Coming back from the dead (screencasting is hard)
A few years ago I found myself extremely happy running a new business I’d started called MotionInMotion. A few of you reading this might have been from the RubyMotion community and remember it.
For those that don’t know, MotionInMotion was my first steps into the world of paid screencasts. Each week I’d release a new episode teaching people tricks, important patterns, all kinds of things, and in return each subscriber paid me a small monthly fee. It was amazing and I loved the fact I was teaching all these people but it wasn’t that simple.
Anyone that works in the programming world knows, community work is hard, it’s a big undertaking. I have plenty of friends who won’t open source their tiny library on the minuscule off chance that they then will have to do community work around it. I wasn’t a hit sensation but those feelings definitely started appearing after about a year in.
It’s getting harder
At this point it was getting more and more difficult to come up with new content but that was a small part of the issue. By this point I had my method for planning, writing, recording, and editing an episode down and could do an episode in 10–15 hours. For that being the core part, the varying $2–3000/month it was making, which was enough for me to just get by on with some extra freelance work, was well worth that. I was working 60+ hour weeks though.
Anyone running their own business knows it’s everything other than the core part of the business that really starts to eat away at the time to earnings ratio. Each week I was spending at least double the time spent on the screencasts on community work, then there was the freelancing, general business admin tasks, etc. At this point a year in, this was ok.
The Lull
Then came the lull. I haven’t been in the RubyMotion community since I went MIA. I’m not sure if this continued, but it seemed with the growing popularity of React Native and the release of Swift it hit the RubyMotion community. Not in a death blow way but growth seemed to stagnate and then flatline. When your entire business is built around a niche community like RubyMotion’s this can quickly become the end for your business.
A lot of what had kept me going was the gradual growth the community had been seeing, working with the likes of Jamon, Colin, Ken, Todd, and many others to welcome the small but lovely flow of new people. Being the main screencast series at the time it was a fairly even ratio of growth when it came to the community and my subscribers, there was a while there where we were considering including a subscription could come with the license fee. Having the inflow into the community being right there in my face, knowing a large part of the community individually, it was obvious very quickly when the growth stopped.
I could have very likely kept going. If I’d continued I’d probably have kept making that $2–3000/month for another year or two, it would have kept me happy. I wasn’t there all for the money though, I’d left a high paying consulting job to do this. It was the demotivation that came with watching that community I’d been so close to start to hurt. It takes a serious toll on you, and this is where I want to finally make my point.
A new found empathy
The biggest screencasting star I know, Ryan Bates, when he put down the mic and I’m guessing Screenflow, Rails had started getting real hits from the other communities around it. I’m sure there was more than that, he was doing it for years, at some point you do just need to stop, but I can very much empathise with how hurt you can be watching a community take a hit. Being any size figure in a community can be a really tough thing to do, not just from the work, but trying to keep the motivation when you’re watching parts of your community start to show its cracks.
I used to have a basic understanding of why people went MIA from communities or very suddenly jumped to a new one, but it wasn’t until I really had to feel it happen to RubyMotion that it clicked.
Like I said before, I’m not sure how RubyMotion is going these days. It looks like it’s still about, though apparently it’s been acquired which is interesting. I care about Laurent a lot so hope he’s ok. What I do know is someone reached out about a month ago saying they’re putting together a new site for community videos and asked if I could make mine available again. I honestly panicked. The thought of having the content out there again where it might draw people back to it other than it sitting there as a relic of the past scared me deeply.
My comeback!
Stuff that though! It’s been a few years now. I need to move on from these first world problems. I’m not bringing MotionInMotion back, but I’m going to put all the episodes up, some of them free, others paid. I’m also going to make an active effort to come back from the grave and start putting myself out in “public” again though. I’m making no commitments on schedules or anything like that. I have decided though to start blogging (here on Medium, follow me) when I feel I’ve got something interesting to say and I’m having my agency (that’s what I did while MIA by the way) start offering some smaller scale teacher services called Build & Learn.
I’m also going to put it out there for anyone that wants to buy MotionInMotion, brand, site, all the content rights, make an offer. It never needed to be shut down, I did that from my own fear, but someone out there might like to buy it, either just to keep selling the content or to bring it back to life, up to you. The only condition will be that the content has to stay available for the community again.
If you are interested in buying the episodes, there will be a site up soon where you can but if you’d like to reach out and help support this small revival you can email me and just ask for them and pay by PayPal or Stripe in the mean time.
Send me an email if you’re interested in either of those things: jack.wh@madebybrains.com
Thank you everyone from the RubyMotion community for the time we did have, and for the amazing things you did do and have continued to achieve. You’re amazing people. I love you all.
