New to the monthly recap? This is a monthly business-in-review post that'll cover the following:

Health of the business
Course updates
Bug fixes + features
Monthly Goals

🗓 June 2021 Goals In Review

My main goals for June were to:

Release an updated intro for the web apps course ✅
Release 4-10 videos for the Three.js shader premium course ⚠
Release a complete CSS course chock-full of videos, exercises, and quizzes ⚠

How did I stack up? Well, just okay. The only fully completed goal was the updated intro for the web apps course, as that was the only goal which required one video to complete 😝

The other goals, while videos were released for them, they're not something I can completely check off and say these are "done."

As a result, they'll be my goals for July, simply so I can mark them off and then proceed onto the next course in August.

If I were to grade myself for the work done in June, I'd realistically give myself a D. I really only had two weeks to work on any Chris Courses stuff as I was away in NYC for half the month of June. And even then, during those two weeks, I was swamped with client work which ate into my time of producing actual content. Not the greatest month at all, but where there is one poor month, there is a great one waiting to happen—I think the work done so far in July is a good indicator that you can bounce right back into things when allowing for the necessary time and attention.

💰 Business Review

$533 total revenue (+15.1%)
$369.75 monthly recurring revenue (MRR) (+32.1%)
14 new customers (+16.6%)
8 churns (0%)

Business-wise, simply stated: Chris Courses is growing. Although net revenue is not as large as May, monthly recurring revenue (MRR) is at an all-time high of $369.75. This number is very encouraging to me - when I first thought of Chris Courses as a potential business idea, my goal was to obtain 300 subscribers to reach $4500 of MRR.

300 subscribers doesn't sound like a lot (at least it didn't at the time), but after going through the process of creating enough helpful content that prompts people to subscribe, I can see that reaching this number will be no easy feat. However, the 25 active subscribers or so I have right now are huge confidence boosters for me to keep going, and increase that number to 300 so that I can call this my full-time job.

So for everyone who is subscribed or who has subscribed in the past... thank you so much for helping me get to where I am right now, I am incredibly grateful and hope I can continue to provide helpful development content that enriches your learning.

I don't really have a set business goal for July, other than complete the CSS course. I'm definitely the kind of person to focus on content before business, so I'll worry about the business side of things once the course is actually ready (hopefully end of month).

⏯ Course Updates

In June I released a total of 7 lessons:

1 premium Three.js shader lesson
1 web application development lesson
5 CSS lessons

A bit down from the month of May, but still not bad as its more than one lesson per week while I'm working full-time next to this. With a bit better time management (recording lessons before trips to NY), I think this number can more than doubled, as I've already recorded 5 hours of content for the current CSS course (which can now be edited remotely somewhere like NYC).

Upcoming course content will focus on CSS til the end of July, so keep an eye on your notifications for releases every other day or so.

🐛 Bug Fixes + Features

Don't even know where to start - there have been a TON of little improvements over the past month to enhance user experience and make certain tasks easier to perform. A couple of the most notable are:

Inline Editors

Any user-created text can now be edited inline (comments, forum posts, replies, etc)

Inline Code-Challenge Creation

Code challenges are now created directly inline with where they are displayed (by me, the course admin). This was done for safety and productivity purposes. Being able to see exactly how the code challenges look as I build them is incredibly useful for ensuring the rendered content is bug free and plentiful of useful exercises.

Wysiwyg Enhancements

All text editors across the site now have options to remove margin from nodes, add "output" fields which are supposed to represent how code will look when rendered in the browser, checkboxes which the creator can check on or off, and a label option which shrinks and italicizes text.

Game Course Purchase Fix

When a user was logged into a Chris Courses account, and visited the game course landing page, the purchase modal would present an issue with associating a Stripe customer with the correct account. I added a guard to this logic flow that prevents the incorrect association and ensures everything works right out the box for any person purchasing the course (even those logged in with an account already).

Bye-bye Annoying Scrollbars

I finally sat down and got rid of scrollbars that were always showing when visiting the site on a Windows machine. Well, they're still there, they're just hidden and only show when they're actually needed now.

🏆 July Monthly Goals

My main goal for July is to finish the free-version of the CSS masterclass / course. It's integral I get this running before moving onto other courses and focusing on the business side of things. The one business thing I will do for this course is release a 2 min intro to CSS on YouTube and create a landing page for the full course to collect emails. Otherwise, it's just producing videos, posts, and code challenges to get this out the door to the students wanting to learn.

To continue the idea of "stepladders" from the last recap, I'll continue tracking my progress with the checkmark method below.

Release a complete CSS course:

Launch monthly recap @2:10pm 7/18/2021
Quick wysiwyg margin fix @2:30pm
Develop landing page w/ email collection for CSS course @4:00pm - See the completed version here: https://chriscourses.com/css-course
Add "would you like to receive emails" checkbox to canvas landing page @4:00pm
Release 2-3 min CSS vid to YouTube @6:00pm
Edit and launch next episode of CSS course @8:00pm
Release position: absolute video @5:00pm 7/22/2021
Release next video in series @6:00pm 7/22/2021

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