Eric Normand (of LispCast and PurelyFunctional.tv) and I have been trading notes about the developer education business for years. The other day we caught up and talked about business models, subscription vs. product pricing, courseware software, and a lot more. We recorded it in hopes it might be helpful to anyone else who is in, or considering jumping into, this line of work.

Topics covered include:

• Non-obvious pros and cons of selling subscription vs one-off products.
• Courseware hosts such as Podia, Kajabi, Thinkific, and Teachable
• Why many of those courseware hosts have business models that favor hobbyists, not professional educators.
• The Lynda.com business model
• Our experiences with hosted e-commerce/courseware platforms, building our own software, and using WordPress as a platform.
• The explore/expand/extract phases of a business.