Just a note, I got a lot of great questions about how producing training videos works.

If you have any questions later, or are curious about things you don't want to ask in public, don't hesitate to hit me up directly either on twitter at @jeremyjarrell or by email jeremy AT jeremyjarrell DOT com. I'm happy to answer anything.

I also have a contact page on my site that I monitor: http://www.jeremyjarrell.com/contact/

Same question as to the other Pluralsight creator. What tools do you use to create these courses?

Hey Nico!

Regarding hardware I record with a Blue Snowball cardoid mic and a pop filter. The entire setup including mic, stand, and pop filter cost me a little over $100 on Amazon. Pluralsight also reimbursed the majority of that after my first course was delivered. (http://www.amazon.com/Blue-Microphones-Snowball-Microphone-A...)

Regarding software I record and edit with Camtasia for Mac ($99) on a MacBook Pro. I've used Camtasia for my last three courses and while the Windows version is quite nice the Mac version is...painful. I'll be starting a new course in January and plan to record with Screenflow (http://www.telestream.net/screenflow/overview.htm) and edit with Adobe Premiere. Screenflow and Premiere are more expensive options and, as painful as Camtasia was to work with, it was more than adequate to get me started.

I also use a bevy of other free tools to support the production process. For example, I do all scripting, outlining, etc in Google Docs and track the entire production process in Trello. Each course is a fairly large undertaking (the course I'm wrapping up now will have about 135 hours into it by the time its done) so being able to keep track of where you are and how you're pacing for the deadline is critical.

I also have a full time job, am married, and have two young kids (a 3 year old and a 3 month old) so I have to make time for production at odd hours of the week. This makes trello all the even more important for helping me manage the process ;)

Let me know if I can give you any more information.

I'm curious if there is a reason you don't use Quicktime's built in screen-record functionality?

Oddly enough I didn't realize that Quicktime could even do that until about a week ago until I'd already made the choice to switch to screenflow.

I haven't tried it yet but it did occur to me as an option, perhaps I should revisit it.

From only two courses? That seems pretty darn good!

Thanks! Believe it or not about 70% of the revenue comes from the Creating Effective User Stories course. I have another course in the same vein, Agile in the Real World, coming out in a few weeks that I hope will do as well.

The trick seems to be to find a niche that people are interested in and that will continue to be interested in for some time, since the course revenue will decay over time.

For me, agile seemed to be that niche...groovy, not so much :)

It also helps if you already have a brand going in. For example, if you're already well known from books or a popular blog you'll have name recognition and some of your audience will follow you. This wasn't the case with me, but I've seen it happen several times with more well known authors.

Interesting, how is pricing decided?

Good question, Pluralsight uses a subscription model so the courses aren't actually priced individually. For example, at the lowest tier a subscriber can pay $29/month and get access to the entire catalog (which is several thousand courses).

When an author produces a course Pluralsight actually acquires the copyright and therefore exclusive distribution rights for the course as part of the transaction. In return authors negotiate a royalty rate for each course which is a function of how much that course was watched per month versus total viewing of the catalog by paid subscribers. These royalties are where your revenue as an author actually comes from.

If you distribute your course through a subscription company like Pluralsight this is pretty much the standard model across the industry. As a matter of fact, it's actually pretty similar to how artist royalties work in the music industry.

Thank you for the detailed answer. Handling copyrights and exclusiveness sounds bad to me... Did you try first to sell your videos independently?

I didn't try to sell them myself, but I did consider it...HEAVILY.

However, fpr me there were a lot of big wins for going with a publisher like Pluralsight. For one thing, they take a lot of things that are not really related to video production off of the table so you can focus on content. For example, - distribution (i.e, an LMS platform with video hosting that actually works across the globe) - payment processing, especially if you want to do subscriptions since that entails a whole other level of PCI compliance - dealing with video piracy, which can be a bigger problem than you'd ever imagine

Now, I'm actually a software engineer by trade so I could eventually build all of this infrastructure myself if I really had to. But once I realized that I'm in the business of producing content and not creating an LMS that path made much less sense to me than it did at first. Basically I just asked myself 'what would be my differentiator?'. Was it doing video hosting? No. Doing PCI-compliant payment processing? Nope. But, making sense of all of the mud around agile techniques in a way that normal developers could actually use start using them day to day was. So, why not focus on that an outsource the rest.

On top of all of that though the biggest win with going with an established publisher is being able to tap an already existing audience. As I mentioned previously I didn't have an established brand going in so any attempt to launch videos myself would have likely launched to the sound of crickets. Launching on Pluralsight immediately gave me exposure to a large audience who were already paying for this type of content. I'm not sure if Pluralsight makes their subscriber numbers public but, as an example, their twitter account has over 200K followers. Now while not all of those followers are paying subscribers you can assume that those who aren't are at least prospects since they've expressed an interest in hearing about which videos are being released. Getting immediate access to that audience, as well as a marketing channel to reach them, can be huge for getting you started...especially when you don't already have a brand of your own.

Does that mean that I'll never release a video under my own brand? Probably not. There are a lots of LMS as a service providers now on the market that make it much simpler to launch my own video distribution platform than it would have been previously. In addition, one of the biggest drawbacks of using a third party publisher is that you lose visibility into the entire sales funnel. For example, I can track people through my funnel through twitter, to a post on my blog, to a CTA at the bottom of that post that directs people to a related video available on Pluralsight, but I don't have visibility into whether or not they actually convert...which is the most important part. Distributing under your own brand gives me visibility into the entire funnel which would help give me the ability to really grow the business. But, before that's a viable option, I need to have a more established brand than I do now. Otherwise...I would simply launch to crickets :)