No one told me coding was the easy part

You need more than just the technical skills

Author

Joe Previte
February 20, 2023

Hey friends! This is Joe’s Inner Circle, a newsletter for folks who are interested in what I’m up to and who want to learn along with me 👋

Here’s what I’ve got for you today:

  • Che, are you Argentinian?

  • Building the list one experiment at a time

  • No one told me coding was the easy part

  • Fun Finds

Che, are you Argentinian? 🧉 🇦🇷

Back in college, I studied abroad in Buenos Aires, Argentina. I fell in love with the culture and the language. Fast-forward to 2022, I started speaking solely in Spanish to my daughter when she was 3 months.

Now she’s 16 months and actually understands both Spanish and English. It’s amazing.

But it hasn’t been easy. I’ve wanted to improve my Spanish for my own-sake but also to help her with her language development so she becomes truly bilingual. I decided to launch a little hobby project: https://speakargentinianspanish.com/

I only have 30 signups so far but I also haven’t been actively sharing the landing page. If I can get to 100, that’s enough validation for me to actually work on the course. Until then, it’ll just be a waitlist.

Building the list one experiment at a time

TypeScript Course has been around for roughly one year now and the email list is around 2600 people. It’s currently in the presale/list-building phase. The target is 10k people.

Once I hit that, I’d like to launch a paid product. I may do it sooner but that’s where my head’s at right now.

To do this, I’m experimenting with different things to see which result in the most subscriber growth. Here’s what has stuck out so far:

List of experiments I’ve done so far.

No one told me coding was the easy part

Coding is hard but once you have it down, the real challenge appears: distribution.

It’s one thing to build something cool. It’s another to get the word out and have real users.

I’ve spent the past 6 years focusing on developing my technical skills. Now it’s time to get better at marketing, distribution and sales. This is what’s holding me back from taking TypeScript Course to the next level. So I’m actively trying to learn how to get better a storytelling and distribution.

Fun Finds 🔎

A list of things that caught my attention recently:


Thanks for reading! Catch ya next time.