These are all fair criticisms that I'm happy to respond to, but let's please be careful when throwing around the word "scam". A scam is something dishonest and I promise that I have good intentions.
We often forget that products can evolve. I'm not pretending that I've come up with the best version of what this product could eventually be. But I've validated the need for a product, released a version of it that has a modicum of value, and an overwhelming majority of the people who have completed the class are incredibly excited and thankful. I just got this email today (completely unsolicited):
"Subj: $100K in wasted programming costs. OMR liberated me!
Hi Mattan,
I followed your Rails course and created Shruffle.com. It's a simple way for businesses to do text marketing. Nothing too fancy, but I'm marketing it to local restaurants and barber shops around where I live, and have been getting good responses.
Just wanted to say a big THANK YOU for making a kick-ass course. I wasted so much time hiring wack ass programmers in the past who never understood what I wanted to do half the time. Over the course of 5-6 years I must have spent at least $100K in wasted programming costs for various projects that never went anywhere. Your course liberated me....now I can build anything that I dream of without spending a penny.
Most of the other courses were a big freaking waste of time. I was looking for something that showed me how to do basic things quickly (login/logout, validations, etc etc), and your course did just that. Next step is to incorporate Stripe for payments."
Now I'll admit that I'm not happy with what % of people finish the course (it's higher than average for an online class but still relatively low) and I'm not happy that I don't teach enough to give people the flexibility to build more than just a fairly simple CRUD app, but rest assured that as the creator of this product, I'm more critical than anyone else of its flaws.
The first version was 3 hours, I took a lot of feedback and completely redid the lessons to turn it into a much longer class. The course has been redone 3 time so far and I'm currently in the process of expanding it out into a much larger one that teaches people the various concepts of web applications within the contexts of different kinds of applications (an about me, a wordpress, a yelp, a pinterest) which will give people more of that understanding that we're both looking for.
Anyway, as I'm sure you can imagine, it hurts when someone takes a product you've spent a lot of time on and calls it a "scam".
We often forget that products can evolve. I'm not pretending that I've come up with the best version of what this product could eventually be. But I've validated the need for a product, released a version of it that has a modicum of value, and an overwhelming majority of the people who have completed the class are incredibly excited and thankful. I just got this email today (completely unsolicited):
"Subj: $100K in wasted programming costs. OMR liberated me!
Hi Mattan,
I followed your Rails course and created Shruffle.com. It's a simple way for businesses to do text marketing. Nothing too fancy, but I'm marketing it to local restaurants and barber shops around where I live, and have been getting good responses.
Just wanted to say a big THANK YOU for making a kick-ass course. I wasted so much time hiring wack ass programmers in the past who never understood what I wanted to do half the time. Over the course of 5-6 years I must have spent at least $100K in wasted programming costs for various projects that never went anywhere. Your course liberated me....now I can build anything that I dream of without spending a penny.
Most of the other courses were a big freaking waste of time. I was looking for something that showed me how to do basic things quickly (login/logout, validations, etc etc), and your course did just that. Next step is to incorporate Stripe for payments."
Now I'll admit that I'm not happy with what % of people finish the course (it's higher than average for an online class but still relatively low) and I'm not happy that I don't teach enough to give people the flexibility to build more than just a fairly simple CRUD app, but rest assured that as the creator of this product, I'm more critical than anyone else of its flaws.
The first version was 3 hours, I took a lot of feedback and completely redid the lessons to turn it into a much longer class. The course has been redone 3 time so far and I'm currently in the process of expanding it out into a much larger one that teaches people the various concepts of web applications within the contexts of different kinds of applications (an about me, a wordpress, a yelp, a pinterest) which will give people more of that understanding that we're both looking for.
Anyway, as I'm sure you can imagine, it hurts when someone takes a product you've spent a lot of time on and calls it a "scam".