Launching Epic Web

This blog post is for those of you who have asked me what it was like to launch
EpicWeb.dev. Epic Web is a platform for learning
everything you need to know to build full stack web applications the way I do
based on my decade of experience building web apps of all kinds, sizes, and
scales. It’s terrific, you should check it out.

I’ve wanted to do this for a long time. You may recall from the end of
2010s Decade in Review, someone once tweeted at
me:

To which I replied:

When
I left Remix in 2022,
I did it
in pursuit of this dream.

So by the time 2023 started, I had my eyes set on launching
Epic Web. My wife and I had decided to try for
another child and I was committed to launch Epic Web before the baby came.

A big part of getting Epic Web launched was live streaming the process of
building the ultimate app we’d be building as part of the workshops. That was
Rocket Rental. You’ll find an
outrageous number of hours of live stream footage on
my YouTube channel of the process of building that
application as well as
the workshop app which is the
application used to facilitate the learning experience for Epic Web.

In between snowboarding trips (the 2022/2023 winter season was a record breaking
snow season in Utah), I ran workshops based on Rocket Rental. The Workshop App
made for a great learning experience even though the size of Rocket Rental was
pretty big. This is thanks to the playground, the diffs, and “open file in my
editor” features. However, I did find that the size of the app was a bit
overwhelming for learners despite this.

Additionally, I realized that the “target market” of Epic Web was far too broad.
This resulted in a couple workshops getting cancelled due to lack of sales (due
to marketing problems).

I did manage to publish
a free tutorial
about deploying multi-region applications and distributed SQLite databases all
over the world. With that in addition to some articles, it felt great to get
some content on the EpicWeb.dev domain and demonstrate I was a serious
operation.

Around this same time, I was invited by the Remix team to run Remix Conf 2023
(the best compliment someone can give you is to ask you to do something
again!!). I told them that I wanted to speak this year and they said that was
fine so I was trying to decide what my talk would be about.

Around all of this I started feeling kind of lost. I honestly felt lost about
what to do with Epic Web. Less than a week before Remix Conf I tweeted this:

Ultimately, Matt Pocock replied with a
brilliant summary of my problem:

And then, in a stroke of brilliance, Matt said:

That was the moment I realized that Epic Web wasn’t me teaching you everything I
know about full stack web development. It’s me giving you a proven path to
building excellent full stack applications.

The opinions are almost as valuable as the instruction.

So I stripped down Rocket Rental to a much simpler note taking application and
introduced that to the world as
The Epic Stack in my
Remix Conf Keynote
the following week. (Yes, it was stressful to do this while also running a
conference, but Zero Slope Events makes running
a conference much less difficult 😅).

It was a smashing success. Now there are a bunch of people building applications
based on or referencing the Epic Stack and getting paid to do it. Super
gratifying.

And it accomplished the original goal of helping me hone my message. Epic Web is
where I teach you how to build full stack applications with the Epic Stack. So
all the material morphed into us building the Epic Stack together. I came up
with great strategies to keep things going (to avoid unnecessary repetition) so
by the end of the series of workshops, you’ve built all the most important
pieces of the Epic Stack which you can then use to build whatever you’d like.

By this time, my wife and I had a due date for our 5th child. This gave me a
deadline for the launch of Epic Web. I had a lot of workshops to prepare. And I
needed to deliver those workshops to real people before I got them recorded and
made available as self-paced workshops.

So I put together a schedule. I needed to get all the workshops delivered to
real people by mid-August so I could spend the second half of August and first
half of September recording the videos so they could be edited, transcribed, and
published by October. At the time I was planning this, it was mid-May. I figured
I had plenty of time.

I did not.

I already had a two day workshop on “Full Stack Foundations” and one day on
“Testing Web Apps” based on Rocket Rental. I was planning on adding workshops on
Web Forms, Data Modeling, and Web Authentication. I figured updating the
existing workshops and creating the new workshops wouldn’t be an enormous task
because I knew the end state was just the Epic Stack so there weren’t really
unknowns.

That all was true. There really weren’t many unknowns, most of the Epic Stack
remained the same through the workshop development. And I’m quite fast at
putting workshops together with the experience I’ve had over the years. And the
workshop app made me even more productive at putting workshops together.

But still. I vastly underestimated the amount of work this would take…

So I get to mid-July and I’m still not even finished getting the foundations
workshop completed. But I didn’t really have much choice (and I still naively
felt like I should be able to manage this without trouble 🙄). So I open up
tickets for “The Full Stack Workshop Series (Vol 1) 🚀.” It involved 8 days
worth of workshops. Two workshops a week for 4 weeks straight.

We sold out 30 seats very quickly. So I decided to open it up to 30 more and
those sold out before the early bird time was finished.

This was extremely encouraging! So I got back to work, but started to feel a
little nervous about the time. Now that I had people’s money, I knew I really
had to deliver the best workshop experience possible.

I managed to finish the first two days worth of workshops and the brand new
forms workshop the week before the series was scheduled. So I was able to start
working on the data workshop.

So, imagine this… I have a brand new workshop not yet created that I’m
scheduled to deliver in a week and two days. And on top of that, three of those
days will be spent delivering other workshops. Oh, and I have more workshops to
create and deliver after that.

It was at this point I realized how much trouble I was in and started pulling
16-18 hour days, 6 days a week, for 5 weeks. This was the most stressful work of
my life. This is a good visual of how I felt during this time:

Despite this stress, I did an extremely good job getting good sleep. And my wife
was a superhero and took care of everything else. I’m so grateful for her. She
put the kids to bed herself, got them ready for school, and did all the
housework and cooking. And she was in her second trimester of pregnancy!! She’s
amazing.

If you’re curious, here’s are links to the work I did in each of the workshop
repos from the time I started them to the time I delivered them:

Oh, and during that time I was also still working on
the workshop app
(105 commits on 30 days).

I only feel comfortable sharing this now because the responses from the workshop
attendees was phenomenal. I think some of them suspected I was just barely
keeping ahead of our progress, but they were all very happy with the experience.
Several of them appear on my testimonials page.

Unfortunately, my rush to get things launched before the baby arrived meant that
I still had a lot of work to do. As it usually happens, I realized that I had
much more than 8 days worth of workshop material. I split several of the
workshops and now we’re at more like 16 days worth of material in these
workshops.

So it’s August 11th, I’m finished with delivering the workshops. I kept my
commitment to the attendees who paid. But, I had 16 days worth of workshop
material (some of which wasn’t completely finished) which needed to be recorded
with enough time for the team to get the
videos edited, transcribed, and published by my birthday, October 18th. That’s
September 14th.

Oh, and I had React Rally to speak at, and
25 bonus interviews
to record.

So that’s 27 days (excluding Sundays and React Rally) to finish the workshops,
get things recorded, and experts interviewed. 😱 Oh yeah, and my kids make
enough noise that I can only record when they’re in school or asleep 🥴.

Luckily, my preparation and experience recording instructional videos paid off.
I managed to have some extremely productive days:

Not every day was super productive because I kept finding little things I wanted
to do differently here and there:

Oh, and of course my wife was a total saint through all of this as well:

And then I finally finished:

Of course, 4 days later…

Thanks a lot Chrome team 😂 🤷‍♂️ 🙃

The team was hard at work getting the videos
and the site ready for publication. I also needed to finish up writing some of
the instructions for some of the workshops and I had some improvements to make
to the workshop app as well.

It ended up being a LOT of words. As of today, it’s 101,407 words worth of
instructions. For context, Harry Potter book 1 is 76,944 words. And this only
counts the words in the markdown files for the exercises. It doesn’t include the
words that are inline instructions within the exercise files people work through
(which is probably another 30k words).

And I wrote all of that in about 3 months. I’m pretty freaking proud of that.

I also wrapped up the expert interviews and with the team prepared the emails
that would go out as part of the launch.

We decided we wanted to launch on my birthday, October 18th. But we also wanted
to start giving people early access. Folks who bought both Epic React and
TestingJavaScript Pro were invited to jump on Epic Web at a 40% discount a week
before the official launch. The next day it was opened to folks who bought
either before. Feedback was very positive, so we were ready for launch day.

We wanted to make the first 24 hours huge. So we decided to offer a 40%
discount + free access to both Epic React and TestingJavaScript.com to anyone
who bought Epic Web in the first 24 hours. This is a ridiculous value.

This went extremely well! We had a ton of people jump on within the first 24
hours. I spent a lot of time on 𝕏, discord, and in my email inbox answering
people’s questions and helping people see the value Epic Web could offer them.
Launch days are always fun.

The sale period went on for a few weeks and now the course is full price (with
support for purchasing power parity of course). In the last couple weeks, we
added support for à la carte purchases of the workshops as well. People are
still joining us every day, though the launch period will always be the biggest
spike.

I’m super excited about the future of Epic Web. With Epic React and Testing
JavaScript, I created the material, published, and it was done (with small,
necessary updates here and there). Epic Web is bigger and certainly not done. I
have so much that I still want to teach. Here’s some stuff on my list:

• TestingJavaScript.com 2.0
• EpicReact.dev 2.0
• CSS/Tailwind workshop series
• Collaborative Web Apps
• Production Error Reporting
• Full Stack Caching
• Production Performance Monitoring
• Web Performance Optimization
• Internationalization
• Accessibility

There’s so much more. So I was looking at this list of things I wanted to do and
I decided that I could either make people wait for me to produce all this stuff,
or I could get some other folks to help me.

The trouble is I really like having all the control. I like the consistency that
a single instructor and teaching method gives learners. But I thought if I could
find some excellent people who would be willing to let me guide them in the way
I want things to be taught and the recommendations I want to make, then I could
get a lot more done.

So that’s what I did! So I reached out to
Simon Vrachliotis and he agreed to contribute
to the Epic Web world! He’s already started producing free material for Epic Web
which you can find on
his instructor page.

I have other folks I’m working with as well, but we haven’t announced them yet.
Stay tuned for that!

Don’t worry, we’re going to keep Epic Web consistent and excellent. I’m
convinced that a big part of what I offer as an instructor is good opinions and
a curated learning path. Other instructional sites are loaded with lots of good,
but conflicting recommendations. That’s not what you’ll find on Epic Web.

While I appreciate that not every tool is the right one for every job, you’ll
never be able to cover every edge case and there’s a lot of value in having a
consistent message and recommendation. And the nuance can be addressed as
needed. But Epic Web will give you a proven path to building excellent full
stack applications. And we’ll do that faster by having more excellent
instructors.

Next year is going to be an awesome year for your education on Epic Web. Stay
tuned!

Oh yeah, and…

The launch of Epic Web was incredibly difficult. But I’m so glad that I managed
it. I’m excited to build on top of this foundation and continue to help people
like you in your full stack web development journey. Thanks for coming along!