Is selling online courses a legitimate side hustle? How do I find the right course?
Testing the waters
With four or five years to go before I start seriously considering a mid-life pivot, I am testing the waters on side hustles. My first side hustle sort of fell into my lap. I heard about a college that needed a teacher for a course in my field and pretty much got the job as soon as I expressed an interest. This second side hustle will require a little more hustle.
Choosing a course
I wanted to create a course that would be valuable and at the same time not rehash something that had already been done multiple times. So I went on Udemy and started brainstorming. I thought I could do something with Arduino controllers and robotics, but it turns out this subject has already been well covered in the Udemy marketplace. My second search was for OpenSCAD modeling. This search turned up only one course. The ratings were not too high so I figured I could probably do something with a course on OpenSCAD. This is a scrypt based 3D modeling software package that is used in the open source hardware scene. A popular example would be the Prusa line of 3D printers. All the 3D printable parts that enable you to build a Prusa designed printer are modeled in OpenSCAD.
Scoping out the competition
In preparation for starting the design of my course I went ahead and bought the other OpenSCAD course and went through the course to see what it had and didn’t have. I looked at student feedback and ratings. This gave me a good idea of things I could do and also things I could improve on.
Learning new things
I am a serial hobbyist, so learning new things is one of the main points of doing something like this. Fortunately Udemy has quite a few good resources for the new instructor. From audio quality to video editing, Udemy has good tips for people who like me have never done any content design.
So far so good
As of now I have done about half of my videos and am getting the hang of recording and editing my content. Things are going well and I expect to have the course up and selling within the next few weeks. I’m not expecting sales right at first and I have lots of time to ramp this pivot project up, so I won’t be pushing it all that hard. I’m hoping to get a second more advanced course up after this one and maybe a third course in the series that will deal with robot design. My theory is that the courses will feed each other so that the more courses I have, the more successful each course will be.
Recommendation
I don’t have any solid experience yet to say how well this will work as a side hustle, but theoretically an online course will scale very well. You will still need to keep an eye on the course and respond to student feedback and questions, but it should be a fairly small investment of time after the initial course design and publishing work.
