I'm partnering up with a friend to start an online UX school and I'll document the entire journey here. My friend is a Senior UX Designer at Expedia and has been working in the UX field his entire career and has helped many individuals get jobs over the years. The #1 thing he noticed that hurt people's career prospects was when their portfolio looked beautiful, but didn't have any practical, published projects that were generating results for a business in the real world.
Our idea is to create a 4 week program called "Super Portfolio" where we help students work together in realistic groups, simulating a corporate environment for them. They'll work to create and deliver a real product for a real client. We plan to generate revenue on both ends. The students will pay a fee to register for the program, and the small businesses will pay a discounted cost to have their product designed and delivered by the students. The entire process will be overseen by a seasoned UX professional so that the final result is high quality, and the students will also get feedback at every step of the way so that they can improve their.
Currently we've employed Daniel Priestley's strategy to launch a waitlist to measure demand. This was just yesterday, so we haven't received any responses yet.
Based on the responses to the waitlist question, we'll have an idea of pricing and demand for students. Based on that, we'll start building out the product and registering students for our first cohort!
I'd love to hear any feedback or thoughts from Fastlane forum members.
Just for the sake of completeness, I'll also chronicle the other things I've got going on in the background:
Indie game design studio: This was founded in 2019. There isn't much for me to do here until the game is in a state where I can begin to market it. This likely won't be until 2025.
Entrepreneurship podcast: I started this about 1.5 years ago. Growth has been stable but relatively slow. I'm publishing an episode a week. I'm happy to report that I recently had a breakthrough in my production process which now lets me interview someone and have the episode go live within 3 hours, fully edited, with the thumbnail and title etc. all done. That should speed things up overall. In the past I would procrastinate a lot on editing and that would lead to a large backlog and some major delays in publishing episodes. This should also free up more time to work on my main venture. The main way I see myself growing this more quickly is if I can polish my interviewing and listening skills to improve the quality of each episode, and also if I can find higher quality guests to share their stories. I only niche'd down on entrepreneurship last week, so that should help as well, since the topics for the podcast were all over the place before that.
Commission based marketing job for AI/Cybersecurity startup: There's a startup whose founder I recently interviewed that I'll be working with as they launch their product. This is purely based on commissions, so I'll be using this job to practice my marketing skills and apply things from books I'm reading, such as $100M Leads. My commission is around 20%, so this has the potential to be lucrative if I can generate a decent amount of sales for them.
Thank you all so much!
Our idea is to create a 4 week program called "Super Portfolio" where we help students work together in realistic groups, simulating a corporate environment for them. They'll work to create and deliver a real product for a real client. We plan to generate revenue on both ends. The students will pay a fee to register for the program, and the small businesses will pay a discounted cost to have their product designed and delivered by the students. The entire process will be overseen by a seasoned UX professional so that the final result is high quality, and the students will also get feedback at every step of the way so that they can improve their.
Currently we've employed Daniel Priestley's strategy to launch a waitlist to measure demand. This was just yesterday, so we haven't received any responses yet.
Based on the responses to the waitlist question, we'll have an idea of pricing and demand for students. Based on that, we'll start building out the product and registering students for our first cohort!
I'd love to hear any feedback or thoughts from Fastlane forum members.
Just for the sake of completeness, I'll also chronicle the other things I've got going on in the background:
Indie game design studio: This was founded in 2019. There isn't much for me to do here until the game is in a state where I can begin to market it. This likely won't be until 2025.
Entrepreneurship podcast: I started this about 1.5 years ago. Growth has been stable but relatively slow. I'm publishing an episode a week. I'm happy to report that I recently had a breakthrough in my production process which now lets me interview someone and have the episode go live within 3 hours, fully edited, with the thumbnail and title etc. all done. That should speed things up overall. In the past I would procrastinate a lot on editing and that would lead to a large backlog and some major delays in publishing episodes. This should also free up more time to work on my main venture. The main way I see myself growing this more quickly is if I can polish my interviewing and listening skills to improve the quality of each episode, and also if I can find higher quality guests to share their stories. I only niche'd down on entrepreneurship last week, so that should help as well, since the topics for the podcast were all over the place before that.
Commission based marketing job for AI/Cybersecurity startup: There's a startup whose founder I recently interviewed that I'll be working with as they launch their product. This is purely based on commissions, so I'll be using this job to practice my marketing skills and apply things from books I'm reading, such as $100M Leads. My commission is around 20%, so this has the potential to be lucrative if I can generate a decent amount of sales for them.
Thank you all so much!
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