor interfaces, and we tried to do some of this. That that whole project between, you know, the time that we spend, which we don't put really any dollar value on, but there's definitely a dollar value to essentially a year of development to redo every single page of the interface was a $100,000, which I know sounds absolutely insane. And actually, now, if I if someone told me that it would cost me that to do that, I would laugh in their face because that's how much designing software and building software has changed, even in just in five years, but especially in like ten years. There's no reason to spend that amount of money, but that's just what it used to cost when things weren't being able to be built so quickly, the frameworks to build things weren't so agile and easy to update. So anyway, 2020 was the other big one.
Jason:So that was like TTree three point o, I guess we could say. And that has really served us well. You know, we we saw a noticeable kind of like bump in people staying on the platform, enjoying the platform, talking about the platform. And really at that time and in the past couple years, Teachery's revenue has always been around like a $100,000 to a $150,000 per year. It's always gone up every year.
Jason:It hasn't gone down, you know, in a year, which is great. I think maybe one year, like 2022 to 2023 or 2023 to 2024, it went down, like, $5,000. And that was actually the first moment where I was like, oh, I think we need to change something, and it really kind of, like, perked my ears up. But I also just have not been spending much time working on t tree. It's always been a side project, and that's actually been the focus.
Jason:But where I am today, and I'm I'm more inspired by Teachery than ever, I think for two reasons. Number one, because financially, last year, Teachery did $325,000 in revenue, which was a gigantic jump, up from the previous year, which is, like, 220,000 in revenue, and that was mostly due to a Black Friday deal. We've been running paid ads, which have been converting okay, kind of like a like a almost two x return on ad spend, which is good. But obviously, we wish it be better when you don't have a huge budget to spend. And I spend about $3,000 a month on ads, not including what it costs me to pay the agency, which is about $2,500.
Jason:So it's literally boils down to, like, spend 5,500 to make, around $10,000 a month, which is not terrible at all. Some months it's less, some months it's, you know, more, But it does even out to about 1.5 to two return on ad spend. Anyway, that's into the weeds. So the two reasons why I'm kinda more motivated is, one, the revenue bump at the end of last year really was like, oh, there's a lot more here that we can do with Teachery , and and I've known that. But that actually kinda got me like excited and revenue can absolutely do that.
Jason:And then the second thing is, and I hope you can hear me because I'm right into the water, which is an amazing thing to be able to do. The, second thing is the emergence of tools like Lovable. So Lovable is this like vibe coding tool, where you just type into a chat box and it builds websites, interfaces, apps, tools, pretty much anything you could dream of that can kinda build with, you know, a little bit of constraints there. There are plenty of other tools that are better than it. There are plenty of other tools that are more sophisticated.
Jason:There are plenty of other tools that are simpler. We just use Lovable because it was the one that we found that we really liked. It has worked really, really well. We really like the way the interface works. We really like the way they're making updates to it.
Jason:So we've just been sticking with it. But what I've been doing the past months essentially is well, and actually even before that, at the end of last year, like the last six months of last year, I was designing new feature updates all in Level one myself and I would give them to the developer as like the prototype to use to then build the feature. And this is a game changer for me because I'm not a designer. I don't work in Figma. I hate Figma.
Jason:It's very confusing to me. But being able to work in Lovable, I'm just smashing my keyboard and things are happening and it's just fantastic. And so I'm really excited because I can basically anything I can dream up, I can make look exactly like I want in Lovable and it is almost pixel perfect because I can just like keep hammering on it until it is pixel perfect. And so this is really inspiring to me because as a product person, I can really shape the product in whatever I want. Now, the tricky part is a developer still has to build that into Teachery and still has to like make it work with the framework that we use, which is Rails is what Teachery is built on, our existing customer database and our existing infrastructure for how lesson content is saved and all that has to work with this.
Jason:So it's not as easy as just building a beautiful prototype in Lovable and then like plugging it into Teachery . It doesn't work that way at all. Now there is an argument to be made of like, could I just build a new version of Teachery? It's literally just hosted through Lovable and basically abandon what we've built technically in Rails. I think that's dangerous.
Jason:I think that's super risky. Apps like Lovable, they're still really new. I don't know anybody personally. I'm sure there are people who have thousands of active customers, huge databases, you know, constant, DDoS attacks are happening. Like there's a whole layer on top of Teachery for just security and data protection that I don't know how Lowable is handling, and I'm sure they're trying to, but I just wouldn't trust it yet.
Jason:So I do think for this next version of TTree, what we'll call TTree four point o at this point, is going to have to be built in Rails. And I was just talking with our developer yesterday, and essentially what he said was, I can rebuild the entire new course editor interface that I've designed in Lovable in about two to three months. And so he will take the code that I've generated, like through GitHub because you can publish your project in mobile to GitHub so he can reference that code and then he'll essentially rebuild Teachery a whole new editor interface that is really modern, really slick, so much more like drag and drop ability, so much faster like Notion works. And it just it feels like a really good experience. And I really think one of the advantages that I'm happy that we have is that is small.
Jason:Like, there are thousands of customers who paid for Teachery, whether that's lifetime customers, one or Aimflame members, people who are on monthly plans or annual plans. And while it is thousands, it's not tens of thousands. And so to make a change like this, yes, it will be difficult and there will be a customer support nightmare to be had, but there is with any of those things you do. But I'm actually not too afraid of the idea that we'll sunset Teachery three point o and give people like plenty of time to move over. But Teachery four point o will be a much better experience.
Jason:And the developer already said, you know, he was he was like, yeah, we'll have to figure out an easy way to migrate courses, an easy way to migrate customers into courses. You know, those are things that are gonna be tricky, but they're not not doable. Like, they are doable. It's just a matter of, you know, how we get them done. And I think the best path forward for me and the way that I like to work is I want Teachery four point o to exist.
Jason:I wanna be excited about Teachery . I I am excited about this new way of building courses, and there's a little bit of AI magic in it, but it's not overly AI. Like, it's just I like to have it as, like, AI gets you started, and then you finish it off. Like, we love AI. It's like a first draft tool for everything that we do because it just helps you get past the like blank page of it all.
Jason:And so if you can prompt a little chat box to start a Teachery course, and let's say you're teaching people how to bake sourdough bread at home, as I love baking sourdough bread, And you just you type in the chat, like it's a beginner's course for baking sourdough bread. You either give it some images that you have or you just have it source images, which you could do very easily. And then if you have course lessons and things already written, you can upload it or you can just say, write some draft lessons. And literally in, like, three clicks of a mouse, you have a course built. Now that course is not a course you should sell.
Jason:That course is not a course that's done. But it is a fully viable online course that then you can go in and tweak and change and fiddle with and, like, add all your magic to. And then that's where the new editor interface will make that a lot easier and a lot more kind of, like, fun to work in. And I'm just so excited by this. Like, this to me has, like, fully reinvigorated my passion with Teachery .
Jason:And for the first time in, I mean, at least ten years, I actually have a financial goal with Teachery . Like, I would love to have Teachery make $500,000 this year for the first time ever making that amount of money. And again, last year was the most money it's ever made at 325,000. And not because I need to make that amount of money, but more because I wanna prove to myself that there's still a big market for courses. There's still a lot of room to carve out and be like, make custom courses that look the way that you want, that feel like your brand, that are nimble and fast and like, you don't have to like pay $300 a month and have an insane amount of features you don't need just to teach people how to make sourdough bread at home.
Jason:Like, it shouldn't be that difficult. So I think, there's a lot that I'm really, really inspired by because of tools like Lovable and because of the reduction of the overall cost, both time and money, to see an idea come to to fruition. And I hope that, you know, three or four months from now, because I just wanna move quickly on this, there's a new version of Teachery that exists. It may not be tied to existing Teachery . You know, they may be separate for now and we'll eventually have them work together.
Jason:But if you wanna build a new course and you wanna play around with it, I really hope that it exists. And I really hope I wanna get back to I remember probably ten years ago, maybe yeah. Definitely ten years ago. People were happy to sign up for T3's monthly plan. Like, we would get people who would reply to the monthly invoice billing charge and be like, this is one of my favorite softwares that I pay for every month.
Jason:That hasn't happened in years. And I don't blame them because I go in and I use current TTree and I don't feel inspired by it. Like, it feels slow. It feels old. It feels clunky.
Jason:Yes. I can still get the job done. And yes, I believe it actually still does a better job of creating custom looking courses, but it's just, it's fallen behind. And that's mostly my fault, but it's also just the limitation of when something's a side project, you can't keep up with it because you have the main thing that makes the money and is the thing that needs more of your time. So anyway, I just wanted to share this because I have loved hearing these types of conversations from fellow founders, whether it's like Justin over at Transistor or Adam, of like the Tailwind, fame and everything he's working on.
Jason:And even like Dan Coe, I don't know if he has a podcast, maybe he does, but I saw a YouTube video that's being passed around where he was kind of talking about like the future or even the twenty twenty six of online courses because the future is even hard now with AI to look even more than one year ahead. But I really liked his perspective, and it's kind of a perspective that I share too, which is people are not gonna be, like, tired of learning. They're not gonna be tired of teaching, but they are gonna be tired of it taking long to do either thing. Like, with AI now, everything feels like it should be instant and everything feels like it should happen faster. Whether that's good or bad, it's just the truth.
Jason:And it's just the thing that like we're all being trained on doing is we have less of an attention span for anything. So I want Teachery to feel like, hey, you can get your course content up faster. You can get your student to learn more faster. And that's probably the one thing that I really do need to figure out is like, I think I have the moment for the course creator and the like the magic course builder, having it, you know, be really customizable through just a couple of quick buttons that like change the look and feel a bit very easily. So like the look can feel really nice.
Jason:I think the thing I really have to put some thought into is from the course customer side of things, the student, what would feel magical to them? Like what could Teachery help the course creator do that then when the student comes to the course, it feels like, oh, this may be a really long lesson. There may be four videos, but like here are my quick takeaways and my action steps. I'm like, that's actually all done by Teachery through, you know, AI. I don't know what that's gonna work out to.
Jason:I think that's kind of like version four point o, point one or whatever, you know, in the software world when you add a point o point one, you know, you're doing extra stuff. So I don't know. We'll find out. But I I I'll see if I publish this. If I do publish this, feel free to let me know if you thought it was interesting or not.
Jason:I think we're gonna use this podcast as less of a sacred space every week. This is the structure of our podcast and more of just like a, hey. We're working on a bunch of stuff this year. This is kinda the first year we're allowing ourselves to chase these shiny objects and actually embrace that and have fun with that. And we're just gonna take you along the way and see if you enjoy it and give us feedback.
Jason:Let us know what you think. So if you listen this far and you wanna see a preview of the Teachery , four point o, I think I can give you a version of it that you can check out way ahead of time. You won't be able to actually use it to build a course, you can play around. Shoot us an email. I'm not even gonna tell you the email because I want those of you who listen this far, you know, you'll go find it.
Jason:You'll figure out how to get in touch with us. And I'll send you a link and you can give me some feedback and see what you think. But I think that's it. So this gets published. Hope you enjoyed it.
Jason:And this doesn't get published, then it was just a way for me to kind of like share my thoughts and, you know, put it into ChatTPT in another chat that I probably will never come back to, but at least my thoughts were captured somewhere. Okay. Bye.