How I Made my Snapchat 101 Course for Gumroad

From my vantage point, I would see Snapchat as a fairly unnecessary app. So why would you want to do Snapchat? Well, no. But, but honestly, that's my my question. Why would you want to actually pay to learn how to use this app that it's like, who really cares?

Hello. Welcome to episode 168 of Daily ish. You can find it at goodstuff.fm/dailyish/160eight. It's, Tuesday, April 19. 17 degrees out.

It feels like 16. Probably warmer than that by now. This episode of Daily is brought to you by FeedPress because this is not a weather podcast. FeedPress is analytics and podcast hosting made for bloggers and podcasters possibly exactly like you. If you visit feed.press/dailyish today, you can sign up and try FeedPress for fourteen days.

No contracts or commitments. Upgrading your storage from the 250 megabytes that's included is super easy. Just a flat rate of $20 for one gigabyte. You can use promo code daily ish during checkout to get 1010% off your first year. So thanks to FeedPress, feed.press/daily and also by, Patreon supporters possibly like you, patreon.com/ichris is where you can check out how you can support my podcasting efforts a little more directly as well as as the folks found out, get a free copy of the the old Snapchat course, which I will be talking about on this episode.

We'll see how far, how long this goes and as to which how much of the discussion I'll I'll talk about this one, and I might roll it into a second episode just if it goes too long. I try to keep these to ten minutes or less. So but, yeah, as you heard my wife at the beginning of the podcast there just asking the question of why and why would someone wanna use the app and why would someone wanna pay for a course on top of that. Main reason why I think someone would wanna pay for the course on top of that, in my opinion anyways, is because in just under an hour of video, basically, you can have the app and everything about it explained to you, which most people would spend at least that long trying to figure it out, I would guess, and then still have some questions. Why you should care about Snapchat though?

I don't really care if you don't care about Snapchat, to be honest. I think it's a fun app right now. It has the potential to get really ruined by marketing biz dev folks in search of, you know, money and monetization and all that garbage. And there is some right now even some fun marketing things you can do with custom geolocation filters in the app for businesses and and, like where you buy a filter basically that only appears if the Snapchat user is in a certain location that you draw on a map of the world. So use this for conferences, concerts, and other event style marketing.

If you're having a wedding, can have a, you know, at say where your reception is, you could do it just for fun, where you basically would pay Snapchat. It's pretty cheap right now. And, like if I'm seeing people, Justin something in Regina doing it for example, where, you know, he's just doing it as a little promo and and giving a giveaway kind of thing. And if you put this certain filter on, then you'll you can, get entered into the contest and stuff like that. But mostly, it's just a fun way.

Snapchat is mostly a fun way to just do like a video journal, a vlog without worrying about lights editing or even in my case, shaving. And so, yeah, to me, it's just fun and that's it's kind of a a relief in a sense from all the other social media platforms where it's all about analytics and figuring out not that I spend that much time worrying about Twitter, although I posted a bunch of tweets today about Twitter's analytics platform. But don't really worry about it too much. But every so often, I'm like, oh, yeah. So and so follows me and this person does and I should be tweeting stuff to, you know, whatever and and overthink it.

Whereas Snapchat is kinda there isn't you can see who watches your stuff, but there isn't a huge push emphasis on how many people are following you and watching you. Although, you know, obviously, we're all vain and we want more people watching our stuff, I guess. So anyways, with the course, I didn't do a great job of tracking my time putting it together because it was a bit random and unfocused initially. It was kind of a maybe I'll do this idea and sort of stepping slowly in that direction. But I guess if I had to guess, it'd be in the fifteen to twenty hour range of amount of time I put on put into it.

And so I'll talk about it, you know, later on, you know, as far as sales and where that puts me in the hourly wage department. But, honestly, a huge help that sort of kick started all for me was trying out a web app called workflowy.com. And it's such a simple outliner app. It's it's one that I know Kyle Roderick uses to put together his podcast Morning Show here on Good Stuff, goodstuff. Fmmorningshow if you wanna check it out.

Highly recommend it. And I always liked the app but I didn't really have a use case for it. So I thought with this course idea that I was kind of rummaging around in my brain a I'd try it out again and just use it to outline my course and it seemed like a really good fit for that. And for some reason it really clicked this time Workflowy did and allowed me to get my thoughts out of my brain onto Workflowy and it made sense of what I should do next and that was to record a couple of sample videos just to test out the tech of, you know, using my phone and recording it and also just whether talking over a Snapchat tutorial video is something I even want to do. In Workflowy, I basically broke it down into steps or chapters, 10 by the end of it.

And I would basically open have Snapchat open my phone beside me as I walked through each screen of the app and documenting things in Workflowy. I think I should mention or call attention to when it came time to record. Then I'd plug my phone my iPhone into my Mac, with the lightning cable, start a new recording inside ScreenFlow, and just walk through what I thought I should be, talking about. What I would sorry. What I'd written down and talked about.

And then when I was done that, I would edit out any mistakes, rerecord anything that needed to be done for that chapter, redone for that chapter, cut out extra crap that didn't make sense when I watched it back, and then export that as a full size lossless ProRes video, which I then import into Final Cut Pro to piece together with some intro text and some underlying new music. Nothing too fancy at this point. I didn't really need to do it inside Final Cut Pro, but I knew if I was gonna do, you know, eventually, if I wanted to do a more polished version of the course, you know, charge more, add more stuff to it, etcetera. I'd probably wanna do that polishing as it were in Final Cut Pro and not in ScreenFlow. Not that you can't do that in ScreenFlow, it's a really powerful app.

I just happen to know Final Cut Pro better and find its templating system a little easier to manage for repeated tasks and videos and stuff like that. So from Final Cut Pro, I then sent it over to Compressor to export at full resolution. In this case, actually just the iPhone screen resolution in portrait mode, which was seven fifty by thirteen thirty four pixels, which actually I was a little worried of the the morning of the launch. I was worried that people would be, like, thrown off as to why it's in portrait mode when everything we do is sort of in landscape mode. And I updated some documents in there and just like made people aware that it was on purpose.

Probably unfounded worry but these are the things that happen as you're about to see this little thing go out into the world. So at this point, I would quickly rewatch the video, make sure the intros were right. I screwed that up a few times where I forgot to update the text and then make sure that, you know, the music came in right, all that kind of stuff. And then I started uploading each file to Gumroad. And a little note there, you're gonna use Gumroad to upload video for a course or a project product of some sort, make sure you do that well in advance before your thing is gonna be for sale just because Gumroad takes their own time, which is understandable to process and set that video up for streaming as well as downloading if you enable it.

That's an option in Gumroad. You can either have it downloadable or not. You don't have to. In this in my case, I left it as downloadable. I'm trusting folks just to not, you know, throw it and share it around or whatever because it's fairly cheap.

But a word on Gumroad, I guess, is I I really feel like it's the best way to test out an idea like this, you know, selling something online, whether it's a product or a course or just, know, a video tutorial or something. Because you could certainly set up your own website domain, and I've done that. Use WooCommerce, let's say inside WordPress to set up a whole store, etcetera. But that's a lot of work. Gumroad allows you to just put your product out there more or less right now.

There's, you know, header screen graphic or whatever that you need and text to sort of explain your course, but other than that, it's basically just ready to go upload your files and put a price and start selling it. You can always set up all that crap later, the websites, etcetera And plus the analytics and and email marketing tools inside Gumroad make it such a great deal to use when you compare to using something like Mailchimp or Convertkit or any of the other selling marketing services out there, especially for prior courses that are, you know, sort of smaller contained things like mine. There's certainly reasons and and a time or a place to use those other services. No no doubt about it. But just for getting up and testing an idea, the whole, you know, MVP, minimum viable product, right now, I think there's not much better than Gumroad to use.

So for right now, I'm gonna stop there. If you have questions about that process so far, I'm gonna cover some of the marketing and sales numbers specifically in the next episode. But if you have any questions and things you'd like to ask me about the process, about the sales, about the marketing, all that kind of stuff, feel free to send me an email, [email protected]. Send me something on Twitter, I chris on Twitter. This is not like I'm not an expert at this.

This is not my gig doing this kind of stuff. It was a lot of fun to do, and I'll probably do another one, but, it's not my main thing. So I'm learning as I go. I'd love to if you have suggestions or comments, I would love to hear those as well. I'm looking forward to the feedback I'm gonna get from all the the folks who bought the course originally.

There's they'll get an email automated thing from Gumroad and hopefully a few of them fill that out and I can get some feedback on it. And, but in the meantime, I wanna thank you for listening. Thanks if you happen to buy my course. And if you haven't, the link is in the show notes. Goodstuff.fm/dailyish/160eight.

I think that's it for now. Thanks for listening. See you next episode. Bye.