Omer (00:11.600)
Welcome to another episode of the SaaS Podcast.
I'm your host Omer Khan and this is the show where I interview proven founders and industry experts who share their strategies and insights to help you build, launch and grow your SaaS business.
This episode is a little different.
It's not actually about a SaaS business.
It's about a high school math teacher in England who decided to create an online web development course on udemy.com he wanted it to be the best web development course on Udemy.
So he put in a lot of time and effort into creating the course he launched in June 2014 and waited with excitement.
But he had just one sale in 24 hours and it didn't get much better after that.
So instead of selling the course, he decided to give it away for free.
And then something happened which literally changed his life.
Since then he's gone on to create a number of web development courses.
He has over half a million students on Udemy and he's generated over $5 million in sales.
This is a great story about following your passion, setting a high quality bar for whatever you create, and having the persistence to keep going when things don't look so good.
I hope you enjoy Today's guest is a former high school math teacher from England who started teaching people to code.
He posted his first online web development course for $199 in June 2014 and only made one sale in the first 24 hours.
Since then, he's gone on to launch several coding courses with well over 500,000 students and has generated $5 million in revenue.
You can find his online courses@udemy.com the topics range from web and mobile development, Ruby on Rails and Python, programming and database development, just to name a few.
He's also the founder and managing director of Eco Web Hosting, a company that is focused on environmentally friendly web hosting and offers packages that are 100% carbon neutral.
So today I'd like to welcome Rob Percival.
Rob, welcome to the show.
Rob Percival (02:41.440)
Thank you Emma.
Great to be here.
Omer (02:43.280)
Now, I always start by asking my guests what drives and motivates them.
So what gets you out of bed every day?
Do you have a favorite quote or in your own words, tell us what sort of gets you to work on your business.
Rob Percival (02:54.860)
Sure, yeah.
There's a quote that I came across relatively recently that actually encapsulates how I feel about doing business and life in general.
And that is a quote by Jack Canfield, which is slightly cheesy, but it's everything you want is on the other side of fear and I read that and that really spoke to me.
And what I get from that is that if you're not doing something that makes you slightly afraid, you're probably not growing, you're not doing new things and you're not experimenting as much as you should be.
So really what I'm aiming for every day is something that makes me a little bit afraid to either put something online that I'm.
I'm not 100% sure of, or build something that I don't 100% know how to build or just do something that I haven't done before.
And that's what really drives me forward and motivates me and gets me through, through the day and through, through life.
Omer (03:45.490)
So I gave the audience an overview of the courses, some of the courses that you offer currently.
Tell us a little bit more about what courses you currently have available online.
Rob Percival (04:01.410)
Sure.
As you mentioned, my primary course, my first course was a web developer course, and that's still my biggest course, which teaches people with no coding skills whatsoever to become a web developer.
I also have an iOS iPhone and iPad app developer course and an Android app developer course as well.
And then I've got a few smaller courses as an Apple Watch developer course and a PHP course.
And then there are a number of other courses that I actually partner with other instructors on.
So you mentioned the Ruby course and there's a bunch of other ones as well, and they are ones that I've worked on with other instructors.
So I'm not actually an expert in all of the topics that are covered in my courses.
Quite a few of them, the expertise comes from the co instructor.
Omer (04:49.410)
What was the reason for partnering with somebody?
I mean, I guess from.
I'm not going to guess.
Why don't you just tell me the reason for partnering?
Rob Percival (05:02.610)
Sure.
Well, these courses, one thing you learn quite quickly is that they don't stay very static for very long.
So it's not like you can just build an iOS developer course or a web developer course and then it's there forever.
They need pretty regular updating and that can be just from the day to day, tweaking images of websites as they update.
Or in some cases it can be rerecording the whole course, such as when a new version of iOS is released, quite often that breaks everything that's in the previous course.
So effectively a whole new course is required.
So I realized reasonably quickly that I wasn't going to have the capacity to keep on producing courses on every topic as much as I might like to.
So that's why I partnered with other people.
It also enables me to kind of scale up what I do.
The courses take a lot of time to put together a lot of effort and maybe sort of a month or two for one of my typical courses.
So there was only so many I was going to be able to produce and keep up to date by myself.
So it made sense to kind of share my expertise.
And I had quite a few requests from other instructors coming in saying, can I do a course with you?
And that seemed like a sort of natural thing to do.
So I work with the other instructor to make the course better, to make sure that the content is what people are going to be interested in and make it an excellent course, essentially.
And then I help publicize it to my students at the end as well.
And that seemed an ideal match really, to find great instructors and grow the number of courses that I have available without having to spend a couple of months myself creating the course.
Omer (06:38.820)
Okay, so if somebody is an expert, let's say on Ruby on Rails, they, they can come along and partner with you, or somebody has already done that, they've partnered with you and they bring the expertise around the specific, the technical aspects of programming in Rails and you partner with them and bring your experience in terms of what it takes to build a successful course and then also obviously being able to promote that to your half a million students.
Rob Percival (07:16.200)
Exactly, yes.
So we're acting more or less like a traditional book publisher, really.
We're finding someone who's an expert and then training them up, making sure that the content is good and then helping them with publicity as well once the content is out there.
Omer (07:33.780)
Eco web hosting is a business that you've been running for over a decade.
Can you tell the audience a little bit about that?
Why did you get started with that and why is an eco friendly hosting business important to you?
Rob Percival (07:48.900)
Sure, yeah, it was.
One of the websites I worked on many, many years ago, about 12, 13 years ago, was a website called Green England.
I've always been very keen on helping the planet and living a good lifestyle in that way.
And Green England was a directory of events, places you could go to get eco friendly products, lists of products, that kind of thing.
It grew into a reasonably sizable website, but it was never a great success.
But one of the things I noticed while running Green England was that it was very difficult to get eco friendly web hosting.
And either the services that I could find were extremely expensive or they didn't offer the same features that the big web hosts, who were generally a lot cheaper offered so there seemed to me to be an opportunity to provide a web hosting service which was eco friendly but competitive with the best and biggest web hosts out there.
And that's where eco web hosting came from.
Actually.
That was my first business that kind of grew organically without me having to do a great deal of marketing.
It turned out that was something that a lot of people wanted and so far it seems still want as a product.
So it's now mixed up with my courses in quite a nice way.
The web developer course offers a year's free of eco web hosting.
So you can learn how to not just build websites, but you can actually get them on the Internet and get them live for free as part of the web hosting.
And then some people carry on and continue to use the web hosting.
So it actually one funnels into the other that the web hosting is now growing quite quickly because of the courses.
Omer (09:32.280)
It's always been my impression that it's a pain in the butt to run a hosting business.
Has that been your experience?
Rob Percival (09:38.360)
Well, it has its disadvantages.
The great thing about the web hosting business is recurring revenue, as I'm sure a lot of your listeners will be familiar with.
It's great to have a business where people, as long as they stay with you, just keep on paying you money as time goes on.
Whereas the courses is generally a one off payment that people buy the course and then they own it for life.
So it's actually really nice to have a mixture of the two.
But of course you need to keep everything live, you need to keep support high quality and you need to continually develop and add new features as the industry develops.
So yeah, it's not an easy business to stay in, but it does have its advantages.
Omer (10:18.740)
How big is the company?
How many employees do you have?
Rob Percival (10:21.100)
With the eco web hosting, we have five employees.
The two currently are actually part of the same company.
We don't separate out the web hosting and the courses.
We're planning to quite soon.
But right now there's six of us in total, five employees and myself who are running both the web hosting and the courses.
Omer (10:38.730)
How is your time split?
How much of your time do you spend on the hosting business versus being an instructor and creating and promoting courses?
Rob Percival (10:48.970)
Good question.
It's very variable is the short answer.
Right now I'm spending quite a lot of time on the web hosting business.
I'll spare you the technicalities, but we're moving to a new server system essentially at the moment.
And that means transferring about 30,000 websites from one system to another, which as you can imagine brings a fair few problems with it, and I'm getting involved in quite a lot of that nitty gritty.
But then next month it's likely that Apple will release iOS 11, and that means that probably a new iOS course is going to be needed.
So I'm going to be knuckling down and getting that recorded.
So it's probably 50, 50 overall, but definitely some months can be very web hosting heavy and some months can be very course heavy.
Omer (11:34.440)
So let's go back to June 2014 and when you posted your first the web development course and made the one sale in the first 24 hours.
I want to kind of go back a little bit before that and just kind of find out from you why did you decide that you wanted to start creating online courses or creating an online course at that point?
You know, I mean, we talked about, I mentioned that you were formerly a high school teacher and so presumably you're someone who likes to teach.
But why, why was the coding the, the sort of the topic that you decided to, to tackle?
Rob Percival (12:14.380)
Sure, yeah.
As you say, I was a high school math teacher, so I, I taught mathematics for 10 years and that was, that was my subject at university.
So that, that was what I knew.
But reasonably early in my teaching career, I started to think that classroom teaching is probably not what I wanted to do for my whole life.
So I looked for a number of other things and that's where web development came along.
It was something I could do in my spare time.
I didn't need to invest any money into it.
I could just learn the skills through Google and then start building things straight away.
And that was pretty intoxicating.
So I went through various different websites, most of which weren't successful.
My most hilarious failure is a website where people could exchange homes on holidays and they could swap their homes for.
For a couple of weeks and live in the other person's house.
And I called that website homesexchange.org which was a domain name I was quite proud of.
But soon after I built the website and people started coming to use it, people started asking for home sex changes, which was not something I expected.
But then of course you look at the domain name and that's what comes across.
So that business didn't particularly work out, but it did give way to Green England, which then gave way to eco web hosting, and that then built up enough monthly recurring revenue to allow me to leave teaching in, I think it was 2012.
And at that point I then started doing a bunch of different things.
So I had the web hosting to run, I was running that completely single handedly at that point.
And I had a range of other jobs going on.
There were a couple of other website ideas I was working on, a couple of other freelance projects, a couple of apps I was building.
There was all sorts happening and one of the things I was doing in it must have been the summer of 2014 was a live coding course.
So this was not online, it was a coding course to students in the UK and it was going to be a two week summer course and I did that and it went fairly well.
But it was a lot of work to get students in and I went around to local schools and did assemblies and there was a lot of interest and a lot of sort of positive feedback.
But I think we had six students in the end, which was nice, but it wasn't as many as I'd hoped for and it just didn't seem to be working out as a business.
But the person that I did it with, my partner at the time, was one day I went to their office and they had the Udemy website up on their computer.
And teaching online is something that I'd thought about doing for quite a while, but I never thought that I could bring students in.
It's the marketing side that is, is more challenging really.
I thought I could create a great course but then I just put it, put it up on my website and I wouldn't be able to get students in.
So discovering Udemy really was the breakthrough for me and I did what a lot of people do when they discover udemy.
I had a look and see, so what the most popular courses were, they tended to be web development courses.
And then you do a quick summation of how many is this course sold and what does it sell for?
You do a quick multiplication and say, wow, that's a lot of money.
I think if I could get any small fraction of that I'd be very happy.
And the next stage was then to have a look at some of the most popular courses.
And at the time I have to say that they weren't particularly good, they weren't particularly inspiring, they were quite dry.
They didn't really focus on how to build websites and do things.
They focused on the more technical aspects of languages and how they work.
So I thought I really had something different to offer here.
And that was where the web developer course came about.
This was in February, I think and I really went full on for this.
I decided that if I was going to do anything, it was going to be an Absolutely complete course.
So I didn't just want to do a little dip my toe in the water, a little HTML course or something like that.
I wanted to make the course which everyone would want to buy if they wanted to get into web development.
So I spent months and months, I think it was probably about four or five months altogether, putting that course together and recording the content.
One particular disaster I had about halfway through was a catastrophic Dropbox sink, which I was using Dropbox to back everything up.
And somehow I managed to lose absolutely everything that I'd done up to that point, which was two months solid work, which was pretty painful.
But I just kept plodding on.
I went straight back to the start and I now do look back on that as probably a good thing.
I think the very first few videos that I recorded weren't particularly good.
And by the time I'd recorded maybe 10 or 15 hours, I was a lot better and a lot smoother and generally more pleasant to listen to.
And it was probably a good thing that that first 15 hours got deleted, but still it was a bit of a blow at the time.
So then, yeah, I put all that together and I combined it with offering the web hosting, which I thought was a really nice extra that no one else would be able to provide because most online instruct have web hosting businesses.
And I also wrote a short book called how to earn $10,000 while learning to Code.
And this was to teach people the business side of coding.
I thought that that wasn't particularly well taught in videos.
I think videos are great for explaining coding and web development because you can literally watch the person create something and then you can follow along.
But things like marketing and sales and more softer skills I think are better read and digested rather than watched or listened to.
So I created that book to go alongside it.
And I really was chucking everything I could imagine into this course.
And finally we got to June 2014 and I put it out there and I put it on for $200, which was about the same kind of price that similar courses were on for.
And I thought, right, this is it, the moment of truth.
And as you said in your introduction, I got precisely one sale in that first 24 hours.
And the really depressing thing was after they bought it, they actually requested a refund.
Oh, man, a proper sale at all.
It only lasted a few hours.
So I panicked slightly, but I didn't quite give up at this point.
What I did was I actually made it free.
So the course was free for, I think, two weeks and as soon as I made it free, people just came in extremely quickly.
I remember actually being in Sainsbury's, which is a supermarket here, and my phone just started dinging with people coming on.
And that was really exciting.
We were getting maybe one sign up every minute.
But those were not engaged students.
They barely watched anything.
It seemed to be just students that were getting something for free.
I'm not quite sure what these students were doing, whether they were just hanging out on Udemy to find free courses, but they definitely came in their numbers.
And a few of them watched some of the videos.
But the vast majority just seemed to like having the course for free.
But regardless of whether they actually involved themselves in the course, I now had 2,000 or so students on my, on my course page.
So it looked suddenly it wasn't an empty course anymore.
There were people in it.
But what it didn't have was reviews.
So I did what all poor men have to do that need to get reviews.
And I phoned around and I just emailed my family friends and just said, please could you watch the first few videos and write a comment, write a quick review.
And finally I got to around 20 reviews and as I say, 2,000 customers.
And I thought, right, this is it.
We have something that looks good here.
And the final stage of the promotion was then to promote it to my web hosting customers.
This was one of the great things for me because there was real synergy between my web hosting customers and this course because a lot of them were small business owners, some of them were coders, but they didn't all have those sort of skills.
But they were all working with a website every day.
It was actually a product that a lot of them were interested in.
So I did a pretty simple promotion and we got really good sign up rates there.
I made around $15,000, I think, from that promotion, which was a lot more than I expected to get, really.
I was looking for around three or four thousand dollars a month.
I think that's what I was really hoping for.
So it was a great first month.
And then that brought me to the attention of Udemy.
And then the Udemy marketing machine started going into overdrive and that's when things really started taking off.
So I'm going to stop talking there because I realize I've been talking for a very long time and give you an opportunity to ask me to clarify or I'll happily continue telling the story.
If you'd rather.
Omer (21:15.570)
Yeah, I do have a few questions.
First of all, you said you spent four or five months Creating this course, was that sort of part time a bit in the evenings and the weekends or were you like totally immersed?
This became like your number one thing that you were doing on a week to week, on a day to day basis.
Rob Percival (21:36.250)
It definitely felt like the latter of the two.
When I look back at that time, when I remember it, it was just intense.
I would just go into, I had an office and I would just go and sit in that office and record and it was quite an epic experience really.
It wasn't quite full time because I did still have this other stuff to do.
I was still running the web hosting, so I'd have to stop every now and again and reply to web hosting queries.
And I spent a few days still on my freelance projects and everything else.
But, but definitely my memory of that time is just intense.
Sitting there with my microphone and computer talking to myself and just creating endless content.
Omer (22:17.270)
And how much revenue did that first course go on to generate before you went and did sort of a revised, you know, a big update or anything like that?
Rob Percival (22:26.620)
Yeah, I don't know the actual number.
It's a crazy number.
It's over a million dollars, I think, but I don't know the precise number, but I do know it's over a million dollars actually and that's my revenue.
So including the actual, the Udemy cut, which is on average about 50%, it's probably something like 2 million.
Omer (22:47.900)
So you ended up generating $2 million of revenue on a course that you sold one copy in the first 24 hours and then the person asked for a refund.
Rob Percival (23:00.200)
Absolutely.
If I'd given up at that point, things would be very different now.
Omer (23:04.920)
And I think that's, this is kind of like such a nugget here that number one, we're, we sort of, especially in the software world, we're kind of told about, you know, go out and do your minimum viable product, ship quickly, ship light.
And you didn't really do that.
You just, you, you were clearly intent on if I'm going to do something, I want it to be the best that is available there on Udemy.
And as a result you had to put in a lot of, you know, sweat and time and to, to, to create this course and losing the Dropbox things, I mean, that's the last thing you need.
But you know, again, it would have been easy to give up at that point and just say, okay, maybe this is meant to be.
And I think it's just fascinating that somebody could, you know, you could have launched this course.
Felt kind of Completely demoralized and said, okay, I wasted my time for four or five months.
I can't even get one person to buy this thing.
I'm not a marketing person.
I'm not really focused on how to drive sign ups and sales and attract customers.
And so it could have been really easy to give up.
And there was a few things that, you know, you did in terms of you made it free.
Why did you decide to make it free?
Rob Percival (24:26.620)
It was essentially a pretty, a pretty easy choice.
I think no one was buying it at the price that it was.
And so it was either make it free or cheaper.
And I did think you go along to the page and you know, you have my marketing video and all the great description of the course.
I thought the course looked great.
But at the very top of the page there's zero students, zero reviews.
And I just thought, would I buy a course with 0 students and 0 reviews?
However good it looks, I probably wouldn't.
So yeah, I had no idea how effective or how quickly students would come in at that zero price range.
But I thought if I can at least get it up to say, a few hundred students and then I can probably ask around to friends and family to get a few reviews in, then maybe I can start upping the price a bit.
My plan was actually to go gradually up to maybe 20, $30 and then increase that price as we started to get more and more feedback.
But I think without that social proof, particularly on a website like Udemy where you're competing against a lot of very similar courses, it's very difficult to sell.
So really those free students for me were that element of social proof and
Omer (25:38.090)
then, and then calling around friends and family and getting people to start writing reviews I think was also smart because sometimes it just takes, you know, one review for somebody who's gone through the course to say, okay, well I'll, I'll add mine there as well now.
Rob Percival (25:54.610)
Yeah.
Omer (25:55.170)
So you, so yeah, I mean it sounded like you, you made, you know, a couple of smart moves and then I think once the, you talked about the Udemy marketing machine kicking in, what did that involve?
Did they.
It was just really about them getting more focused on, okay, this, this, it comes onto their radar.
They see the quality of the content and then they do things like what?
Like start promoting it on their homepage, in their email updates, those kinds of things.
Rob Percival (26:29.960)
Exactly, yeah.
So there's a lot of promotion within Udemy itself.
Yeah.
So emails and putting it on the homepage.
They also do a lot of paid promotions.
So they do A lot of adwords, Facebook ads, YouTube ads.
I think they've actually widened the range of online advertising that they do since 2014.
But I think I generally speak very highly of Udemy and I think that the thing that they are very, very good at is marketing good courses.
So once they see that a course is selling and they have a look at it and they make sure it's quality and that the reviews are good and everything, then they will just sort of put as much weight behind it as they can.
And because they've got that scale and they've got, I think they had about 3 million students at the time and I think it's maybe five or six now.
Could be more than that.
They have the scale to really bring students in when they've got something that's converting well and selling well.
Omer (27:28.370)
I'm still curious about why you decided to build such a big course.
It would have been, I think many people would have said I could do a pretty decent course on HTML or I could teach people about css.
But you kind of, no, that's not enough.
I'm going to teach you how to build websites, I'm going to do HTML, CSS, some JavaScript, I'm going to teach you some PHP and probably about the database as well.
That's a lot to do.
Why did you decide to do that instead of just saying, okay, I'm going to focus on one topic like HTML and go really deep in that and do a great job with that.
Rob Percival (28:11.500)
It's a good question and I don't entirely know the answer.
I like you preach the same things now.
It's testing your market and doing a minimum viable product.
And in this case I just did the complete opposite.
I think one big part of it was naivety that I simply underestimated how much effort a course like that would take.
And I thought, I am a teacher, I know this stuff, it can't be that hard.
I want to make, I think it was 20, 22 hours.
Doesn't sound that much.
Maybe a couple of weeks and it'll be done.
And there was this very naive sort of belief that it would get done in almost no time at all.
That's my general optimism.
But there was also, I think there was some kind of zeal in me at this point, which I've never really had at any other time.
But I kind of saw in my mind's eye as soon as I came across these courses on Udemy that were kind of doing the kind of thing that I thought was a good idea.
But not doing it very well.
The, the whole web developer course just came into my mind in one go and it felt like doing any small part of it just wouldn't encapsulate it.
I wanted to do something that provided absolutely everything, or at least as much as I could possibly give to someone who wanted to get into web development.
And doing something like, as you say, an HTML course just felt like it wouldn't be a minimum viable product because it wouldn't be an example of this complete everything that you need.
And so it really was all or nothing, I think, at that point.
And I didn't really think that hard about it.
It wasn't like I made a really rational decision.
I just had this image in my head of this final, final product, which I thought was going to be fantastic and unlike anything else that was out there.
And, you know, when you get this zeal in your heart, you just have to build that thing because anything else would hugely fall short.
So I guess it was a risk.
And I still look back and, you know, it could well have been four or five months completely wasted if nobody wanted it.
Fortunately, a bit of, bit of survivors.
What is it survivors bias or survivors luck means that I'm here right now and it didn't go that way, but it's definitely, definitely a risk.
And not one that I calculated by any means, just one that happened to turn out well.
Omer (30:30.460)
I guess I was going to say, I think sometimes naivety is a good thing and it stops us from overthinking things.
It reminds me of a story that I actually heard you mentioned, Jack Canfield earlier.
It was a story I heard from Jack Canfield.
I don't know if you're familiar with this, about a guy called Cliff Young.
Rob Percival (30:49.060)
I don't know.
Omer (30:49.740)
This was.
Cliff Young was a.
An Australian potato farmer who at the.
I think he was 61 years old.
He ran the Sydney to Melbourne ultramarathon, which is about, I don't know, like over 500 miles.
And he'd never run a race before.
And I don't think.
I think he even.
The way that I heard the story from Canfield was that, you know, he even turned up in his, you know, you know, farming boots and all of that stuff.
He didn't, he wasn't even dressed for this, this race and he, he kind of was like, you know, just kind of kind of loping along at a very slow pace.
He was behind everybody.
Obviously this guy was 61 years old.
And the thing was that he didn't really know about this race or how it's supposed to work.
So by the end of the first day, when all the runners had ended, they'd stopped running and they were sleeping.
Cliff kept running all night, you know, because he didn't know he was supposed to stop.
And eventually he ended up winning this race by 10 hours because of that.
And it's kind of a great thing about.
Hey, you know, it's just sometimes just not.
Just not knowing too much or just not overthinking sometimes is not a bad thing.
Rob Percival (32:10.310)
Absolutely.
Yeah, I agree completely.
And it's breaking the rules, isn't it?
Whether it's intentionally or unintentionally, quite often it works out badly.
But sometimes breaking the rules does something new and something different and exciting and yeah, just like that.
Sometimes if you've got a real zeal in your heart about something and you really want to make that thing, forget the nonsense about minimum viable products and testing the market, just build the thing and see what happens.
Omer (32:38.990)
Now, have all your courses been successes?
Rob Percival (32:44.590)
Not exactly, no.
Well, it depends on how you would define success, I guess.
But I'll tell you what happened after the web developer course, because this is sort of where it gets interesting.
So the web developer course was gaining quite a bit of momentum.
And then that summer, very fortuitously, Apple released a new programming language called Swift.
And this was a really nice new language, easy to read, easy to write, and a lot easier to read and write than the previous language for making iPhone apps, which was objective c. So Udemy actually contacted me and said, would I be interested in making a course on Swift for iPhone app development?
And if I did make that course, they would be really excited about it and they would market it and it would be pretty big.
And, you know, I'm still only two or three months into this at this point, so this seems like a great opportunity.
But this was over the summer break, the summer holidays, July and August 2014, and I promised my wife when I left teaching that I would always keep the summers free and I wouldn't work during the summers, just like I didn't work as a teacher.
So I went home with my tail between my legs saying, look, there's this really good opportunity, but it does mean I'm going to have to work throughout the summer to put this course together.
Fortunately, we came to an understanding and I built the course, and that actually turned out to be more successful, at least at the beginning, than the web developer course.
So a lot of these things, I think, really come down to timing.
And the web developer course was Kind of the first of its kind.
But the iPhone app developer course was particularly good because Apple released this new language and no one knew this new language, so it was a really good big course.
It was the first big course on Swift, so that was a great bit of opportunity.
But the next course after that, soon after that, Apple released the Apple Watch, which at the time people were a bit unsure of, but I was quite excited about it.
I thought this was going to be a big new market.
So my next course after that was the Apple Watch developer course, which it sold okay.
It was by no means a waste of time, but it was far less popular than both the webcourse and the iPhone app course.
And I think, as remains the case right now, Apple Watches is not as hot a platform definitely as the iPhone, and people are just not as interested in.
In making apps for it, presumably because the scale isn't there.
That course was a bit of a disappointment and I haven't actually gone on to make any updates to that one.
It's still there, I think, but it's a few years old now, so it's pretty out of date.
But other than that, I then went on to build the Android Developer course, which again, hasn't quite achieved the scale of the iOS course or the web developer course, but it's been pretty big and I've updated that a couple of times as well.
So, yeah, really the Apple Watch, I think is the only one that really hasn't sold as much as I'd hoped and I think that's just a matter of that people aren't as interested in that platform as the others.
Omer (35:54.240)
Had you done any iOS development before you started putting together the Swift course?
I have that course, by the way, I think it's great.
But yeah.
Rob Percival (36:05.240)
Oh, fantastic.
Thank you.
The honest answer is no.
Well, very little, very little.
I'd opened Xcode a few times before, before, primarily to build.
I built a couple of apps using phonegap.
It was at the time Cordova now, which is a way of building iPhone apps using HTML and JavaScript.
And so I'd worked on iPhone apps a little bit primarily through that, but I obviously never used Swift before because it's a brand new language and I'd never done any proper iPhone app development.
So it was a crazy summer, actually, that one.
I was absolutely figuring it out as I went along.
Fortunately, as a teacher, I'd done this a few times before.
Really, when you have to teach a new bit of maths that you've never really studied before, my way of doing it was always just be one lesson or two ahead of the, of the students.
And literally I only planned that one lesson.
You teach that and then you plan the next one and you teach that.
Omer (37:02.730)
So what happens as you're kind of putting together the course and you're going one step at a time?
What happens when you learn something about say, Swift further down the road and you go, oh, I wish I had known that information when I did the first module.
And what do you do in those cases?
Rob Percival (37:21.650)
Yeah, it's a great question.
On some cases I definitely did go back and then edit that video.
If I believe that I've done something actually wrong, that that's a really bad way of doing something, I will go back and change it.
But most of the time the way that I work is very much I focus on being able to do something.
So it's not like I'm analyzing the language and working out the best way to do a loop or work with variables or whatever it is.
It's very much doing something practical.
So if I want to show them how to put an image on the screen or to play a sound or store some data permanently, while whatever it is, I'll focus on how to do that and I'll then just.
If I don't know how to do it, I'll Google it, work it out, put it together so it makes sense in my mind, and then go through that process.
And as long as I've got something that actually works and does the thing that I want it to do at the end of the day, then I'm pretty happy with that.
I'm not super focused on getting everything exactly as an expert coder would do it.
And in fact, in many ways that can be a disadvantage doing it the expert codaway because although that might be good for memory or speed or whatever it is, it's often not the best way for a learner to learn because they don't know all the details of how to make a super efficient or a super scalable application.
They just want to know the basics and a nice simple way to do something.
They can always learn the more complicated stuff or the better, more advanced ways later on.
So that's been one of the features of my courses and it is, I have to be fair, a criticism that some people say that I don't always teach the best way or the most efficient way, but I think I generally teach the simplest way.
And for people learning, I think that's the most important way to do it.
And it turns out that if you're not an expert, then it's the only way that you can really teach.
Teach anyway.
So that's a happy coincidence for me.
Omer (39:21.650)
Yeah, I have a personal experience with that that I started.
I mean, I've dabbled both with Rails, you know, Ruby and Rails, and with Python and Django.
And in both those cases, it was almost the whole kind of black box scaffolding and all of that stuff.
All of these things that happen and you don't really understand how they're happening made me.
Made it really difficult for me to really learn.
And I know a lot of people talk about, well, you know, Rails is really easy.
It is, but.
But when things go wrong, do you know enough about it to be able to go in and fix it?
Right, yeah.
And so because I was kind of more comfortable with Python, I ended up using Flask as a framework.
And I don't know if you're familiar with that, but I've used it a little.
Yeah, Yeah.
I mean, that's so lightweight.
Like, you know, you literally are starting with a couple of files and you're kind of adding on what you need.
And it, for me, it was so beautiful in its simplicity because you're kind of constructing every piece of the puzzle as you go along.
And so when you hit problems, it's much easier, easier to deal with them.
So I've kind of stuck with that approach.
But, yeah, I agree with you.
I think now that I go back and I look at some of the things I've done, yeah, sure, I can go back and think about how to refactor the code and clean things up and this code that I look at, and now I just go, oh, my God, I would never show this to anyone because it's so embarrassing, right?
Because you've kind of evolved and you've become a better developer, so then you can go back and, and fix those things.
But I don't think if I had started out like learning Python and trying to do it in the kind of, the kind of, the Pythonic way of making everything, you know, writing 10 lines of code in one line wouldn't necessarily have been the best way for me to learn.
So I completely understand that.
And that kind of leads me on to the next question for you, is there are going to be people who listen to this interview, and they're probably in a situation where they are either starting a software business or maybe they want to get into a career as a developer or whatever, but most people here are going to be about starting a business and maybe they have a decision to make.
They've got to either think about, okay, I'm not a technical person, do I invest the time and learn to code so at least I can get started and build the prototype or my minimum viable product and kind of go out and validate that?
Or maybe some people just want to learn to code so they can work with a developer and not feel like they're completely out of their depth and have no idea what that person is doing or what they're telling them.
So in your experience, can anyone learn to code?
Rob Percival (42:28.230)
Well, of course the answer is yes.
I couldn't say anything, but yes.
In the same way that as a maths teacher I would say that everyone can learn maths.
So of course there are some people that are perhaps more naturally inclined towards it.
There are definitely some people that enjoy it more than others.
But I think it is something that everyone, you know, just as everyone can do basic maths, everyone can do basic coding.
The question is really whether that's something that everyone would want to do and would benefit from.
And I think for the vast majority of people, especially people listening who want to start their own business, at least trying out, say, one of my courses, or just going online and searching for how to build a simple website and seeing how it goes, I think is hugely important.
It might turn out that it's not so much that you're awful at it or you don't understand it, but it's just you don't enjoy it and it's not the way that your mind works and perhaps your more creative and you're better at working on product development or marketing or something else and finding a technical co founder to do the techie stuff.
But as a single co founder, I find obviously coding is very much at the center of my business, but before it became the thing that I taught, it was really just the thing that allowed me to build things to then sell and market and grow.
And having those coding skills just allows you to do so much more on your own without having to get someone in to build everything that you need.
So I think there's that very basic starting point that just a few simple skills can get you a really long way and take you a long way on your own without having to get someone to help you.
The other side of it is if you do have those simple skills, even if again, you realize it's not something you want to take any further, any further, and not something that you want to go on and build your own apps and websites, but at least if you have that understanding of how it fits together.
There's so much more that you can do.
So when you're hiring a developer to build your app, you're not going to get absolutely fleeced and charged a huge amount for a very simple app because you know the constraints and you know what you're asking and you know what it's going to take to build it.
So I think that the very simple level skill and just trying out coding is something that I really do think that everyone should try it, especially people that want to build their own businesses.
It might not turn out to be for you, but it's very unlikely that it won't help you out at some point later in your career or while building your business.
Omer (45:07.850)
Yeah, I think I really like your complete web developer course because if somebody is new to coding and they're thinking about a SaaS product, it's a great place to start because you kind of walk them through building different type of, you know, real world websites and they kind of get an understanding of HTML, CSS, JavaScript, some PHP, Python, MySQL.
These are all like important building blocks that I think everybody should have at least a basic understanding of and you know, know how they kind of work together.
And then I think beyond that, I think the best piece of advice that I ever got from anybody was when you start thinking about, you know, sort of the backend, let's just call it that programming, whether it's, you know, PHP or Python or Ruby, try try them all out a little bit, get a feel of them, because there's no right answer on what you should be using.
And you may find that one particular programming language just works better for you, you just grok better with it.
And you'll never find that out unless you try it.
Rob Percival (46:19.560)
Yeah, absolutely.
I like things languages where I can get things up and running as quickly as possible.
So as much as it's unfashionable these days, I love a bit of PHP, JavaScript, a bit of HTML, but that works with me.
Whereas Ruby, as you mentioned earlier, I find really frustrating.
If something goes wrong, it can be really hard to work out which bit of the program is causing the problem.
But yeah, horses for courses, you've got to try it out before you know whether any of it works for you and if some of it does.
Which bit,
Omer (46:52.850)
ironically for me, having spent many years working at Microsoft, I thought I'd be going down sort of the.
NET path or something like that.
And actually I found that Python worked a lot better for me.
So that's why I Kind of stuck with.
Okay, great.
It's been a great conversation and I know we're running out of time, so I want to move on to the lightning round.
I'm just going to ask you seven questions.
Just try to answer them as quickly as you can.
You ready?
Rob Percival (47:19.880)
Okay, let's go.
Omer (47:21.080)
What's the best piece of business advice that you've ever received?
Rob Percival (47:25.720)
This is the.
The Paul Graham quotes make something people want, and it's just something that's so simple.
But in my life, I think I've done that twice.
I've done it once with eco web hosting and once with the courses.
And I've done it a bunch or I failed to do it a bunch of other times.
At least 10 or 12 businesses that I've built that went nowhere.
And just this feeling when you have made something that people want and people are just coming to you and they're just buying your thing without you having to go out there and really sell it to them is an amazing feeling.
And we spend a lot of our time, I think, trying to sell stuff that people don't really want.
So really making that really great product and making something people really want is the secret to business.
Omer (48:12.290)
Yeah, that's great advice.
And I would just add, you need to go through the process of failing to figure out what it is.
And if you just wait for the.
Until you're 100% sure that you have the right thing, then you might be waiting a long time.
And it kind of goes back to what you said earlier at the start about doing something that makes you a little bit uncomfortable, creates a little bit of fear.
That's good.
What book would you recommend to our audience and why?
Rob Percival (48:40.700)
It's a fairly cheesy choice again, but it is my favorite.
It's the Four Hour Workweek by Tim Ferriss.
I've read it maybe four or five times now.
And the bit that I really love about it, that there's a lot about how to outsource a lot of the stuff you do and overcoming fear and that kind of thing.
I'm actually not that keen on those bits, but the bits that I love are the bits at the beginning where he talks about working out why you want to do this, why do you want to earn a lot of money or to build a big business.
What is the actual end goal for you?
And that was so important for me, and it was something that I'd never really thought about.
It was just, well, let's build a business and see what happens.
But actually thinking about those end Goals means that you know what you're going, and so when you get there, you know what to do rather than just to kind of get there.
And all right, I've got a million dollars.
What do I do now?
Yes, I get another million dollars.
And just keep on going.
And stopping to think about what your real life goals are is something I think everyone should do.
And this book is the for me, it's been the best way to do that.
Omer (49:41.300)
What's one attribute or characteristic in your mind of a successful entrepreneur?
Rob Percival (49:46.260)
Persistence.
That's the big thing that comes back to me.
It's the people that have been successful.
Yeah, there's occasionally the people that get lucky and the people that have got flair or whatever, but the vast majority of people that are successful just keep on going and keep on at it.
It's like that moment where I got no sales or that one sale and the refund stopping there means that I wouldn't be where I am right now.
And it's the people that just keep plugging on, keep trying new things, and they don't give up.
They're the ones that more often than not make it at the end.
Omer (50:20.530)
What's your favorite personal productivity tool or habit?
Rob Percival (50:24.850)
I'm a big morning person, and I love Miracle Mornings by Hal Elrod.
I think it's said.
I don't know how it's said, but it's a very short, very quick book.
And he guides you through setting up a morning routine of six things.
I'm not going to remember what they all are now, but there's meditation, there's exercise, there's reading, there's writing, there's visualization, I think.
And one more I can't remember what it is, but I find if I do that, if I spend an hour doing all those things first thing in the morning, then I just feel like Superman and I'm really ready to go for the day.
If, however, I've had a late night or a bad night's sleep and I'm just up and, you know, going straight away, it's a very different experience.
So for me, Miracle Mornings has been by far the biggest productivity bonus that I've experienced.
Omer (51:16.030)
What's a new or crazy business idea you'd love to pursue if you had the extra time?
Rob Percival (51:21.070)
The thing that's been going in the back of my mind for a long time now is a 100% online school.
So a school that teaches everything that students need to know mathematics, English, and had video lessons from the absolute best teachers in the world automatically marked assignments and just the best school experience you could get, but absolutely scalable and online and ideally free and accessible to everyone.
That would be my dream creation.
Omer (51:52.510)
You know, I've been thinking about something like that for quite some time as well.
Not from a, from a business perspective, but from, but from a parent perspective.
If there was a different way to educate kids that maybe we should be thinking about, maybe that might be a conversation for a future topic.
Rob Percival (52:13.240)
I'd love that.
Omer (52:15.560)
What's an interesting or fun fact about you that most people don't know?
Rob Percival (52:20.120)
I always hate this question, but I'll give my most sort of vulnerable answer, which is I hate my nose.
I've got a particularly large nose and I really didn't want to put my face anywhere on the courses.
And actually if you look at the original version of the complete web developer course, my face doesn't feature anywhere.
Even in the promotional video.
It's a cartoon version of me that comes up.
But later on I did put my face in it, but I could only get myself to do it if I'm absolutely straight onto the camera.
So whenever you see me on video, I'm always straight on.
And that's because you can't see quite how big my nose is.
Omer (52:59.870)
And finally, what is one of your most important passions outside of your work?
Rob Percival (53:05.630)
There's lots to choose from really.
I play guitar, I sing, I play a lot of football.
But the big one I think that I really need in my life is travel.
And this is something that I've done a lot less recently.
I've got two boys now, one's two and one's six.
So there's not the same opportunities, opportunities to get away as they used to be.
But I try and travel and I find that if I haven't been anywhere out of Britain for six months or so, I start to get a bit itchy.
And I think traveling for me is really something that clears the mind out and enables you to forget about obsessing over conversion rates and sales targets.
And you realize that there's a lot more to life than just building businesses.
And travel is the one thing that reminds me me of that.
Omer (53:48.600)
That's awesome.
Rob, I want to, I want to thank you for joining me and for sharing your.
Your story and insights.
It's been a great conversation.
I've really enjoyed chatting with you.
Would love to get you back on the show sometime and, and continue the conversation.
Now if people want to check out your courses, they can go to udemy.com and just search for you.
Rob Percival what I'LL do is in the show notes, I'll include a link to maybe your instructor page.
Does that list all the courses in one place?
Rob Percival (54:24.980)
Yeah, that's probably the best place.
If you like, I could create some coupons for you.
We do 75% off coupons quite often, so if you wanted a specific coupon for the podcast for, say, The Web Developer, iOS Developer and the Android developer course, that would be fine.
Omer (54:44.770)
Oh, that would be awesome.
Rob Percival (54:45.730)
Just a single link?
Omer (54:46.530)
Yeah, yeah.
I'll follow up with you after that.
And then maybe we can offer that to people if they're interested.
I think people should definitely check out these courses.
And I'm not just saying that because you're a guest on the show, because I already own, I think, at least a couple of your courses.
So it's from personal experience that I'm recommending that.
And if they want to find out about Eco web hosting, they can go to ecowebhosting.co.uk.
if people want to get in touch with you, what's the best way for them to do that?
Rob Percival (55:17.200)
Twitter is probably best.
I'm teched Rob on Twitter.
Omer (55:21.680)
Okay, great.
We'll include a link to that as well.
Rob, thank you again.
It's been an absolute pleasure and I wish you all the best.
