In Horoma's Head 21

We did it!

The course is finally out there... or is it?

Well, nope, but it will be next Monday because today just wasn't the right fit after all.

While I could make this newsletter all about how kickass this course is and how it will be beneficial to you to purchase it (with a discount on top of that!), I'll keep that for another marketing email that you'll probably receive too on Monday.

This newsletter is about behind the scene stuff, so let's bitch about how incredibly complicated it is to put together a course that is worth putting out there, how impossible it is to stay on schedule, how random outsourcing has been, and other really happy things about the world of education in archviz.

The course

To put it simply I had very high expectations regarding my course. I think I took about all the available free and paid courses on the web, and have been pretty disappointed in general. I thought I had a lot left to learn, and yet I learnt mostly nothing when taking those courses, so something was wrong. Hence why I wanted my course to be better, more thorough, more in-depth, more advanced, more structured, and to basically make more sense for the seasoned artists as well as for the newbie starting out his journey in archviz.

Needless to say when you put high expectations, things can tend to drag on and on and on. While the material was mostly already there last year, it took me a while to restructure everything into something that I think was better for the teaching/learning experience. It also took me a while to properly articulate every concepts into something that could be learnt easily by the students without losing too much of the complexity of the topic.

Now, when I look at the content of the course and what has been achieved, I can't say I'm not happy. I'm pretty proud of myself even. Still, there is plenty of room for improvement, things I want to clarify, content I want to add, bold ideas I want to explore and share, etc.

Good news is the student will have lifetime access to the course once they buy it, so they will eventually get all this cool stuff. Even though V2 is not even entirely shipped, I'm already working on V3 content and putting together the roadmap for the evolution of this course in the coming months and years.

Other good news is, I simply enjoy thinking about all this and sharing.

Recording the damn thing

One aspect that turned out to be a nightmare for a while has been to actually record all the content.

Thinking out the concepts and putting together a curriculum, or even writing a script for a video is fine. But when you live in a pretty noisy neighborhood, that there's not much offer for decent recording studio because they all closed down because of covid, you're kind of stuck in front of a very practical and stupid issue : where the hell can I record?!

In the end I had the chance of having a friend letting me use their meeting room in their office on the weekend so that I could record in a quiet environment. (see image above, meeting room was still under refurbishment when I was recording in it, it now looks way fancier).

But this was for audio. I needed some talking heads sections too, right? Would be a shame to miss out on showing my tired face and crazy beard.

This had to take place in my appartment, in a weird position, sitting on the floor, while it was 45 degrees outside and 65% humidity. The absolute pleasure of living in a nice appartment that has no air-conditioning.

Overall it took a good 2 months to record all the content. With the proper settings in a professional studio, this would have taken about a week and that's it, with a lot less stress. But hey, at least it's done.

Outsourcing

Here is a big topic for me because I just seriously suck at it. In front of the mountain of work that this course represented, I knew I wouldn't be able to do everything together, especially since two things were just clearly out of my skillset : Unreal scene building and video editing.

Interestingly, I gave the Unreal scene as a task to a former student of the course (who is still learning stuff when rereading his notes from my course hehe). It took some back and forth but overall I was happy with the result (see quick excerpt above) and he was happy having the opportunity to deepen his knowledge of a software while getting paid for it.

Video editing was a bit more problematic and lead to a lot of back and forth with the team I was working with. High expectations are sometimes hard to meet I guess, even when you put the price. So this is probably the most frustrating part of that whole journey, where I had to give up on many ideas for the video editing because the team just wasn't able to deliver. I won't blame them too much since I blindly followed some referals rather than checking more thoroughly their credentials and portfolio. But this is a lesson learnt. What lesson? I'm actually not sure. Either do more thorough checkup, or just do things yourself even if it takes longer.

I'm genuinely unsure on how I'll deal with the future updates of the course. Time will tell

Landing page

Now this one was also another little disappointment.

Back when I was starting to put together some ideas for the new landing page, I was also looking at some tutorials of Webflow, which seems like a pretty easy platform to navigate with very neat features, especially when it comes to animation.

Unfortunately, this revealed more time consuming than I expected and I had to revert back to my former platform (squarespace) and just update/refine my old landing page. It wasn't a bad landing page, but it just lacked the little animations that make all the difference in UI/UX and that are simply not doable in Squarespace.

Bummer.

But I'll get to it next time, fingers crossed

Taxes & shit

This one was an annoying, oddly unexpected (!) one towards the finish line. How the hell do you handle taxes when you sell stuff on the internet?

The new course is hosted on Podia, an all-in-one platform for streaming courses. For now we're in a love hate relationship. I can see the upsides of this platform, but also a lot of downsides. But I'll probably stick to it and make it work.

After some stressful back and forth with my accountant and the, quite useless, support from Podia, everything got set up. Needless to say Podia is making it simpler than it could be, but there are things that still don't make sense to me to this day. Hopefully on the launch everything will go alright.

Funnily enough, I've been pushing the launch from today to Monday just so that if there's any invoice issue, they fall on the month of October and I have a whole month to fix it, rather than end of September where I would have only a short week to fix and declare everything properly.

Listening to yourself for feedback on your own stuff

Now this one was cringy. Usually when I put together Youtube videos I don't really watch them as I know the editing is always optimized to be as simple as possible. I put the recording in the timeline. Overlay some titles, cut the parts where I say "eeuuuuuh" too long, and we're done. I know there's a certain standard on YT for video editing, but I don't care. YT is not bringing me any money, I don't want to grow it so that it generates any revenue, so I just record myself and throw knowledge out there for free. For a more refined, optimized and cute version, there's my paid course.

Here since I'm not the one doing the editing, and that I'm a perfectionist at heart (I say that as a negative point) I had to sit down and listen to myself for the 17+ hours of content to neatpick on what was not done properly for the video editing.

Don't get me wrong, the course is great, and I made the whole thing as enjoyable as possible. But listening and looking actively at details and fuckups is not the same as casually focusing on a course you're following for the first time.

Time management

Scheduling for this little journey has been pretty hectic. I can say I was pretty much as bad at scheduling and delivering this course as I'm good at scheduling and delivering images for my clients.

Just to give you an idea, my original idea of a deadline for releasing the course was February, then March, then July to finally settle on September... which is in the end early October.

Even though I've been spending most of my free time working on this course, it's just been dragging on for a very long while, and I of course have to admit that I'm happy to finally release it, and also happy to finally start doing something else of my freetime (before diving into it again, but I'll for sure take a good month off of it).

Having to dedicate all your freetime to a single task is unfortunately not very rewarding except when you finally can deliver the course. But now that we're done, the fun can start with the online workshops, the ideation for V3, incorporation of feedback, etc.

Will all this even pay off?

Pretty good question. Have I done all this for nothing?

Well luckily there are two ways of looking at it.

On a purely financial point of view, breaking even shouldn't be too complicated except if sales really are a fail (let's hope it does sell decently). Upfront investment was around 15.000 euros, so it's not nothing (and I'm of course not billing for my time in there, just the basic expenses). On top of that will be the cost of running the course, which should amount to about 1000 bucks a year, although there is one important aspect of the workshop where pricing hasn't been figured out yet since the team helping me is still actively working on implementing the features I need. Again in that amount I'm neither including my own time nor the additional freelancers I might need in the future to help me (additional video content, additional Unreal sandbox scenes, the app I have in mind, etc.).

So yes, if I don't at least break-even on all this, this would kind of be a fail. 

But there's also another way of looking at it.

The thing is, and this genuinely was unexpected, is that I've learnt a lot while doing this course. And I'm not talking about new topics that I've explored for this course and didn't know about, since ... well it's normal that I've learnt stuff there. But I'm talking about the topic of the course itself, composition. And here, I have to admit even though all the knowledge in the course comes "from me", rewriting, reorganizing and talking it out gives a completely new dimension to the knowledge and practice I've had.

In a nutshell, I managed to learn from myself just by doing and taking my own course. Pretty cool! I think it stems from the same idea that states that you can't really go deep on any topic if you don't actively write about it.

So yep, on that aspect, I can say this course already paid off manyfold.

Back to work

Ok, time to close this little newsletter. As usual it feels fun and weird at the same time to be that transparent, especially on a course that will ship in 3 days. But hopefully this builds your interest, and you see all the love and care I've put into this course, and you'll check out the landing page on Monday.

This is just the second step for From The Ground Up, and I still have a lot to offer to the community and will do my best to keep on doing it.

I hope you can draw some ideas and insights from this long rant.

As usual if you find this utterly boring and useless, please let me know before unsubscribing 🎀. If on the other hand you do like it, then I'm glad, and feel free to share it with your archviz pals that would maybe like it too by sending them here : https://www.horoma.net/newsletter-subscription

Cheers

Simon