OneMonthSkill

OneMonthSkill is the second iteration of an idea maker D’Andre Ealy had when he was in college, a learn by email educational series.

In less than 30 days since launch, OneMonthSkill has seen over 3,000 people sign up for its courses surpassing D’Andre’s pre-launch milestone of 100 subscribers.

Even with their first course going live in a couple of weeks D’Andre was able to take some time to give us a behind the scenes look at the idea to launch process for OneMonthSkill.

In 100 words or less, what exactly is OneMonthSkill?

One Month Skill is a daily email that sends readers the best resources found online to help enhance or learn new skills.

How did you come up with the idea for OneMonthSkill?

I came up with the idea for OneMonthSkill when I was in my college apartment a few years ago trying to learn the programming language Swift.

I had a hard time sticking with learning to program, but I knew that if I learned Swift, then I would have a valuable skill. To help push me, I decided that I would program every day for one month and that I would also teach people while I was learning.

So one weekend I created a simple landing page that told people they could learn Swift for $20. I submitted the site to Betalist.com, and I started working on the course. In a few days, I had a couple of hundred people signed up and ready to start learning.

I created 30 different lessons for Swift and started sending them out to users. Looking back on it I didn’t think they were that good, but people loved them. I decided to stop the company so that I could focus on some other ideas that I had at the time.

The original name was named 30 Day Skill; I’m sure you could Google it and see what the site looked like compared to today.

How long did it take you to go from the idea to actually building your first version?

I did everything over the course of a few weeks. It took one day to set up the site and everything I need for people to signup and pay. The part that took the longest was creating the actual course itself.

Part of the reason why that process took longer was that I was learning the language and then having to teach others. I had to make sure what I was telling people was correct, and I needed to understand the concepts.

I had a very little understanding of programming before starting this project so I was learning from zero and trying to teach others.

How did you go about building the first version of OneMonthSkill?

So I would read all the documentation that I could find on Swift at the time. Swift was still a new language at that time, so there wasn’t a ton out there on it which is partly why I decided to teach others.

I would read a concept in the documentation, and then I would code an example using Xcode’s Playground, screenshot what I coded and then write about the concept.

Did you run into any challenges along the way in building OneMonthSkill?

Yes, when building the first version one of the most significant challenges was that I didn’t know the skill that I was trying to teach others. I had to learn at night and then work on the courses while I was at work.

The second time around it was much easier because I’ve had the chance to build several companies since so my knowledge of the subjects that I’m teaching people today is deeper. I would also say that the problem I’m solving this time around is much different than the problem I was solving years ago.

How did your launch day go?

It surpassed how I thought it would do. My goal was to get only 100 people signed up, and it turned out to be over 3 thousand. I was happy to see that other people like myself wanted to learn new skills.

We ended up getting picked up by Product Hunt and some other fantastic tech sites, and that helped us get awareness.

Looking back at OneMonthSkill’s launch day, would you do anything different?

I would have conducted A/B test on the website to test different variations of certain elements to see how it impacted conversion. But other than that I feel that it was successful and I’m happy with the results.

What are some milestones that OneMonthSkill has hit since launch that blow your mind?

I can’t believe that over 3,000 people have signed up for this! I wasn’t expecting it to do this well, so that blew my mind. I’m also shocked to see how many people are interested in learning about Blockchain which is a mind-blowing technology.

I’m excited about our investments in Blockchain education and what we plan to deliver for those interested in learning about this space.

Now that you have officially launched OneMonthSkill, what are some short term goals you are working towards?

Well, we haven’t launched the courses just yet. We did an announcement to see how people would respond before investing so much upfront. We had a hypothesis, and we simply set out to validate it.

Now that we have validated our assumption, our next step is pushing our first course which is planned to go live in the next few weeks. Shortly after that, we’re going to push another course and continue to deliver resources to our users.

What is one website or resource you used during making OneMonthSkill that made the process 100 times easier?

I used Wix to build and host the site. Using a web builder this time around made things so much easier because I could make updates super fast.