Teaching User Interface Development with Sam Selikoff (BuildUI)
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Brian: [00:00:00] Today on the show, you're going to hear my conversation with Sam Selikoff, teaching software engineers how to level up their game with video courses.

Here we go.

So my friend, Sam Selikoff is on the show today. We recorded our conversation on December 15th, 2023. It was a good one. We got to uh, catch up and and hear all about Sam's journey to building his business and co founding it. It's called Build UI. com. So Sam is a career software engineer who focuses on.

The technical side of the front end of web development. And he and his partner teach courses on web development and software engineering and helping folks kind of level up their game there. He has a fantastic YouTube channel where he teaches that stuff for free. And then they sell a line of courses and it's a really great business.

So we had a really great wide ranging conversation from Sam's journey, working for Ted. The, you know, the video media company into [00:01:00] going out on his own and starting this business and and really thriving as an online teacher. Let's get into it. Here's my conversation with Sam Selikoff.

Sam Selikoff, welcome to the show. Great to hang out with you again.

Sam: Thanks man. I'm excited to be here.

Brian: Yeah. So, you know, I've just got, just gotten to know you recently in the last a couple of weeks here and we now we're in a mastermind group together. And yeah, this is cool.

Sam: It's awesome, man. It's been a long time coming because I've been listening to your pod for a while and I met Jordan at microconf, like maybe my first microconf and I think we just passed by each other. But I always knew there was a conversation there, so I'm glad we connected and,

Brian: For sure. Which microconf was that? Was that last year?

Sam: No, it would have been like 2017 or 2018, something like that. It was pre COVID.

Brian: Yeah. I I've been going to microconf I think almost every year since like maybe 20. [00:02:00] 14 or 15 but I think there was one year that I missed. It might've been 17 or 18. I forgot.

Sam: Okay. Maybe you weren't there, but I remember I was listening to your podcast and that's like, those are the years. So me and me and Ryan started our business in like 2016. And then we found micro comp a few years later, met Adam Wathen and Taylor Otwell and all those guys. And then found you guys and basically everyone who's in those circles.

And yeah, I met George. It's fun when people have a podcast, right? Cause you're, you're like, I already like this guy, you know, and then you meet him and you feel like you already know him.

Brian: I know. I, I, not that I'm like super famous or anything, but I do get that a lot. Like whenever, you know, cause I tend to come on other podcasts or people that I tend to work with probably know me from my podcast. So yeah, it's, it's pretty often that it's like, yeah, I know everything about you and

Sam: Yeah,

Brian: and, and like,

Sam: your voice. I've, I've listened to hundreds of hours of your voice in my ears walking on the west side highway. So

Brian: And, you know, Jordan and I also have that kind of podcast where we're just. Weirdly open about, about like [00:03:00] most of our, at least our work lives. And and I often like just get off the recording and I'm like, oh shit. What did I say on this one? You know?

Sam: good though. It's like eavesdropping, you know, on on, on friends talking about business. So it's great. I'm always a little like I was, wish Jordan was back in the East coast a little bit. You know what I mean? Because I, I like, one of the reasons I like listening to you guys is because you got the East coast vibe going on.

Brian: You know what's so funny is I feel like, Jordan is, is, he's always got that, that New York vibe no matter where he lives. But the funny thing about me and Jordan is, is we it's such a coincidence how we met. I mean, and we grew, we literally grew up like in neighboring towns in Long Island, New York.

Sam: how did you guys

Brian: And we didn't know it like know each other then we met as adults we met through we both like, Andrew Warner on mixer G put out a call to form a mastermind group. This was maybe 2012. I want to say something like that, like a long time ago. Me and Jordan both [00:04:00] joined that along with like Brennan done and a couple of other people.

And we were in a mastermind group together for like, maybe 3 years. And. Yeah. What at that time I was living in Connecticut and so was Jordan in neighboring towns in Connecticut

Sam: Wow.

Brian: And like we

Sam: had both moved there from Long Island.

Brian: Yeah, like we had been traveling around. I was I was in New York City before that and then but yeah Then he was so he and I just both joined this like mixer G mastermind group and then and then was like hey Let's meet for coffee because we live like five minutes away from each other and then we find out that like we both also grew up in like neighboring towns in Long Island, New York and

Sam: That's awesome. The rest is history.

Brian: Anyway I want to talk about you and actually probably in the next episode that we do together, we'll, we'll talk about New York city. Cause that's, that's where you are

Sam: can talk about New York City all day long.

Brian: I love it. All right. Awesome.

Sam's elevator pitch
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Brian: But I want to hear about what, you know, cause I've, I've been seeing your stuff for a while, mostly like through, through Twitter, but you know, I, I've known that you're in this like code teaching ecosystem with like [00:05:00] YouTube and courses you run, you're the co founder of build UI.

com. I think what you're, I think you're building and working on a really interesting business. And I want to hear more about it. So, so how do you, we'll go back a little bit in your story, but like, how do you describe what you do today? If, if you're meeting someone, if you're at MicroConf and you're in the hallway, what do you, what do you do, Sam?

Sam: I say I make videos teaching people how to code.

Brian: There you go.

Sam: So that's what I do. And if I'm at a party, I'll say teaching people how to make websites. Because most people are like, code?

Brian: yeah. And then they're like, can you make me a website?

Sam: right, exactly.

Brian: I remember I started as like a freelance web designer and I used to hate telling friends and family what I do for a living,

Sam: Yeah.

Brian: at like these, you know, like I just couldn't stand that conversation.

Sam: Yeah. What's the what's the product that everyone uses? The, the one that's advertised everywhere. [00:06:00] Squarespace. I'm like, have you heard of Squarespace? They do. They're really good at making websites. They're even better than I am actually.

Brian: I recommended that to like a family friend and they got super offended. They're like, oh, you won't build me a website. It's like, oh.

Sam: Yeah.

Brian: mean, Squarespace is such a better option there anyway.

Marketing as front end only (at first)z
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Brian: But you focus on the front end and obviously UI, right? Um, I mean, I would say aside from Tailwind, I'm actually not super familiar with any of the other stuff that you teach.

Like, like, I, I see you talking about these courses on like Radix and, and all these different things that like, I literally have never heard of this stuff. Like, what are you, are you, are, are these? Tools and, and libraries that are like pretty niche, or are they pretty widespread in other parts of the code ecosystem?

Like,

Sam: Yep. So I can, I can give some context. So The reason I call myself a front end developer is because it's the part I kind of love most about building [00:07:00] for the web. I come from a Rails background, originally PHP, and just ended up spending more time on the JavaScript and UI and design and HTML and CSS sides of things because that's just naturally what I liked the most.

So the reason we talk about front end development is because that's kind of the target. Audience, but we still end up teaching full stack. It's kind of like

Brian: Oh, okay.

Sam: you're a react developer and you want to make an animated dropdown and that's what you're going to be searching for. And we're going to teach you how to do that.

But along the way, we might sneak in, you know, things about domain modeling on the backend. But we still think about it all from. If we're teaching you something on the server, something about databases, something about APIs. It's all in support of a front end feature. You know, our podcast, our technical podcast called front end first.

And that comes from part of our philosophy on, on software development, which is [00:08:00] that you want to think about the front end first, because that's the point of contact with the user. And so if you're talking about. Adding an index to a database to speed up a query. Ultimately, it should be in service of something that benefits the

Brian: so that it loads faster.

Sam: exactly. And so, and then, and then just to avoid things that you're doing because you're interested in them, technically, there's always like a user flow that's supported. There's value being created for the user. So that, that's kind of how we think about it, but we still do the, the angle that we

Brian: I really liked

Sam: in our marketing is, is, is front end developer.

Brian: I really liked that because that's exactly how that that's my history with it and also how I build today. I come from a background as a designer and front end person first, and then later in my career, I bolted on like learning how to build in rails so that I can build the interfaces that I want to build,

Sam: Right. It's all in support of the

Brian: still how I think about it.

Even, even at the start of like a new project or feature, and I'm thinking about like the, [00:09:00] the database architecture. It's all in service of how this is going to end up for the user on the screen.

Sam: Yep. Absolutely. So, I moved to New York because I was working for TED Talks, the conference company, and I was doing Ember development there, which is a front end framework, and still with Rails back end, but that was the framework that we used on the front end, and met Ryan there, and then we started EmberMath, where we taught Ember.

And then last year we started build UI. So we kind of broadened out and stopped focusing exclusively on Ember. Now we use React, but React has lots of kind of frameworks that are at the same level as Ember in terms of things that provide routing and, you know, all the other pieces that you would need to actually build an app.

Brian: So,

Sam: so that's what Build UI is about.

BuildUI courses and staying up to date
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Brian: okay. So, I mean, again, we're going to get back into the story in a bit, but what's like the, so I know you have like a bunch of courses on, on Build UI. com.

Sam: Mm hmm.

Brian: You know, there's [00:10:00] one on Talend, Remix, Framer Motion, which I've never heard of. Um, uh, I mean, React is huge, of course, and like, there's a lot of stuff within React, but like, think,

Sam: And then our current one is on Ra Our current one is on Radix. That's going to be coming out next. And, and so

Brian: so I'm sitting here, like, Radix, Framer Motion, and Remix are things that I think I've only heard of by, from following you. But like, are the, how niche are these? I want to know, you

Sam: They're pretty big. They're pretty big. So have you heard of Headless UI from the folks at Tailwind Labs? Radix is an equivalent level of abstraction in terms of the problem it's solving to headless UI. So Radix UI is another very popular UI library that's headless. It provides behavior for things like dropdowns and modals, but then you get to bring your own styling.

And so, I've made a [00:11:00] lot of videos about Radix. On my YouTube channel, people were asking for more, and that's what led to us wanting to make the course for BuildUI. So, that's a pretty popular library. Remix is a framework that uses React, but it also has APIs for interacting with the server side and crossing the server client kind of boundary.

And it uses Node on the backend. So you're writing Node code for things like creating sessions or talking to databases. But it's tightly inter, interleaved with React, the React app you're building.

Brian: You know, it's, it's funny. Like I've, I've always once I learned rails and then I got into like stimulus JS and you know, a little bit lately with like Alpine JS, mostly just vanilla JavaScript. Right. And, and light you know, sprinkling JS, like in, into the Dom, like that was like beautiful to me.

Cause like, it's, it's so simple. It's, it's front end focus. It's, it's designed [00:12:00] focus. And I don't need to get into the big heavy handed frameworks that the reacts and everything else. And maybe that's to a fault. I think at this point, the, like all, all the, that whole ecosystem has gotten so huge and so widespread that, that I guess these like sub tooling starts to make it easier and more like digestible for, for a developer to get in there and start to build.

I always just felt like it like added so much more complexity to what you need to build and ship a simple product, you know?

Sam: It, it does add complexity without question. I talked about this on the Mostly Technical pod with Aaron and Ian, because they also are kind of starting from Laravel, and then just like the Rails ecosystem, figuring out how to get more interactivity on the client. Without leaving that paradigm and the way I think about it, I don't think there's a one right approach, of course, the reason that I started using more and more JavaScript [00:13:00] first is because when I was learning programming and falling in love with front end development, I was working in Boston for a financial software company and building an internal like dashboard of a survey from our customers and I was using D three to render charts and graphs.

And tying it to the URL so you could click a part of the chart and it would add a filter. And I wanted all the charts, the SVGs to animate once you clicked on it. And so for that, you're writing JavaScript, right? You have to. And I had an idea of what I wanted to do, and I didn't want to be constrained by any abstraction, right?

Because all of those kinds of, those abstractions in those backend frameworks eventually hit a limit in some sense. And you have to dive down into the actual language. So, I kind of think about it like, I had an idea for a user experience, a UI I wanted to build, and I didn't want to have to be limited on the ceiling of that.

I wanted to be able to use D3. [00:14:00] Completely. I wanted to be able to use CSS or any JavaScript APIs in the browser I needed on hover, right on mouse, enter on mouse, leave and just write it like JavaScript. So I think the folks who are like me who end up think basically tackling a problem starting at the front end, they want that high ceiling.

But the problem is, as you described, is like the JavaScript ecosystem. By abandoning a lot of the stuff that came with the full stack frameworks, like rails and Laravel, the floor got really, really low. And the way I see rails and Laravel ecosystems is like, we have a high floor. You start off with a high floor and we've been figuring, but you, but you hit a ceiling and things like live wire and all these stimulus have been figuring out how to raise the ceiling, but the floor is there.

The JavaScript first people are like, we have no limit to the ceiling because we're working in the browser, but the floor dropped out. And now finally frameworks like Next and Remix are raising the floor, giving us a good baseline so we don't break the [00:15:00] web so that we have the baseline experience. So I think both things are fine and it depends on which you want to focus on, but there's no question that there's a lot of complexity in the JavaScript

Brian: I mean, it's a little bit insane, the complexity, like, like the, you know, cause I always talk about this in my career, that this gap in web development that I had. So I, I, I was, you know, in the web design industry working for agencies and stuff starting in 2005. And then going out on my own and, and, and really in it up, up until around 2010, 2012, and then from that point forward, I only dabbled in it to build my own product sites, but mostly I was focused on like marketing and bootstrapping businesses and stuff like that.

And then I didn't really get back into like full stack development until 2018 myself, like coding.

Sam: I remember you were learning, you were learning

Brian: so like, so there was this period in, in my history of like this, like Where I went dark between like 2011 and 2018 and then I came back to the, to [00:16:00] the code world and I was like, what happened? Everything got so complicated, you know?

Sam: It definitely did. I think that if we had a figurehead like a DHH or Taylor Otwell, who could have brought those convention over configuration mindset to the front end ecosystem. It didn't have to be like this, but we didn't really have that. And so you have a lot of fragmentation at the same time.

I will say when I was at Ted, one time we were at the conference in Vancouver running like the big Ted event and my boss, the CEO, like CEO of the company, Chris Anderson wanted me. And Ryan to make an app that he could send messages to the speakers for. And this was in like, he, we had 30 minutes to make it.

And he's like, I want to have an iPad on the stage and I want to have my computer and be able to send a message. You're taking too long. Look at the audience, flash the time. And this was like a very magical experience. I had where we created this Ember app, we plugged it [00:17:00] into Firebase and we had like a real time to route app that was deployed.

We built that thing in like 13 minutes, I think from scratch done. And that to me was like this magical developer experience where I was like, Oh man,

Brian: Like what's the

Sam: like I don't need to write control exactly. And I don't need to write controllers in my rails app to do this because so much of the backend stuff has kind of been commoditized into these services.

This is like. Incredible. Right. And so I think a lot of people who do love the kind of front end, like the JavaScript first approach to building web apps have probably had experiences like that. And it makes you think, rethink a lot of what, what you thought that being said, it's still massively complex.

And when you don't write that back in code yourself and use something like a service. And then you add a bunch of services for a real app. You've now shifted the complexity to how those services [00:18:00] talk. So that's a separate problem. But that kind of thing is what this enables in a lot of ways. And yet you're still writing an Ember app.

You're still writing JavaScript. So you can make the UI do whatever you want. That's, that was like really fun experience for me. So that's kind of when I got pilled

Brian: Yeah, for sure.

BuildUI's UI (...and UX)
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Brian: All right. So like the other thing that I'm kind of wondering about when I look at Buildui. com is, Just overall, like how great it looks, right? Like, and obviously I would expect that from, from, from you guys. Cause you're like, you know, especially like front end focused engineers and everything, but like, do you have a design background as well?

Like who's, who's really, cause there, there, there's so many details in here. There's, you know, just the overall look and feel, but then when you click into these like these recipes and stuff who's, who's like kind of, you know, defining that, that brand style there.

Sam: Yeah, so Steve Shoger helped us with that design. And for the initial version, he's fantastic, of course. And I'm lucky to have him as a friend who helped out. And [00:19:00] he gave us the mock ups in Figma for the homepage and the video page. And then we also paid someone for Jord Requel for the logo.

And he did a great job with that which was based off of some, some sketch logo work that Steve had done. And so, between the colors from Steve's mock up and the logo, we've tried to embrace that for the brand. There's some other colors that he gave us with the logo that I've been meaning to add to the site but for now I'm really happy with how it looks.

And the recipes stuff is, was just ours. So basically, with those first two screens we've taken that and tried to do that.

Brian: I also really like that model of working with people, you know, I've, I've like a bit of a design background and I, I, I have designed like everything in my sites before, but then more recently, like on the Clarityflow marketing site, I worked with Mike McAllister and he only did the home, he, he did the brand design and the homepage and I ran with it from there.

Like. I think that's a really kind of [00:20:00] efficient way that a lot of companies can, can leverage a, like a super high end designer who you can't hire that person like full time or for, or for a huge project, but you can, you can have like a more doable project to do that homepage and you can get so far with, with just

Sam: You get so much more if you get someone like a Steve to do that because he's going to be thinking about The shadows, the typography, the line height, the white space, and then you can just use that and, you know, I've have enough experience. I'm not a designer, but I can create another page that's completely different.

That feels the same as the page he gave me. So I totally agree with that. And, you know, once you build it, obviously the source of it's changed a lot from that original thing. So you have to be living in the code. So if you don't have the designer on, you can't. That, that's the way to go for sure, though.

Sam's time at TED
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Brian: So I do want to like. I do want to kind of just ask about your story on, on the business. So you were at Ted [00:21:00] and what, I mean, what was it like at Ted? Is that a large team? Like, kind of small? Who,

Sam: it was about a hundred people, maybe a hundred and fifty by the end, or today here in New York and Soho, and then the developer team, we probably had twenty developers, maybe less, maybe twenty by the end, distributed mostly. But Ryan, my co founder, was here. We became really close friends and then ended up starting the business together.

But it was a rail shop. You know, and the code that we wrote was for TED. com. That was the main thing, which is the biggest website I've ever worked on. And I think like 30 million, like, visits or something a month.

Brian: I, I always have so much respect for people in our industry who, who had the opportunity to work on these huge websites. That, that's how I start. I, I started at, at an agency in New York doing sites for at and t Discover Card, Pepsi. And I was like, I started as an intern at this agency in my twenties and I just remember thinking like they had me updating [00:22:00] like nutrition facts on like a Pepsi page somewhere.

And I was like, how many thousands of people are looking at this page? You know? And

Sam: Yeah.

Brian: But you know, a couple of years of working on these like major brand websites, it does raise your game to a level of like attention to detail that. Like you, you cannot ship stuff that, that will break in random versions of random browsers when you're working.

And so like when people start their career.

Sam: We had something at Ted called make it red. It was like our fake password for things because my buddy Aaron, the designer one time pushed out something on the front end and there's like Ted red is like the brand color of, of Ted, you know, and we use like this Helvetica font. That's like just the T E D.

That's like the main thing. Anyways, we had to make something red. Like the background of the whole homepage, this bright, atrocious

Brian: Oh, yeah.

Sam: we always would joke, make it red. It was like a bug in production that went out to so many people. So, yeah, it happens, but no, you're absolutely right. It's a [00:23:00] different level of concern.

It, it, it forces you to think you have to, you're forced to prioritize in a different way when you're at an organization like that and dealing with a property that big.

Brian: especially when you're young in your career and you start with that level of exposure on, on like working on websites with that level of traffic. And I had managers who I learned so much from as a young front end web developer. And this was like in, 2006, 2007, when, you know, we're dealing with like IE6 and all this JavaScript stuff did not exist, you know, and but it, it was, I, what I then found as I went out on my own and started hiring other developers and collaborating with folks, I used to be amazed at like, you know, some of the, some of the like, like well known or higher priced people, they're delivering stuff.

That's just like, Man, this would never fly if, you know,

Sam: I got really lucky because the design team at Ted was phenomenal. [00:24:00] And the designers that we worked with would give us really, really nice mock ups, not even mock ups, you know, just like they were really high fidelity. Screens for apps we built both internally and externally. And we had a design system and that's where I would say my taste improve the most because I learned to pay attention to details that I didn't understand before why they made things feel and look better.

White space, shadows, things like that. And I got good at implementing detailed designs because if you did something wrong, the designer would say, Oh, you know, there's actually, this is not black. It's like a soft gray, the line height here. You need to make sure to check the line height and the text, because it's not just a default.

It totally looks different. So that helped me develop the taste. And then. And today being able to do, you know, what we can do with build your eye, where we take a nice design that Steve gave us and then build recipes pages that feel the same. I would say tailwind and meeting Adam and Steve and reading [00:25:00] refactoring UI and just paying attention to the things they pay attention to.

helped to bring the level of skill up to my taste. Oh yeah. Cause you learned a lot of design by using their tools since they are so detailed and focused on the details and pay attention to those things that you inevitably kind of pick it up. So I would say a lot of people get to that point where you have acquired a taste for what looks and feels right and what feels shoddy, you know, but then there's a time delay between your skill getting there, which can be really frustrating.

And you just have to practice, I guess, but

Transition from TED to BuildUI
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Brian: so talk to me about like, when did you leave Ted? What was the transition between that and build UI? Maybe there were some stops along the way. Like what? How did you, how did you make, and also partnering up with, with, with Ryan, like, was the, so did you both leave around the same time and decide you were, you were going to work together going forward or how did that come about?

Sam: yep, I was at Ted for two years. [00:26:00] Ryan was there for three, maybe a little bit longer and we were doing Ember stuff and Going to JavaScript conferences and Ember conferences and doing open source. So we were very early on the same page in terms of, we were just spending a lot of time doing that cause we really loved it and we started doing some open source of our own speaking at conferences and meetups, kind of making a name for ourselves in the Ember community.

And, that's when I started getting like requests for, you know, doing some moonlight consulting with folks and helping them out. We have Ember developers. We want them to level up. You're an expert, you know, so can you help out? And so about two years after I started at Ted, I was like, I really wanted to start my own company, go out on my own.

I had never done that before. And Ted was the best job I ever had.

Brian: when you, when you set out to go out on your own, was the thought like you'll do consulting?

Sam: consulting. Yes, basically. I want to work for myself and I also was getting into videos at that point, you know, conference [00:27:00] talks, but also kind of thinking about things like YouTube videos. I had watched rails cast. I just love teaching. I used to want to be a professor. So my original career was going to be an economics professor and I had worked at I had, I had been a tutor and an undergraduate.

I had a company called Gator tutoring. So I was actually like build UI 1. 0. was Gator tutoring where I taught economics and finance. And then

Brian: So,

Sam: so I always loved

Brian: So, so you're thinking about leaving TED and your game plan is like, yeah, I'll do some consulting but you, but even then, you were you were also plotting to get into like maybe teaching and doing videos

Sam: Yeah. And the consulting, even the consulting was focused on teaching. It was kind of like leveling up your team, you know, it was mentoring, mentoring. So we would do mentoring by the hour, by the month or whatever. And we would basically pair with your developers and that's like the best, that's how we felt was the best way to level them up was to pair with a senior on your team.

Next best thing was to pair with us.

Brian: that a[00:28:00]

Sam: so they learn how,

Brian: model of consulting?

Sam: there's a lot of folks who do it. And, and if you have a team of folks, but your limiting factor is the seniors, senior developers in your team, and you have a lot of intermediate or juniors who, you know, the equivalent in Rails would be like, they don't understand why their thing is N plus one ing.

And, you know, they need to learn that and learn how to hoist the data fetching to the route so that you avoid that.

Brian: But they're in house,

Sam: with someone,

Brian: are all

Sam: are busy. Yes, exactly. So we would come and pair with them and just work on whatever they're working on, but explain and teach and level them up. So it's really effective if you can get folks who are working day to day like that and they have They're not getting pulled into things.

You have a couple of solid hours per week with each person on the team. You know, Ben Orenstein like to say like pairing is the best way to level up anybody. And if you just aren't, don't have the resources to pair, basically you can hire us to pair with you. So that was the [00:29:00] idea. Yeah.

BuildUI origin story
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Brian: when did, like, when did you and Ryan go, like, start going hard on Build UI, like, build this as a business, selling courses

Sam: Yep. So basically fall, summer of 2016, I left Ted and I started doing full time. I had like one contract and I was doing some other stuff and I was trying to get Ryan to come along. I'm a little bit more like he's a little bit more like, he thinks things through more than I do. And I was like, come on, man, we'll, we'll do it.

We're going to make enough money. Don't worry about it. And so it took like six months, but eventually he came along too. And that's when we sat, we start, we founded Ember map Inc. Was the company and that was in the, in the fall of 2016. And we launched embermap. com with like our first two courses on acceptance testing and Ember Concurrency, I think, which were libraries in the Ember ecosystem and testing was a general course on how to test Ember apps.

And yeah, we ran that. It was a subscription video site. We still have folks who are on that [00:30:00] because we have a big library of videos there. And we really ran that from 2016 until, I would say, Basically until we shifted focus to build UI, which was last year, 2022 October is when we launched that

Brian: I mean, EmberMap, it's still running. That's still a product and a subscription that's like, it's almost like that product is like, sort of like feature complete and still has value.

Sam: Oh,

Brian: Even though you've, you've stopped kind of focusing on it.

Sam: We started learning, you know, the thing with these businesses is there's a technology risk, right? If you're going to create a business that teaches Ember and Ember kind of falls out of favor, it doesn't get as popular as you thought. Meanwhile, react is going crazy and you know, people are canceling their Ember map subscriptions because their team is switching to react.

They don't use Ember anymore. Then there's not much you can do, right? So we were also learning and interested in react, but we loved Ember because. Yehuda Katz, the creator, and Tom Dale shared a lot of the philosophies that DHH had with Rails. Convention over [00:31:00] configuration, that was kind of what we valued, but it just never, you know, took off the same way for a variety of reasons.

Brian: It seems like this developer ecosystem of like, teaching all, all development you know, all software stacks is, is such a really great space for people who, like you who are like kind of natural teachers. You know, a lot of technical experience. I feel like there's this classic thing of like, Oh, developers don't buy products, but learning products that, that level up their skills.

They absolutely buy probably you, I would think like actually pretty quickly when they are like motivated to level up their skill, whether that's like. Advancing in their career or getting their first job or, or building products. Like

Sam: Dude, developers spend free time on their weekends watching YouTube educational content. I mean, when I was learning, I, I, I was self taught because I didn't have, I didn't go to school for it or, and I didn't grow up doing it. But when I was learning programming, I was eating that stuff up. I was doing Linda courses.

I was up till [00:32:00] three in the morning. I mean, that was one of the most invigorating parts of programming to me was that. Unlike my job, I could get better on my own time and at my own pace. And so yeah, I think that's true for sure.

Pivoting moments for BuildUI
---

Brian: So what are some of the things today, as we start to wrap up this episode about the courses business, like I know you you've gone through a few different iterations, not just like Ember map to build UI, but even Build UI, you've done some like pricing experiments and models of how you sell these courses.

And, and, you know, your, your funnel kind of runs through your YouTube channel What are some of the like the key learnings, or maybe there was like an event where you change something and this was like a big trajectory change in the business? Anything like that come to mind?

Sam: Yeah, there's two specifically. And you know, Adam, while then again, I mentioned earlier is he's become one of my closest friends and he's helped us a lot with the business mentoring side. And Basically, there was two inflection points for us. One was we were starting to build a [00:33:00] frame or motion course.

I had been teaching frame or motion. That's an animation library for react. That's pretty popular. One of the most popular animation libraries and react when I started making YouTube videos, which originally started because we were going to give a training at Ember Conf in 2020 COVID happened. And since I had prepared it, I asked, can I just record it and put it on YouTube?

I did. And I was like, Oh, I can make YouTube videos. This is fun. And so that

Brian: Oh, YouTube's a thing.

Sam: It is a thing. And eventually started using react and making react videos. And I always loved animation. So I was making frame of motion animation videos and I was like, I'll do a course. This is going to be kind of our first way to like, try something new, a new product after Ember map, because we knew we wanted to teach react.

So I was making a course. And we had like a business conference with a bunch of those guys that I had met through the microconf community and basically Adam and some of the other folks there were, were basically saying, why make the course and sell it if you ultimately want [00:34:00] to do ember map 2. 0, right?

Brian: Mm hmm.

Sam: You don't have to validate that people are willing to pay a subscription for a learning site. You've already done that. So just start the learning site. And you can even put the court, the videos you have already for the course up early, early access. People can start watching it and you can just get it going.

So that was October of last year. We came back from that. And like six weeks later we had, we launched build UI. It was subscription, same model as Ember map, 29 a month. And then in this year, in April, March, I guess, March, end of March, we had another one of those kind of mini conferences, little founders retreat.

And Subscription stuff. There's some podcasts we can link to. If people want to hear the whole breakdown, but subscription business is just hard. And especially, it's also not a great fit for content sites. Basically the revelation there was like, we're, we're always feeling like we're trying to plug two holes.

One is people [00:35:00] canceling because there's not enough new content. So there's churn. The other is, You want to make a splash when you launch a new course because that's what gets people excited. Raises the ceiling of the launch. Builds the organic word to word, mouth to mouth marketing between people.

Brian: Mm hmm.

Sam: But there's a tension because you kind of want to build the course, but you have to keep things going so that people don't churn out.

And it was really, it's a frustrating, it's a hard business to run. And um, Um, Adam was like, why don't you do lifetime purchases? So long story short, we came back. All we did was change it from subscriptions to lifetime and boom, we had a great month. We were able to stop consulting and we haven't had to do any consulting since, since

Brian: I think there are so many of these examples where, where people try to fit a business into a recurring revenue box that just doesn't quite fit. And I feel like this is one of those things where it's like, you know, and I've been a member of content based subscriptions. Like I was a [00:36:00] member of go rails for, for a couple of years there when I was when I was learning that.

And um, uh, you know, it's the thing with that is like the, the churn comes down to revenue. There's absolutely nothing wrong with your product. It's just the person has moved on. Like they, they've leveled up. They're not interested in that thing anymore or that community anymore. And they're moving on. And like, it's a, it's like a natural cycle, you know?

Sam: Because you're trying to fight that and it

Brian: because if it's a typical

Sam: in your mouth,

Brian: a typical SAS, it's like, all right, why are people churning? There's some feature, some product that that's not working, but with, but with content, it's like people are just moving on in their, in their life, you know?

Sam: Yes, exactly. So that, that, that's a really stressful business to run, a content business as a subscription. And it's just, it just sucks, honestly. And the other problem is that when people find out about it, your site and your content, at the beginning, is when they're most excited. And their willingness to pay is highest and a lot of the subjective value you get [00:37:00] from buying the thing.

It's like going to a movie, you know, or buying a book. If a book comes out from someone, an author you love, it's super fun to go and buy it. And then you have it on your shelf forever. And if you never read it, you're not mad that you spent the money on it. Actually, you love that you have the optionality to read it.

Part of the benefit, the value of the product is the optionality. But if you do a subscription, first, you're only charging 29 the

Brian: what I was going to say is like all that excitement and all that value that they get in month one for like Diving into this to this ocean of content. It that's worth so much more than than one than 29, you

Sam: exactly, exactly. And then life gets in the way they move on or they just don't have time to do it. They see the invoice for the next month and they're like, am I really using this?

And then eventually they cancel and it's like, well now they can't even reference it. It's just not a good fit. You want to treat it like buying a book or a movie. You buy the full price, you own it forever and it's just such a better model. Everyone was happy. We were happier. The business is more sustainable.

It freed us up from having to focus [00:38:00] our attention and energy on fighting churn and writing emails about people's failed credit cards and, and all of our customers loved it too. In fact, there was a ton of people who were waiting, who had, who were interested but never signed up. And once we changed the pricing model, literally just changed that nothing else about the product.

A bunch of them bought. So that's definitely the right fit for us. And we're in a spot now where we're really happy with the business we have. And it's, it's, you know, we've been in it since 2016, but we've never had a better chance at making it all work. So it's been pretty fun year.

Brian: Sam, this is like super, super fun to kind of follow along in your, in your journey with, with build UI. And so, you know, here in 2024 I'm sure you'll be releasing, you know, courses like every month. So I definitely, especially if you're, you know, I love how there's so many different, like. Types of courses and for different levels of people and their career.

I like that yours seems to be like a little bit more on the advanced side, but, but you still, I mean, of course you have the YouTube channel, but like even the courses are [00:39:00] sort of organized in this like bite sized way. So you can even get in there and start to level up and in different ways. So I like

Sam: Definitely. Cool.

Brian: well, yeah, thanks for doing this.

Sam: Absolutely. Appreciate it.