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Udemy S-1 IPO
- lanecwagner 5y agoThey do an okay job for video courses, but videos are just so dull for coding. That's why I built https://qvault.io https://qvault.io maybe someday ill have time to make it an interactive course marketplace
- Ecstatify 5y agoI find that the courses on Udemy are very amateurish. I was following a course, what the guy was saying was wrong, I was seconding guessing myself and then towards the end of the course he corrected his mistake. Coursera and Pluralsight are much better at least they have some quality standards.
- duxup 5y agoThat was my experience a few years ago with taking some courses from some folks who were some of their top instructors... but it was very much "guy who knows this like the back of his hand rushes through a thing and maybe mentions one or two tips ... and here's the rest of the **** owl". Yeah I could reproduce his work but not with an understanding of what is going on / any kind of pathway to try new things, and I felt like there was no effort to communicate more than that. A few courses I really got the feeling that the instructor was taking an inaccurate approach to the whole topic. Not wrong... but not how the concept of the language or code works.
- ai_ia 5y ago> Coursera and Pluralsight are much better at least they have some quality standards. I agree 100% with Pluralsight. My previous company had given me access to entire Pluralsight courses and I really completed a lot of courses.
- lotophage 5y agoAmazing to think that 10 years ago that there were two new format Stanford open access courses that launched at the same time: AI Class (Peter Norvig, Sebastian Thrun) and ML Class (Andrew Ng). Thrun and Ng went on to launch Udemy and Coursera, respectively.
- forkLding 5y agoSebastian Thrun founded Udacity. Udemy was founded by other people.
- lotophage 5y agoWell, I got that amazingly wrong
- falcor84 5y agoThere was actually a third excellent course launched at the same time - Jennifer Widom's Introduction to Databases. The original version is no longer available, but there are mini-courses in its stead. Highly recommended - https://cs.stanford.edu/people/widom/DB-mooc.html https://cs.stanford.edu/people/widom/DB-mooc.html
- 1cvmask 5y agoAccording to wikipedia: It was founded in May 2010 by Eren Bali, Gagan Biyani, and Oktay Caglar. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Udemy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Udemy
- jstx1 5y agoI'll wait for the 90% discount on the stock.
- qaq 5y agoso you plan to add to your position every other week?
- belter 5y agoI was going to say they it all would be at 9.95 for the next 24 hours...But interestingly I just checked, and it seems there are no promotions, and courses that were sold days ago at 9.95 are now 120 and up. Is there maybe an IPO coming up? :-)
- roel_v 5y agoTheir promotions are usually time limited. And you'll have to make a separate account because the promotions are for new users only. So now you have your content spread over multiple accounts. But you can use Udeler so that you have local copies of everything, much better anyway.
- jstx1 5y agoI think it's more than just new users - I've gotten larger discounts from logging into the same account through a different browser.
- skeeter2020 5y agoyep. open the same page in a private session and watch prices plummet 90%+. Pretty annoying.
- belter 5y agoGrounds for a lawsuit? "Price discrimination is a commonplace practice that is presumptively lawful, save under special circumstances discussed below. It occurs when a seller of products regularly offers lower prices to its preferred customers and higher prices to the others when selling them the same or similar products at around the same time." https://www.markhamlawfirm.com/law-articles/unlawful-price-discrimination-an-obscure-antitrust-offense-by-william-markham-2013/ https://www.markhamlawfirm.com/law-articles/unlawful-price-d...
- moneywoes 5y agoIs the online course market not over saturated with LinkedIn Learning, Pluralsight etc
- regressiveparty 5y agoEveryone in the space has a different take on the best way to present online courses. Udemy is the wild west market approach. They let anyone make a course, and let the algorithm sort out whats worthwhile and what's not. That means you get A LOT of terrible stuff, but absolutely some insane deals from genuinely talented instructors.
- forkLding 5y agoI just bought 300 dollars worth of courses couple days ago on Udemy, I've used all these companies and I have to say Udemy is better than them. There is definitely a market based on teaching quality difference and the teaching tools provided.
- afs27 5y agoI noticed a lot of the courses I was looking at on Coursera seemed to be from universities and the ones on Udemy looked like they were more from companies (Google, etc.) or professionals from different organizations. Is that a fair assessment?
- abhi_arora 5y agoI'm in Tech Consulting with a background in Computer Science (specifically Data Science) and I'd have to say that the courses on Udemy are much more aligned with how things are done in the industry. And yes, most of the courses that I have taken there are taught by professionals with industry experience.
- arnvald 5y agoCoursera also has a number of courses provided by companies, even by Google (https://www.coursera.org/google-career-certificates https://www.coursera.org/google-career-certificates). You're right that Coursera has content from universities, on the other hand Udemy has individual instructors (and anyone can become an instructor). Also Coursera has a lot of free content - not sure if 100%, but a large number of courses offers the content for free, you only need to pay if you want to do assignments and get a certificate. Oh, and Coursera does not have 90% off promos every other week, unlike Udemy
- arboghast 5y agoOne thing I particularly appreciate from Udemy compared to other platforms is that there are many great (and not so great) courses covering obscure topics that are not available in Coursera, Edx, etc.
- WA 5y agoLike what?
- FlacoJones 5y agoLike deep diving TLS: https://www.udemy.com/course/ssl-tls-intro/ https://www.udemy.com/course/ssl-tls-intro/
- cute_boi 5y agoits not deep dive looks like some superficial tls course. 2 hour seems very less imo.
- arboghast 5y agoWindows Kernel Hacking https://www.udemy.com/course/windows-kernel-defense-and-attack-for-beginners-to-expert/ https://www.udemy.com/course/windows-kernel-defense-and-atta... Unlike the reviews I actually thought it was good and insightful, coming from Linux and macOS. Same for this malware development course on Windows https://www.udemy.com/course/ehf-maldev-in-windows/#instructor-1 https://www.udemy.com/course/ehf-maldev-in-windows/#instruct... This car maintenance one was also very useful Car Maintenance Anyone Can Do https://www.udemy.com/course/car-maintenance-anyone-can-do/ https://www.udemy.com/course/car-maintenance-anyone-can-do/ Just a few examples.
- omarhaneef 5y agoI agree. If you want to pick something brand spanking new, your best bet is Udemy. I remember when Vue first hit the scene and Udemy had 3 courses on it but the others did not. The same with a "small" topic like containers when they first came out and so forth. They can't match the depth of Udacity -- which, in my experience, is as deep as top graduate level courses -- they do have coverage.
- nickjj 5y agoOne thing that's worth mentioning is Udemy is a completely different type of company based on you being a watcher of courses vs being an instructor on Udemy. I was an instructor there for 5+ years (with ~30k enrollments) and in my entire professional career I've never met a worse company in terms of how corrupt they are and how little they actually care about instructors unless you happen to be one of the few instructors they reach out to privately and sign a contract with in which case they do extra things for you like promote and rank your course more so than related courses in your category. Their entire platform is based on manipulating both instructors and watchers of courses. I would seriously suggest anyone thinking about creating courses to avoid using any type of course marketplaces (ACG is especially bad too). It's worth it to build your own audience because on Udemy and other platforms you're actually not building your own business, you're building their business because you won't receive any information about anyone who signs up which means your students are 100% locked into that platform. If you leave you're essentially starting at ground zero in which case you might as well start at ground zero on your own terms.
- GoldenMonkey 5y agoAgreed. Similar experience as an instructor with them.
- arnvald 5y agoThanks for sharing! I'm planning to create a couple of courses next year and I considered using Udemy, because I use it quite a bit as a student, but I see I need to do some research before I lock myself in some platform. By the way: ACG = A Cloud Guru?
- nickjj 5y ago> By the way: ACG = A Cloud Guru? Yep. I don't want to get into it here but their founders are some of the worst people I've ever encountered in my life as a human being. This is only my opinion of course based on having had a fairly long term business relationship with them in the past. I don't like negatively talking about folks in public but yeah out of 20+ years of freelancing and dealing with dozens of companies ACG's founders are at the top of my list of folks I never want to think about or encounter again for the rest of my life.
- lquist 5y agoInteresting that the founding CEO owns only 1.5% of the company while the current CEO owns 2.5%. Wonder if this is because of secondary or dilution? How much does the other cofounder (Gagan) hold? I would have thought this was a huge success story for founders but it might not be?
- htrp 5y agoThey probably required massive rounds of dilution in each round to fund all the user acquisition to get to the next round. Per Crunchbase, it looks like they raise every quarter or so, and they lose anywhere between 10-20 million a quarter (amateur numbers compared to something like uber).
- buf 5y agoUdemy is the reason why I helped start Reforge and Closing Credits. I can't believe I'm seeing the S1 and it fuels me even more. Curated cohort-based live instructors that give revshare to industry experts > static unqualified mess.
- omarhaneef 5y agoI had not heard of these before but Reforge looks very cooked. I was impressed by the names you got on there, and that you are actually selective and seem to say no to some people. (For those who are wondering: I am not a plant, and I do not know buf.) Can you say a little about the placement rates, and what people end up doing after the program.
- chrisfrantz 5y agoReforge has far better content for the overlapping disciplines, it’s not even close.
- alangibson 5y agoMiddling quality, many good competitors, substantial I'll will from creators, no customer lock-in. I'm feeling there's a good short opportunity here
- mywittyname 5y agoAlternatively, they could go on a spending spree with all their new-found capital and effectively corner the market. I'm in agreement with you, but I've also noticed that company with a bad product isn't necessarily poorly run.
- avelis 5y agoWow. Crazy journey for Eren Bali. I remember when he was a Sr. Engineer at SpeedDate. When I was let go he was casually discussing Udemy around the office. At least the beginning ideas for it.
- lyime 5y agoHow come the founders have so little equity?
- regressiveparty 5y agoThey left a long time ago, and the company has raised a metric boatload of capital in the meantime.
- millerm 5y agoI wonder if they’ll have a flash sale on stocks every three days.
- crackinmalackin 5y agoJosh Comeaus css course is one of the most amazing courses I’ve ever purchased. I also wouldn’t be a web dev without Wes Bos and his courses. Brad Traversy, Max Depps sorry I know I’m spelling your name wrong, also Stephen Grider. Also can’t forget the amazing Scott Tolinkski and level tuts. These guys are amazing instructors and I’m happy to give them my money, more so if they’re on their own platforms
- mlengineerio 5y agoWhat do you guys think about educative? It's getting more popular in for people who focus on interviewing. I've been told a good author can earn about 20k during 6 months. It's pretty good ROI given it's all passive. As an author myself, what I really want to a direct communication channel with readers to answer their questions.
- robomartin 5y agoI see a lot of negative comments on this thread. Fair enough. I have seen the good, bad and ugly of Udemy. I have never tried to publish a course (thought about it). I am sure the instructor-side view of reality is less than ideal. Frankly, this is true even of massive platforms like Amazon. Ask any Amazon seller what the world looks like from their perspective. It can be horrific and surreal. Udemy (and Amazon) do not create value by developing top-notch back-end applications for instructors and sellers. Nor do they add value by having the best process for behind the scenes participants. Their value comes from what consumers see and experience. Yes, Udemy has a bunch of junk courses. I probably bought a few hundred courses from them. I am very careful about watching as much of the free material as possible before making a decision. Once you've seen and experienced a few courses you get a sense of how to evaluate quality. You can also do research on the instructors outside of Udemy. For example, a while ago I decided to take Robert Feranec's Altium Designer course on Udemy. I wanted a refresher. I use the software daily but I do so many things I haven't really kept up with the latest and greatest. https://home.fedevel.com/other/about-robert https://home.fedevel.com/other/about-robert Robert's course is top notch. I really enjoyed it. I will likely take some of his advanced classes off-platform. I've also had my kids go through various courses on Udemy. From software development to handwriting, math, languages and using GIMP. All great courses. No complaints whatsoever. One of my kids is currently going through the excellent "100 Days of Code - The Complete Python Pro Bootcamp for 2021" from App Brewery. It is amazing to see just how engaged she is. One of my other kids is currently going through MIT's 6.00.1x on EdX while simultaneously using the "100 days of Code" course on Udemy to shore-up holes in his Python knowledge. He is doing great. From there I plan to move them to higher level courses on either (or both) EdX and Coursera. These kids are going to finish high school with actual marketable skills that will lead to nice jobs during college (rather than the useless shit they are being fed in school...don't get me started). If it was possible to take these courses for credit they could graduate high school and obtain a BS in CS within a year. Sadly the only path I have been able to identify has a starting age requirement of 17, which I think is ridiculous. They are a couple of years younger than that and can already code circles around most first and second year university CS students. Age is irrelevant. Anyhow, I guess I am saying that there's a lot of good on the platform for learners. You just have to be careful about evaluating courses and instructors.
- cafetree 5y agoWe are building an open and mostly free course holding platform. https://classgalaxy.com https://classgalaxy.com Just like GitHub for learning. Here instructors can access and manage all students. Social connections for instructors and learners. Market place with small fees for qualified instructors.