Table of contents
- How it started
- Testing collaboration, material and commercial viability with live workshops
- Continuously creating and sharing high-quality learning material
- Team support to deliver and elevate the Total TypeScript experience
- Guidance from a trusted & experienced partner
- Life-changing launch results
- The cycles continue to build a sustainable business
#How It Started
Matt had been teaching for about a decade and had long been looking for a good opportunity to create an online course to be more flexible in when he worked and less gated in what he earned.
Having started his teaching career as a voice and singing coach, Matt got his start in developer education through contributing to XState. He made open source libraries, wrote articles, and eventually went on to be part of Stately’s core team. He gained his first 4,000 followers on Twitter (now X) through those efforts.
Introducing
Matt Pocock
Full-time TypeScript educator. Ex XState & Vercel developer.
In his work to improve XState’s types, Matt asked for help with problems he faced from TypeScript library authors and app developers. He made videos sharing what he learned from these TypeScript wizards and found he was filling a gap for good high quality advanced content about TypeScript.
“I realized people were responding really well to the videos I was posting, and I thought there really is something that’s very different than the previous two years that I’d done making content about XState,” says Matt. “And so I started to do more of it.”
Matt started publishing TypeScript tips in early 2022.
Matt figured he could leverage the advanced TypeScript knowledge he gained and his years of teaching expertise to make an advanced TypeScript course that would do well. He announced his intention in April 2022 while still working full-time for Stately. He figured he wouldn’t make the progress he wanted on the course while working a full-time job, so he subsequently took on a three-month part-time job at Vercel to give him the time he figured he’d need to work on it.
Facing a huge amount of effort & uncertainty to go it alone
As Matt contemplated everything involved in building and selling Advanced TypeScript beyond designing and creating the learning material, he realized it would be helpful to have a partner to support him in some of those areas.
“When I was setting out on my own, I really had no idea what to expect,” says Matt. “I knew that it would take an enormous amount of effort for me to do what I wanted to do. I knew that I would have to build a course platform because I didn’t want to just ship it onto Udemy or something. And then I was thinking, you know, how do I handle payments and handle polices for refunds. I knew that I needed to build a mailing list. I knew that I eventually needed to sell a product. I had no idea where to pitch the product in terms of price. I could have worked this all out on my own, but it would have been an enormous amount of trail and error.”
Matt knew our team had in-depth experience supporting instructors in creating high-quality developer educational products that sell through endeavours such as egghead and Kent C. Dodds’ courses. He’d also heard great things about partnering with us from Pro Tailwind creator Simon Vrachliotis and he had personally crossed paths with Joel Hooks a couple times (including meeting up over some delicious smash burgers in Salt Lake City). He decided to reach out and ask if we’d be interested in partnering.
“I didn't realize how much they could do, actually,” says Matt. “I didn't realize how much they would bring to the table and I didn't realize how much support I would get. I thought I would get less support than I ended up getting. I just got the sense that I needed some backup. I just thought, ‘Okay these people have done it before. Let’s start a conversation.’”
#Testing collaboration, material and commercial viability with live workshops
Lowering the risk
Creating high-quality developer education materials demands significant time and effort from both our product partners and the team. Costs are typically covered by the product's revenue, but if it fails to generate income, our company bears these expenses. Starting projects on a large scale too quickly often leads to letdowns and unfinished work.
To minimize risk on all sides, we like to test out the collaboration by shipping something smaller in scope. We can test out whether our collaboration is a good fit for a longer-term partnership and get an indication for much appetite there might be from learners for something larger.
Matt talked about his ideas and goals with Joel. We decided to start with hosting a single live workshop on Zoom around the core Advanced TypeScript premise and see how we worked together.
Creating and delivering the first live workshop
Matt didn’t need a lot of support on the content side. He got straight to work building the exercises and sequence he’d present within a GitHub repository.
Each exercise was initially designed to focus on one concept, guiding learners through it with a basic example. However, he realized this approach might be too simplistic and unengaging, not mirroring real-world scenarios and potentially limiting code comprehension improvement.
Concept first
The bigger shift was towards an "example-first" approach for the workshop. Matt started with complex code samples, then explained the concepts, guiding learners to solve problems before revealing solutions. This method aligned with his teaching style and proved beneficial for learners.
Example first
“I actually say, go and look in the docs and go and pull out the information that you need in order to understand it yourself,” says Matt. “You're understanding exactly the problem that this information is designed to solve, so the information feels more valuable to you. If you don't manage to solve the problem, when you do learn the solution, then it's going to stick better because you're going to have basically gone through a rite of passage in order to get that information, which is really useful.”
While Matt designed the content, we handled setting up an event page, wrote the copy for it, set a price, handled logistics (such as setting up announcement emails, calendar invites, and reminder emails for attendees) and answered customer inquiries.
The workshop was a huge success — even with only about 2 weeks of promotion, we sold out all 30 seats, which worked out to $15k in shared revenue after expenses.
More cycles to keep learning what people will pay for
After giving the first workshop and shipping some free tutorials (more on that later), Matt had the idea of building out further workshop content OSS style, use it to gather feedback, then use that to go straight to recording the self-paced course from it. We agreed working in the open by giving free access to the repo content made sense on several levels, but checked in with Matt about the usefulness of the live workshops to his workflow. While doing live workshops involved more work for Matt (and he was still working part-time at Vercel at the time), finding out if the material was commercially viable was quite important to him. We pointed out the best indicator of commercial viability is people pulling out their cards and paying a premium for access. With this reasoning, Matt was bought into doing more live workshops.
Matt decided on the subject matter and we scoped out a set of three strong workshops to be delivered over six weeks. Again, Matt would design, create and deliver the educational content and we’d handle the rest. And again, these sold out.
Valuable feedback
Not only do live workshops test whether people will pay for what an instructor is teaching, it’s also a gold mine of interaction and deeper understanding of the learner audience that an instructor gets to tap into before recording. Matt says doing multiple live workshops was intense, but helpful to test and double down what approach worked best for what he’s teaching.
“I dig the workshops as exciting and adrenalizing and I got a lot out of them just in terms of actually being in touch with learners,” says Matt. “It was beneficial because I got it wrong in terms of the amount of spoonfeeding that people want. You can give them one line to change or you can just basically leave the file blank and tell them to sort it out on their own. What I realized was it’s better to err towards the side of leave them one line to figure out and make that line really condensed and really close to what you want to teach them. I realized that in some of the exercises, it felt like doing meaningless busy work, putting together a function definition and writing out the lines of code and stuff. I think in the second workshop of the three that I taught that was sort of the feedback that we got. So that was definitely something that helped me refine the material.”
Going all in
The success of the live workshops gave Matt the confidence to go all in. At the end of his three-month contract with Vercel, he decided to quit the job and work full-time on what we were now calling Total TypeScript.
“I could just see that the amount of popularity that the workshops were having was extraordinary. I earned, I think, about the same amount in six weeks from the workshops as I did from my three-month contract at Vercel. So it was a no-brainer at that point. I also felt very confident in Joel and the team and what they were doing. My partner and I live pretty cheap. There was not much risk in terms of me actually quitting a job and just going to test something. I also had all this background of being self-employed for six years. I knew that, ‘okay, I’m going to have to be a bit more self-motivated again.’ So culturally, I knew what to expect and financially, I knew that I was going to be okay.”
#Continuously creating and sharing high-quality learning material
For the content, Matt hasn’t needed a lot of support. He was already a savvy and skilled creator who cares about his audience. In addition to a growing social media following, he also already had a healthy email list of about 3,500 subscribers.
Our approach with partners like Matt is to let them be in the captain’s chair when it comes to the learning content. Matt leads designing and creating the content and we’re here to support and elevate the experience.
Providing value for free
Providing value for free helps drive people to subscribe to the email list (which is a primary driver for product launch success in our experience). Our favorite way to ramp up signs ups is Amy Hoy's e-bomb format — packaging expertise and research into something awesome and free that people can use today.
Matt had an idea for a video tutorial around the Zod library for TypeScript. Rather than his initial inclination to publish it on YouTube, we suggested that he create the videos and our team create an elevated and engaging experience on the Total TypeScript website using the Skill Stack platform. The result was problem/solution exercise pairs that include an interactive IDE to give the learner the opportunity to try to solve it before watching Matt do so. The first problem video of the Zod tutorial is free to watch, but the first solution asks for your email address and lets you know why we want it.
Matt also decided to do a Beginner's TypeScript tutorial following the same format as the Zod tutorial. The Beginner’s Tutorial had a much bigger initial impact on email list growth, but both have helped drive sign ups.
A Slack message from Matt pointing to the impact of the Beginner’s Tutorial.
Beyond list growth, the tutorials have also provided valuable feedback for Matt on where to double down in the approach to creating learning content — such as the short “problem-solve-solution” loop, the way he speaks quite naturally, and the mix of text and video.
A Slack message from Matt explaining the feedback he started to receive.
In addition to the tutorials, Matt has also continued creating and sharing tips and articles.
Matt doesn’t just push out information, he actively engages in answering people’s questions about Total TypeScript and is enthusiastic about doing so.
“I just seem to be on a weird run and people seem to think of me as the TypeScript guy,” says Matt. “I genuinely always learn something or even if it's a question I've answered 10 times, I know that there's a challenge there, right? There's something that isn't being answered by Google or ChatGPT or something like that. There's something actually that I can contribute into the realm of TypeScript learning.”
His continual efforts to be helpful has helped solidify his authority as the person who can teach people how to learn TypeScript and also has helped demonstrate the value of his paid learning material.
Creating the self-paced workshop material
Matt created the self-paced workshops based on what he delivered in the live workshops.
While it’s a lot of physical effort to record about 300 videos and several interviews over a period of four or five months, Matt says having to come up with nearly all the material for the live workshop schedule helped with the hardest part of workshop creation.
“I think writing the exercises was the hardest bit actually,” says Matt. “It's so difficult to think of examples and having that six-week condensed time in order to get the framework down was really critical because it just meant I had to do it. It was pretty intense, but it meant that then all the material was ready to be recorded afterwards.”
Matt’s approach to recording
Matt’s recording process is optimized for speed and ease. He takes time to properly design and organize what to teach and in what order, including using a directed acyclic graph to structure his content and having a very clear idea of who is speaking to and what he imagines they know or don’t know to make sure no new knowledge is introduced out of the blue. After having a clear plan for the curriculum, he takes to recording unscripted.
“Most of my content is just me talking about reacting to something or talking about something off the cuff,” says Matt. “It's very intense and very quick. It feels to me like I'm teaching a one-to-one lesson. It has been a shock to me actually how well people respond to essentially me just reacting to stuff in code. And that has felt to me like a superpower that I can make use of, because I just get to skip an entire step, which is scripting, and I just get to talk. And I guess having done all of that one-to-one training and being dramatically trained has helped.”
Matt also has some automations he uses to take care of some fiddly bits of the editing.
#Team support to deliver and elevate the Total TypeScript experience
With Matt designing and creating all the content, we support design, development and production work to deliver the material to learners.
Building the platform
Owning your own platform — having control over your database as well as access and delivery — is huge. It’s an element to course building that was always important to Matt.
“It gives you just a lot more flexibility and you can be very creative with that as well,” says Matt. “You want to get people off social media and into your walled garden or your secret happy little place where you can express your personality and sell the products. I always felt like that was going to be useful and also have somewhere where SEO can start working to your advantage as well."
Building your own platform is a massive amount of work. In the process of building and launching Testing Accessibility with Marcy Sutton, we developed a full-stack serverless platform for producing and selling educational products. Using Next.js, Prisma, PlanetScale and Stripe, we had created a full commerce setup handling core concerns such as authentication, prices, single and bulk purchases, discounts, and purchasing power parity. We used Sanity as a content backend and Mux for video delivery. We’ve also used TurboRepo to extract the reusable parts of the site into components for Total TypeScript and other partner products we’re working on. Matt is happy to not have to deal with the concerns of building a great platform for his content.
"The level of quality and care that the team puts into the platform is incredible,” says Matt. “They have a kind of semi white-labeling solution so I get the benefits that have been brought to other products, they get to come in my thing too, which is really nice. And it feels like it's always being worked on and improved."
Joel directed and guided the development and production of Total TypeScript. He also served as the technical architect, leading the development and infrastructure work.
Josh did back-end development work.
Landing page and visual design
Great visual design helps communicate the value of a premium, well-designed product and elevates the learning experience. Just as importantly, we’ve found an awesome design that resonates with our expert partners’ style adds fuel to their enthusiasm for the work.
We always ask new expert partners for a mood board or visual exploration of what they like. Matt first attempt included images of some interesting graphic design on beer cans. But after watching Maggie Appleton’s talk explaining the power of metaphor, Matt was struck with the idea of "TypeScript Wizard" and wrote a narrative mood board.
A couple days later Michelle Holik shared this illustration she created based on Matt’s vision:
Michelle handcrafted the stunning and spellbinding illustrations for Total TypeScript to bring Matt’s wizardry narrative to life.
Matt’s reaction was pure delight.
Matt’s reaction in Slack when we shared Michelle’s first illustration for Total TypeScript.
Michelle has continued to deliver the epic magical vibes with each illustration. Matt has a very strong sense of metaphor and what he’s trying to communicate, so she usually checks in with Matt at the early stages so he can give what is often a “hell yes” or offer some direction to shift it closer to the what should be communicated.
With Michelle’s amazing illustration work setting the tone, Vojta Holik first designed and built the landing page and has continued to help deliver a magical user experience throughout the Total TypeScript website.
Vojta did the UI/UX design and development for Total TypeScript.
Producing written instructional content from videos
Matt’s preferred medium is video. It’s a great fit for him as a skilled, engaging, and charismatic presenter (his dramatic training and experience as a voice coach certainly help here and that British accent is just the cherry on top of a very talented sundae).
In our experience, having accompanying written content adds a lot of value for the learner. There are opportunities add clarity to spoken explanations, include examples that might not be in the code repo, and link to more information for later reference. Getting support to create supplementary written content for his instructional material wasn’t something Matt expected when we began collaborating.
“I can record lots and lots of stuff very, very fast,” says Matt. ”I'm a fairly good writer, but I write very slowly. So I have to go plod my way along and I don't enjoy it very much. The writing I produce at the end is okay, but it's annoying for me. They have been doing a a phenomenal job of basically taking the videos I produce and turning them into written content.”
Based on hundreds of hours of experience turning videos into written content for Testing Accessibility, Taylor Bell created automation-assisted systems to process live workshop recordings and produce written content for the self-paced workshops that add clarity while retaining Matt’s unique voice. Using tools such as Whisper, ChatGPT and ScriptKit allows us to generate first drafts quite quickly that we can augment and refine based on our instructional design expertise.
Taylor provided instructional design support and led creating Total TypeScript’s complementary written content. He also provided additional writing, workshop facilitation, planning, and marketing support.
Nicoll created complementary written content for Total TypeScript. She also did content migration and QA reviews to identify fixes needed ahead of launch.
Cree created complementary written content for Total TypeScript and did content migration.
#Guidance from a trusted & experienced partner
Planning support
Throughout the process, we talk through the topics and scope of what learning material Matt produces. Occasionally that’s through planning call, but a lot of our work together is async over Slack.
We also work collaboratively on the scheduling of “releases” (whether that’s a live workshop or a self-paced product). There have been a few times when Matt has suggested a more conservative timeframe for workshops and we’ve suggested nudging it by a few weeks to be a little more aggressive (but only if he thought it was doable). We also suggested going for a pre-release of the Core Volume in December 2022 rather than waiting until everything was recorded.
Matt and Joel discussing workshop timing.
Matt says that kind of nudging and challenge to be a little more aggressive with timing is one of the benefits of collaborating with us.
Pricing and creating a sustainable business
One of the big uncertainties that lead Matt to reach out to us in the first place was how to handle pricing. Having a partner who understands from experience what’s possible in the developer education marketplace and how to position what Matt is offering is a huge plus for him.
From the beginning, Joel had an instinct that Matt had something premium to offer that working professional software developers would be eager to pay for. For the first five-hour advanced TypeScript live workshop, we priced it at $1200 with a 25% early bird discount. We priced the later bundle of three workshops at $2400. We sold out all the seats both times, which gave us a pretty good indication that we were on track with premium pricing.
When it later came to pricing and packaging the first three self-paced workshops, we anchored against the full workshop price. We wanted the pricing to reflect the high value of material, but keep it within a range that would be an easy purchase decision for working developers and teams. We also wanted to avoid a promise of an infinite future of new content based on a single purchase. The goal was to build a sustainable business, not just a product.
We ended up going with the idea of volumes and later settled on “Core Volume” as the name of this first self-paced paid product (a bundle of three self-paced workshops). It correctly implied we’d be charging for future volumes of additional material beyond the scope of these first three workshops. We initially priced the Core Volume at $800 full price with a substantial 40% pre-release launch discount. (The thinking with the launch discount was that it worked out to $490 — close to the ‘magic number’ of $500 which often doesn’t need approval for corporate credit card purchases). We also offer purchase power parity on products to make them more accessible to people in regions with less buying power.
Matt was understandably nervous about putting a high price point on the material and on the “volume” messaging. There will always people who are unhappy with pricing, but if we were way off the mark, it’s Matt that would hear about it.
The volume messaging did receive some pushback (people tend to like getting everything included forever) but we considered it ultimately successful. The questions we got showed an implicit understanding that they were buying a specific defined scoped product. We felt confident that sticking with the “volume” label was best for setting the correct expectations (overpromising on material is not a good idea) so we stayed the course on it.
We initially aimed for a right price but, after Matt's pre-release social media announcement, feedback indicated $800 was too high. To break the $500 barrier, we lowered the pre-release price to $490 with a moderate discount (up to 20%) for launch periods. Later, for the full release, we increased the price to $590, still offering discounts for launches or sales.
Matt says that it would have been much different having to go it alone on decisions like pricing.
“I would've sold myself short,” he says. “I think I wouldn't have realized the value of the product, and I wouldn't realize that people would've paid as much as they are paying for it. I would've undersold the workshops, got way too many people in and then not been able to deal with the support requests. I think if I hadn't gone with Badass, then it probably would've failed and it would've been due to that."
Both these decisions turned out well for the success of the product. Learners recognized the value of what was being offered.
Sales and marketing support for pre-release and full launch
When it came time to do the pre-release in December 2022, we opted to do a soft launch first. We found out through surveys that about 1,000 of Matt’s email list subscribers (out a total of 18,000) identified their TypeScript skill level as either advanced beginner or intermediate. This was the sweet spot for the Core Volume. We sent these 1,000 people an early email to let them know they could buy the Core Volume at the launch discount. 34 of them bought immediately. Doing this limited announcement let us work out some of the edge cases and tune the commerce funnel. The following morning, we dropped the announcement to the rest of the list.
We handled the support inbox — answering questions from learners. We also created a just-in-time email campaign for the pre-release. Each email of the sequence was written the day before it was sent out, allowing us to monitor the emails coming in from learners and create emails that would answer questions and objections being raised. You can see the details of the pre-release emails and how we managed the campaign in this article.
While Matt continued to do his part by continuing to be essentially his own DevRel — sharing valuable and important information across channels — he felt like the launch period went pretty easily for him with all the customer and sales support we provided.
“It felt like I could have taken the week off really,” he was “I didn’t feel particularly I was needed much, which was just incredible. I was sort of just having normal days. It wasn’t particularly stressful for me. There were lots of requests coming in for various things. I was occasionally cc’ed onto some emails and stuff. But for the most part, I felt like a passenger in a F1 car. Everyone did a phenomenal job.”
We built on the previous work to do a full launch in March 2023 after Matt had finished the content for the Core Volume. We continued to handle the support inbox through post-launch, freeing Matt up from having to handle customer issues or questions about admin or payment issues or if there’s an issue with one of the videos.
“Sometimes people will like ping in the Discord and they'll say, you know, ‘Can I get a refund?’ or whatever and I say, you know, ‘Just email team at Total TypeScript’ and I just get to chuck it over the wall, which feels amazing. I used to be a teacher and I used to handle, you know, singing lessons and like half of my job was emails, right? You know, just emailing people back and forth about calendars. Having that handled and handled well and handled in a way that I know I don't even need to check really just feels amazing”
#Life-changing launch results
The results of both the pre-release and full launch were phenomenal. The pre-release in December 2022 resulted in $415,000 gross revenue with 1200 seats purchased. During the 10-day full launch period in March 2023, another 850 seats were purchased, bringing in an additional $314,000 in gross revenue.
“I wasn’t expecting how well it would do financially. In terms of the pure amounts of money that were coming in was extremely gratifying and I felt like I was justified in quitting my job and coming to do this. It’s been a life changing setup because it's changed my personal finances. I have a totally different relationship to money than I had before.”
Learners have really resonated with Matt’s material. People find the material exciting and challenging and gained a lot of understanding, with enthusiastic recommendations to others.
#The cycles continue to build a sustainable business
Our experience in selling developer education products covered various models, including subscriptions and one-off purchases with lifetime updates, typically in three tiers. Partnering with Matt for Total TypeScript, we recognized an opportunity to develop a more sustainable and mutually beneficial business model, diverging from our traditional approaches.
Building expansion packs
We decided to apply techniques from other e-commerce marketplaces for Total TypeScript. Joel was inspired by D&D Beyond Marketplace where they sell a core product and have additional adventure or expansion packs. The upsell concept also does well with Shopify stores.
Building Total TypeScript in this modular way allow us to offer upsell options and keep content updates within a reasonable scope, which allows us to keep the endeavour more sustainable as a business.
The first “expansion pack” that made sense to go forward with was an Advanced React with TypeScript workshop. We decided to do the same live workshop-to-self-paced workshop cycle as before and later decided to also run with a pre-release.
Building out Total TypeScript beyond the Core Volume was not without its challenges though.
Navigating a motivation slump after an intense high
After the intense high of launching, Matt didn’t quite expect the post-launch slumps he felt after the pre-release and full launch of the Core Volume.
“I think a lot of my motivation comes from the idea of can we make this work?” says Matt. “As soon as I understood, ‘oh, it’s working’ then oddly the motivation just went. And I didn’t know quite where it was coming from, because I got this feeling that ‘okay, this is fantastic, this is working, this is dreams coming true territory here, but then there was this other emotion as well. I felt a sort of alienation from my actual work.”
One way Matt was able to reconnect with the work and get out of his creative slump was transforming his outlook on content creation (inspired by an article on “Creator Flywheels” by Nathan Barry, founder of ConvertKit). Matt had strayed from some of the formal processes for ideation and content creation, beginning to rely more on gut instinct and inspiration. But following good written processes and refining those processes for efficiency was a fascinating challenge he could get into. Any time an idea pops up, he now writes down it into a database. This means he has a bunch of ideas for content to pull from when he needs to create but isn’t feeling very creative. He also finds ways to automate parts of the his process or make them more efficient.
“Sometimes I just need to find a small problem within a problem that I’ve solved already,” he says. “How do I make part of the process quicker or how do I solve this particular little thing. It’s still something that I’m just trying to figure out really. And I don’t think I’ll really ever figure it out. As soon as I figure out that, then I’ll get bored by my own solution and need another solution. But I think it’s the right thing to focus on — the idea you can always improve your processes, always improve the way that you think about things. I really like the idea of time spent doing that.”
Complex platform work to make new purchase paths work
Creating a bespoke platform means we’re able to adapt it for our commerce use cases. Figuring out the user experience for customers purchasing the new React “expansion pack” as a standalone purchase or part of a bundle with the Core Volume had its challenges. There’s a combinatorial explosion when you have a lot variables that can be mixed and matched together:
- Existing or new customer: Has the customer already purchased the Core Volume or are they a new customer?
- Launch and pre-release discounts: Are they purchasing while we are running a pre-release or launch discount? Have they made a previous purchase with a discount?
- PPP: Have they made a previous purchase with PPP applied? Are they purchasing now from a region that qualifies them for PPP and is it a different region than the region they made the original purchase from?
This is the most complex and most tested part of the platform (we have carried over a lot of the logic from the egghead platform), and one we continue to work on to make sure that future changes don’t make it behave in unexpected ways.
Pre-release and full launch results for the first expansion pack
The Advanced React with TypeScript pre-release and full launch were both successes. During the one-week pre-release period in July 2023, 491 seats were sold, bringing in more than $122,000 in gross revenue. In October, we ran a one-week full launch, which sold an additional 145 seats and brought in more than $72,000 in gross revenue.
“Adding more paid modules onto an existing course always feels a bit risky — especially given that you’re asking folks to buy from you again,” says Matt. “I was really pleased with the results, though — it validates the idea that people want more specialised content. We’ve also noticed that more folks tend to buy this add-on as part of their TT purchase. Adding the React module is often a no-brainer for folks buying for their teams, for instance. So more modules like this feels like an obvious move for the future.”
Working towards the long-term vision of “Total” TypeScript
The first ~12-15 months of work on Total TypeScript was focused on some more advanced content with The Core Volume and Advanced React module — things that take intermediates to Wizard stage. Matt’s vision for Total TypeScript is for it to be able to address the needs for learners at all stages of their journey of learning TypeScript.
“I want to extend it so that Total TypeScript actually becomes ‘total’ and becomes a fully fledged, ‘Okay, you wanna learn TypeScript? Take this course. This course will teach you everything you need to know. And you can chop off the advanced stuff if you don't need it, or if you feel like you don't need the basic stuff, you can just go straight to the advanced.’ But then we get the opportunity to extend it in several directions in the future. And it feels like we haven't quite got to where we could get to yet.”
We’re pursuing a published book with a traditional publishing partner — No Starch Press. The distribution the partner brings to the table is a big attraction — we have an opportunity to serve a much larger market than Matt’s audience on social media and his email list. The content will serve closer to the beginner end of the spectrum. We’re approaching it to cater to Matt’s video-first preference — he’s first creating the video course content, which will then be edited into a written book format.
We’re keeping an eye on the future sustainability of Total TypeScript. There are possibilities to explore, including possibly bringing in other instructors to create content. Matt is conscious of the fact that he may not always want to be the sole person responsible for creating new material or perhaps will someday get bored with creating TypeScript learning material. But in the meantime, he remains excited to continue on this path.
“It just doesn't feel like I'm finished yet, you know,” he says. “There's just so much more to do. I've got a huge list of content I want to make and stuff I want to build. I've contributed maybe 20% of all the stuff I could. And TypeScript is changing all the time as well. There's so many formats I haven't really experimented with yet. There's so much Total TypeScript stuff to do.”
