Building Kursus.io

19/10/2022

I wanted to release a free app, and I needed something to share good resources I find online, so I decided to build Kursus.io, an app to create mini "courses" from links to resources you find online.

I started working on the app a few weeks ago, but then I went on other stuff.

I decided to re-start from scratch. I somehow ended up hearing about Vue.js and apparently it's nice to make user interface, so I'm doing to learn that today.

Mandatory step

Nevermind, it's actually too long. I'll go back to Vue.js later, jQuery will do it for now.

21/10/2022

So... I've been pulling my hairs out for two hours trying to pass data from a form on Vue.js

Surprised it's that complicated for something that stupid. Errors don't say what line is causing the issue. Had I sticked to jQuery & Node the app would probably be done by now.

I'll give myself two more days, if by then I'm not able to fully figure out that shit I'll just go back to jQuery.

Fuck that, I'm going back to jQuery, no time to waste.

Ended up doing a micro-framework myself with jQuery & Node, way faster than learning a whole thing. Wasted 2 days on Vue, I have to catch up.

22/10/2022

Spent the whole day finalizing the skeleton of the app. I ended by doing some design for the UI and gathering some ideas.

For the marketing, Communities is probably my best bet to get started. I'll create courses myself at the beginning and share them where people ask questions.

For example, if someone ask "What's the best way to learn XXX", I'll make the research myself, create a course, and share the link.

I'm not a good designer, but I'm good at copying stuff. When designing an UI, I first make a swipe file with inspiration, then I design a prototype.

UI Proto (content not relevant)

23/10/2022

Most of the course design is done I think, pretty happy about it. Once I'll be done I'll start to improve the user experience by adding features like drag and drop, etc. No idea how to do that yet tho.

Improved UI

Reworked some design, improved the user experience a lot. Still very basic but enough to make full courses pretty intuitively imo. Obviously I'll have to test that.

I took most of the UI ideas from Dribble, amazing website to get inspiration. I put everything in a swipe file, and then I make some tests on Figma.

UI Swipe file (made on Milanote, best app ever)

Gonna publish the first version of the website tomorrow and then I'll either focus on user account or making a list of all courses on the homepage. The goal is to have a list of the very best courses on the homepage, where people can upvote/downvotes.

For the messaging, I started with those ones:

• Learn new skills fast
• Learn anything with the best of internet
• Stop wasting time looking for the best courses

They suck but they're ok for now, it give me a benefit-focused starting point, I'll refine them later.

24/10/2022

Mainly focused on the auth system so far. I'm pretty happy with the login page so far. I'll add something on the right panel later.

The auth system took longer than expected. My brain is starting to get a bit fried so I think I'll stop early today. Just going to add the course list to hold into what I said I'd do today in the last video.

Nice! Courses are linked to the database and displayed on the homepage, yay!

I'll call it a day today (from 7:30 to 19:00, I usually work until 21-22).

Edit: Worked until 21:00, had bugs to fix

25/10/2022

Spent the day adding an upvote system and a few other finitions.

And, we're done! The first version of the app is done, yay!

Still have a few things to add (feedback box and other stuffs) byt the overall thing should be available here!

26/10/2022

I just added a feedback box on the site, fixed a few bugs and we're good to go.

Here is the plan:

The idea of the app came to me because I hang out a lot on entrepreneur forums. And lots of people ask for recommendations of books, courses and other learning materials.

So, that's the target I'm going to focus on first. I created a few courses, gonna add more during the week.

27/10/2022

Since the best time to post on forums is Sunday, I still have a few days before making most of the posting.

I think having a way to display the level / price / time of each resource would be good, so I'm going to add that.

Personal note: No revenues + Loneliness = Feeling like society's garbage.

Almost took me the whole day but I did it, you can now add additional infos about the product.

Improved the Marketing courses with lots of additional links.

28/10/2022

Seems like it's not possible to exclude yourself, to remove 75% of the datas (Indonesia) to get an accurate number

I started to post link to resources wherever I saw people asking for book/blog resources about marketing and managed to get around 50 users like that, yay! I'm just going to keep doing that on the side while I focus on the next project!

Just added the social sharing cards:

It's ugly but it gets the message.