Creating one of the world’s leading iOS tutorial platforms out of a side blog — AppCoda

Archive Date: April 19, 2018

Every week, we feature one entrepreneur or startup in East Asia that we respect. This week, we interviewed Simon Ng, Founder and Chief Editor of AppCoda, a leading iOS development tutorial platform.* In our interview with Simon, we covered his entire journey with AppCoda for the past 5 years, which we’ll be separating in to 2 parts: Product and Business Development. Read on to find out how he developed his blog side project into a a full-time publication as a solopreneur.*

Simon works on AppCoda at a local co-working space in Kowloon, Hong Kong. Unfortunately, we conducted the interview over a casual lunch and didn’t record it, but it turns out that Simon, a Hong Kong native, isn’t often interviewed in person.

How did you get started with AppCoda?

Simon: Well, I liked programming, but I didn’t get to do much development in my day job. I got bored and wanted to teach myself something new. When Objective C was introduced for the App Store around 2011, I started teaching myself as an exercise. I developed my first app in about 6 months and discovered that X-Code was quite good for developing a full product. Previously, even teaching yourself to code for the web required a lot of knowledge (Java, JS, HTML), and the first projects you’re taught — Hello World — just don’t look that appealing. Objective-C and the Xcode integrated development environment (IDE) changed all that by making development more integrated, visually appealing to beginners, and also easier to pick up and create something new with relatively quickly.

Why did you specifically think of blogging about your project instead of just trying to create new apps that generated income?

Simon: About 10 years ago, I started a blog that covered iPhone jail breakers and at its peak it had around 20,000 daily views. So I liked writing, sharing what I learned, and teaching (I taught courses at the Open University at one point). I get a lot of satisfaction from teaching. A blog just seemed natural, although I didn’t action it for a few months.

What did you do in between?

I purchased the domain, created a splash landing to collect e-mail signups, and just sat on it for a while. I started to think about blogging in September 2011 and actually started in April 2012, when the mailling list piled up to 300+ subscribers. I figured I should actually write something.

Do you remember your first blog post?

I think it was why I was starting this new blog. ** Laughs* * I told my readers from my jail breaker blog that I was starting this new blog. The first tutorial was probably something like “Hello World”.

Give us the goods — how did you grow AppCoda after you started?

Part of it was timing. At the time, there was basically no-one who did tutorials for Objective-C, and when Swift was released in June 2014, I had a book out by October. There were O’Reily books and other guides, but they’re not as easy to pick up for a new developer who’s just curious. Now, there’s a lot of great online content to help people learn to code, not just for iOS — Udemy, Coursera, Treehouse, to name a few.

Also, I learned a lot from my first blog that helped me start on the right foot with AppCoda quickly:

• Collected emails from day 0 is essential and it’s still the main way I engage my readership
• Write regularly — I don’t know how I did it, but at the time, I committed to weekly Sunday posts.
• Writing as I was practicing was the best way to write because I could relate to the readers

What’s your differentiation, or what do you see as your product?

My product is how I share iOS coding tutorials. How the tutorials are presented is important. So for example, the formatting of text, screenshots for people to follow more easily, and demo code. To be honest, the AppCoda blog had a following, but it didn’t take off immediately and for a long time the jailbreaker blog was still much bigger.

But how did you manage to monetize AppCoda as a product if the traffic wasn’t that high?

A lot of people feel that blogging income comes from placing ads and affiliate links. But if the traffic volume isn’t high, the money is never worth it and would never have replaced my day job. So instead, I tried to think of other ways to monetize the blog. But even that happened organically, and I can’t say I engineered it as a strategy.

The blog wasn’t my first paid product. At the time, making apps was big money. People sold source code (the same source code could create multiple apps). Do you remember the websites selling source code? So actually, my first paid product was selling my game app’s source code, and I included a user guide (which many other developers didn’t do). That generated some HK$ 100,000 in revenue. And my selling channel was the blog.

So you monetized organically through an ecosystem.

Basically. I never made annual targets for growth or anything like that.

But since your iOS development tutorials were available for free online, how did you manage to become a published author?

The original idea came from a reader who said they loved my blog, but requested a PDF version for convenient offline reading on the iPad. I remember thinking, “Man, my tutorials are free and you’re still making demands?” I corresponded with him, and he was supportive saying that he would pay for the PDFs, but I didn’t really do anything about it for a while.

So when did you go full-time?

August 2014. I started to hire freelance writers and began focusing on writing my own book. Before that, I read everything that Nathan Barry wrote. Nathan doesn’t write blogs much anymore, but he also developed a business model where he teaches people how to code and he shared how much revenue he makes. He still does. I read his entire guide before I wrote my book.

Simon grew his content ecosystem from online to offline — Photo by Athena Lam If you have friends creating content, send this post to them so that they can also be inspired to monetize their creations!