How to earn 1 million dollars by teaching on Udemy platform ?

Abhimanyu Kapoor
Sep 7, 2018 · 9 min read

Learn from the experience of Frank Kane the famous Udemy teacher

So let start ! what’s your background, and what are you working on ?

Today, my main focus is producing online courses in the fields of machine learning, big data, and cloud computing. I formed a company, Sundog Education, to publish these courses on various platforms such as Udemy, Skillshare, Safari, Packt, and others. Right now, I just published a new course called “Building Recommender Systems with Machine Learning and AI” and I’m getting ready to start a new one about self-driving cars. Before that, I spent almost 10 years at Amazon.com in Seattle. I spent most of that time building recommender systems and managing teams related to them. By the time I left, I was in charge of engineering at IMDb’s Seattle office, which is a subsidiary of Amazon. And before that, my career mostly involved video games and computer simulations, including at Sierra Online and Looking Glass Studios.

What motivated you to be in this field/career ?

I think I was born with a fascination with technology in general. I got a degree in electrical engineering, but my passion was in computer programming. Shortly after I graduated, I wrote a couple of small video games for the Mac in my spare time, and that’s what led to my first job doing software development at Sierra Online, where I worked on many classic adventure games. In addition to game development, artificial intelligence always fascinated me too. The results of AI work are truly rewarding, and the insights it gives you into how our own brains might work really change the way you think about the world. That fascination was part of why I jumped at the chance to work at Amazon when it came. They offered me a chance to try and write algorithms that understand the individual preferences of millions of customers and present them with things they are likely to love — and that presented an opportunity to learn more about machine learning and AI, and immediately apply those technologies at massive scale. After I left Amazon, Udemy contacted me to ask if I would produce a course for them teaching some of the stuff I learned at Amazon. I saw it as a chance to share some valuable knowledge with people around the world at an accessible price, so it was really a situation where everybody wins. All I had to lose was some time really, so I gave it a shot, followed by persistent effort — and that led to where I am today.

What went into building your skill set through which you are making a living right now ?

I’m mostly self-taught, but you have to be mostly self-taught because technology changes so quickly. I taught myself C++ while in school, and taught myself Java, Perl, and Python as my later jobs required them. You have to stay on top of new research and developing technologies, and take the time to learn about them and experiment with them. So, at Amazon, that’s what I did. There was a lot to learn from the existing systems and people that I worked with, but I also took the time to search the academic research world and understand any relevant papers to what I was trying to do, and I shared those learnings with my peers as well. Amazon also taught me a lot about building distributed systems. This was before things like Hadoop or even Amazon Web Services (AWS) existed, so we really had to learn the hard way how to scale things out in a fast, reliable manner. Building algorithms for recommending products to Amazon’s customers was only half the battle; we also had to design and build systems that would deliver those recommendations to thousands of people every second. You can imagine the sort of transaction rates Amazon deals with, and if your system breaks, you’re the one who gets paged at 2 AM to fix it. So, that was a real case of being taught to swim by getting thrown in the water — but it did require us to figure out how to design large-scale, resilient distributed systems. AWS was ultimately born out of what we learned.

Have you found anything particularly helpful or advantageous? ( Online material to read from and things that helped you build your skill set )

At Amazon, we were often on the cutting edge of things ourselves, so the best resource was just being surrounded by lots of smart people who could come together to figure out challenging problems. Working or studying in that sort of environment, where you’re surrounded by people smarter than you are, is probably the best way to grow and learn professionally. For staying on top of new research, I’ve always paid attention to academic conferences, like those sponsored by the Association for Computing Machinery. I don’t actually attend the conferences, but I purchase access to the conference proceedings, which lets me quickly read up on what the research community is doing. Then I can dive in more deeply into topics that seem relevant to what I’m trying to do, and understand them and even practice with them. I learn best from reading and practicing, but today I make a living from translating what I’ve learned through reading into a video format for people who learn better in that medium.

You teach at Udemy, How come a sudden shift of career ?

I just sort of stumbled across it. In 2012, I left Amazon for family reasons and moved to Florida, so all of a sudden I had to find a way to pay the bills without having a “real job.” My initial plan was to just do freelance software development and sell software I had written myself, but I didn’t really find freelance work to be motivating. I really wanted to focus on working on things that would generate residual income, and get out of the pattern of trading my time directly for money. You gain a lot more freedom when you build things that can just be sold online automatically without your direct involvement. Udemy tracked me down because they saw I did a contract gig doing curriculum development related to data science during that time, and they needed courses in that field. I figured it was worth a shot; all I had to lose was the time it takes to produce a new course (which is more than I thought!) And if it worked out, I could teach thousands of people around the world valuable skills while generating that residual income I was hoping for. It took some time and persistence, but I was fortunate enough for those online courses to finally take off and become my primary source of income.

You have being teaching at Udemy for three years now and reached a milestone of 1 Million dollars. Can you share your experience about your growth and what it took to achieve that milestone ?

It was mainly a combination of luck and persistence. In hindsight, the key to success was combining together several things I’m good at that not many others are: deep experience in machine learning and distributed systems, experience as a presenter, and the luck of being born with a voice that sounds like a radio announcer. The work ethics and business principles I learned while in management at Amazon also helped. So if there’s one bit of advice I have for people in general, it’s to think about what you’re good at that’s unique about you. If there’s more than one thing, can you combine those talents together somehow? You also need a dash of luck — a lot of it was just being in the right place at the right time. But you can increase your odds by being open to new possibilities — none of this would have happened if I had just told Udemy “no, I’m too busy right now” when they called me initially. It didn’t come easy for me, however. That first course I produced was initially a flop. It only made about $100 in its first couple of months. It required persistent effort to figure out ways to effectively get that first course off the ground (which I did through a free course that promoted it), and then to constantly create new courses that I could market to an ever-increasing audience. It continues to be very hard work, but it’s very rewarding at the same time.

Many people have started their Udemy courses, but a-lot of them have not achieved a good growth, Can you suggest some pointers for them ?

Probably the most important thing is topic selection. Successful courses teach students some skill that they can directly translate into dollars for themselves. Be it technical skills that can result in a six-figure salary, or financial skills for making better investments — but it has to be something where the value you’re offering to the student makes a $10 investment in your course a no-brainer. Udemy also offers a “marketplace insights” feature that instructors can use to research the demand for any given topic; use it before you start investing your time into developing a course that nobody wants. Beyond that, it’s persistence. The key to growth is producing more and more high-quality courses that you can market to students of your previous course. It takes a lot of hard, sustained work, and that’s just how it is. You won’t get rich by figuring out clever ways of marketing a course you already made; you just have to make courses that your students love, so when you make a new one, they buy it without even thinking about it. Let Udemy worry about the marketing; that’s why you’re on their platform. You also need to get over the fact that Udemy is all about volume; success on Udemy means selling thousands of courses for just a few dollars apiece. Every successful instructor I know is opted in to all of Udemy’s marketing programs, and allows Udemy to figure out how to best market their courses for them, and the right price points for those courses. If Udemy’s model isn’t a fit for what you teach, then you should explore other platforms or partnerships instead.

What are the biggest challenges you’ve faced and obstacles you’ve overcome in your field ? If you had to start over, what would you do differently?

Working in technology means overcoming challenges and obstacles on a daily basis, and being excited about that. I don’t really look at things as obstacles, they’re just challenges to be overcome. I guess the biggest challenges were getting myself up to speed when I started at Amazon; I knew how to write code, but I had never done anything on a web site before nor did I have any experience in machine learning going into that job. I had to learn it all myself, quickly, while still dealing with the demands of the new job and moving my family all the way across the country. Just surviving those first few months at Amazon is probably the thing I’m most proud of, really. It was a real sink-or-swim moment, and I managed to swim. From a professional standpoint, I don’t have any regrets. I’ve had the privilege of working with emerging technologies my entire career. I suppose that degree I got in electrical engineering never did me much good, though. It’s the things I taught myself that ended up mattering.

Was there any moment in your career that changed you or made a huge impact for your skill set ?

Oh yeah. I touched on it earlier, but making the transition from the world of computer simulations and 3D graphics to Amazon was a huge one. It was a much larger company than I had ever worked in before, surrounded by smarter people than I had ever encountered in my life, working on problems nobody had ever solved before. The amount of growth I experienced there was truly transformative. Amazon was also small enough at the time that I actually got to talk to Jeff Bezos once in awhile, and the insights I learned from him are priceless.

Where can our users go to learn more about you ?

You can explore my online courses and books at www.sundog-education.com and you’ll find social media links and stuff there too.

If you liked this article, please hit the clap button. You might also enjoy reading :

  1. Know how a google designer thinks and creates design for billion of users
  2. There is no age limit for doing whatever you want to do.
  3. What is Multiplier Q & A ?

Abhimanyu Kapoor

Written by

I am a Designer and a sales guy. Design should always have a meaning behind it.

Welcome to a place where words matter. On Medium, smart voices and original ideas take center stage - with no ads in sight. Watch
Follow all the topics you care about, and we’ll deliver the best stories for you to your homepage and inbox. Explore
Get unlimited access to the best stories on Medium — and support writers while you’re at it. Just $5/month. Upgrade