How I Grew my First Online Business - No Coding Skills

In 2010 I was 21 years old. I wanted to earn money on the side and, after some prospecting, I decided upon online tutoring. There were numerous platforms where I could do this type of work. Today, there are a gazillion more...

I put my entire focus on one platform. It was all good...for a month or so.

Not knowing how things worked, I made mistakes. And those mistakes cost my membership on that website. I got banned. But they paid me to the last cent. So, no hard feelings.

Of course, I could have simply opened up a new account. But I decided not to. I already had a few students that I was working with by email. So, I said to myself: 'why not build my own hustle'?

I was to create my own website where potential students could see the types of services I offered; they could also purchase specific project tutorials. They would use these tutorials for inspirational purposes only. There was one problem though, I did not know how to code. And I didn't have any experience building websites either.

What to do?

This was 2010. You didn't have as many website builders available as you have today. But there were a few...

I began building my first website with Yola. Had I been aware of my naiveté and the sleepless nights that were about to come, I would have probably never done it. But I'm glad of my ignorance...

With Yola I didn't have to have knowledge of code. I would simply drag and drop whatever elements I wanted to have on my website. I was able to edit the text, layout, color and a few other aspects of those elements. I didn't have the degree of freedom a coder has, but Yola's builder was enough to satisfy my basic needs.

So, piece by piece, I started adding tutorials to my website. Below each tutorial I would add a Paypal button - with which potential students could send me payments. When a payment was made, I would get notified by email and I would have to email the specific tutorial to the student.

So, it wasn't like an automated system. I couldn't add attachments, so I had to email each tutorial that would be paid for.

I can still remember the exaltation I felt when the first payment came in. I got the notification on my phone. It was for a tutorial worth of $2. I was at the beach and I didn't have the tutorials on my phone. I had to rush to my laptop, find a wi-fi and send the tutorial by email. The student was so pleased of my promptitude that contracted me for weekly custom tutoring. We worked together until graduation, a year later...

As my website and all the tutorials started being indexed by Google, people would make payments all day long. That wasn't okay. It had me hooked up all the time. After a few months I was extremely exhausted.

I couldn't get 6 hours of uninterrupted sleep. I would set my phone to wake me up every two hours to check if there was any order. And ironically, most orders would come in by night. The feelings I experienced were a mix of frustration and satisfaction. It's hard to put it into words.

But, I couldn't go on like this. I had to find a way toward an automated system.

There was no easy way back then, or I wasn't skilled enough to find any. But I found a website called Tinypay that allowed selling digital products. They would link to your paypal account. It worked for a while, until they made a critical operational mistake that killed its clientele. As a result, I lost about 40% of my clients.

The logical 'next'?

I moved away from both Yola and Tinypay and started using a new website builder, Weebly, which is very popular today. Weebly allowed me to integrate automated payments of digital goods via a service called Fetchapp. After a while, more services and website that would allow selling digital products appeared. It would be more easier than ever to sell online. No coding skills needed.

But as I moved my attention to my blog and to writing and experimenting with fitness, nutrition and lifestyle, I became less passionate about tutoring. It was too time consuming. Plus, I thought I could always return to it, if times would become harsh (to be read: urgent need of liquidity).

Conclusion

There are a ton of things I learned from this hustle, one of them being the fact that it eventually made me force my way into coding. Here's one of my recent projects - a voice assistant coded in python.

In terms of business management, growth and customer experience, I learned a few things:

1. Clients like to talk to you informally - like from person to person (from friend to friend)
2. It's okay to be professional in what you do, but don't forget to be human
3. If you develop informal relationships with your clients (friendships), make sure you respect the boundaries
4. Clients don't mind paying more if the work you provide is of high quality and if you deliver on time
5. Clients like to work to you on an ongoing basis. They prefer using you over searching for others who offer the same services (the burden of switching)
6. If you serve them well, your clients will contribute to the sustainability of your business => by referring you to others and by reusing your services.

The market for tutoring has exploded since I started back in 2010. There are many more websites and platforms where you can use your skills and get paid to tutor students. I wrote an extensive post about this on my blog. You only have to put in the work, be consistent, be reliable, and deliver on time. It may be challenging at first, but if you're persistent enough, it almost always pays off.

If there's one thing you should take away from this: my naiveté saved me.

Had I known the technical difficulties I would go through, not knowing how to code, not knowing how to deal with clients, or how to indirectly promote my services, I would have never started it.

And it all began from an idea I had during a sleepless night: I wanted to earn income on the web. I'll leave you with one of my driving quotes from back in the days:

“Whatever the mind can conceive and believe, the mind can achieve.” (N. Hill)

#entrepreneur #story #business #startup

Image Credit

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Cristi Vlad, Self-Experimenter and Author