Brian: PodRocket is sponsored by LogRocket, a front-end monitoring and product analytics solution, which is to say, it's not really sponsored by anyone, it's sponsored by us, LogRocket, and we're giving it away for free. The podcast is free, the product is not free. There's a free trial, we could split hairs about whether or not that's free to you, but anyway, that's it, there are no more ads. If you're interested and you want us to know that you came from the podcast, please go to logrocket.com/podrocket. If you don't care, logrocket.com works just fine. Thanks. Brian: Hey, welcome to PodRocket. Today we have Jessica Chan from Coder Coder, a collection of resources that helps aspiring web developers learn to code. Jessica and I chat about creating content for web developers, building a personal brand and then we get into marketing a little bit where I mostly launch into a few marketing rants and Jessica either politely listens or adds her own two cents, so I really enjoyed the conversation and let's get started. Jessica. Jessica Chan: Thanks for having me. Brian: Tell me about Coder Coder a little bit. What is it? How did it get started? All that stuff. Jessica Chan: Yeah, for sure. Coder Coder is a bunch of things. I do have a website with tutorial articles. And as you mentioned, I have a YouTube channel, Instagram, Twitter, social media type stuff. Basically I am trying to help people who want to learn web development, learn those coding skills and find a job or whatever they ultimately want to do with coding. And I started it because I, myself, I never went to school for computer science and I basically had been just doing these temp office jobs, but somehow I fell into web development and learning how to code on the job and it ended up teaching me skills that I could use to then get a much better stable career for myself. Jessica Chan: And it's just been super fulfilling and satisfying being a web developer, doing coding, I just really love building stuff. So I felt like it was a way that I could help other people and maybe give back a little bit for others who may be trying to find a new career or just getting into something that maybe they don't have a college degree or a CS degree, but you can still get a good job out of it if you know how to do web development. Brian: I wanted to sort of plug the YouTube video you made that has the story of your journey through. It's really an amazing, it's really a well done video. It covers your journey from switching majors and making $8 an hour, that's kind of how I knew we were like roughly peers, is I could remember when like, oh, I could remember making $8 an hour, so that's good. But you should check it out on the Coder Coder YouTube page. How long have you been doing Coder Coder? Jessica Chan: It started some time in, I think 2017. So I guess it'll almost be four years. Brian: Well, for me, everything revolves around the LogRocket blog so I was like, what is the one time that Jessica wrote for us? And that was in 2019. I looked up before this and I go, I think I was aware of it maybe a year before that. Okay, so 2017, how'd you decide to launch Coder Coder with the audience that you have? Mostly beginners, right? People who don't know how to code. When you were thinking about, who to help first. Jessica Chan: There's sort of an interesting story how I landed on the idea of Coder Coder and creating content to help people. But I was actually on an international flight to Japan to visit a friend. And for my airplane book, I had the book, The $100 Startup by Chris Guillebeau. I brought that book with me because I've always been interested in having my own business or company of some sort, but I didn't really know exactly what I wanted to do, but I read the book and in the book he asked you, what is it that you're passionate about that you could then turn into your startup idea? Jessica Chan: And for me, I think coding was actually what I'm probably most passionate about in my life, at least right now. And I basically wanted to help past me if that makes sense. So I've been a web developer for eight years and it was a rocky start at the beginning because the learning curve for learning how to code is pretty steep at the beginning. And so I felt like even though there's a lot of other tutorials material out there, I felt like I could create content that can explain concepts and things to people who are struggling with maybe some of these basic ideas. So it's like trying to help my past self pretty much. Brian: That's such a nice sentiment. I usually hear like, "Oh, well I got into it because I don't know, who else are you supposed to help?" It's interesting. When I think about content for LogRocket or just content in general, people talk a lot about either that kind of intermediate content for our intermediate level of practitioners and then of course expert level content, but I don't know, it seems like the most people that you could really help would be at the bottom of that pyramid, although it is crowded, I will say that. I don't know how much that matters. Jessica Chan: It is crowded, but it's kind of weird. Everything I've read about oh, should I start getting into this niche for content creation because there's already so many other YouTube channels and blogs and things like that. But it's interesting, it's almost weird that for every content creator, there's people who watch their stuff and it just resonates with them more. It's almost like when you make friends, you don't click with every single person, but there's certain people that you gravitate towards more naturally and I think that's applicable to the whole content creator thing. So not having a scarcity mindset, but being like there's enough content viewers to go around. There's still room for me to do it as well. Brian: That's super interesting too. Even you could watch three or four different people talking about the same thing and then finding the person that really speaks to you the best. Jessica Chan: Exactly. Brian: The other thing I wanted to ask is the platform you just added onto grow Coder Coder. because between Instagram and YouTube, I think those are the hardest ones to get started with, and you went there first. So I'm impressed. How did you make that decision? Jessica Chan: It just kind of happened. So I originally started the blog because blogs are what's most familiar to me. But I already had a personal Instagram account and I must've just decided to search for where are other web developers on Instagram? And I just found this really thriving, vibrant community of developers who are sharing their 100 days of code progress or sharing pictures of their computer setups and things like that and it just seems like a really friendly place for beginners as well, so there's not a lot of gate keeping if that makes sense. And I was able to have just cool discussions in the comments on different people's posts, my own as well as other people's. And honestly, I would say I've made friends on Instagram through this whole Instagram developer community. So it's been really fun. So I think that's why I got into Instagram first before Twitter or really going into YouTube. Brian: I have noticed, and I don't know if it's just my imagination or it really is this way now given the last year we've had or not. But I feel like when I started here in 2017, content creators on YouTube, content creators on Instagram, more or less kept to themselves, like they were in these kind of independent circles versus maybe the web developer community on Twitter. Those are distinct groups I thought. Jessica Chan: Yeah, I agree. Brian: But now it doesn't really seem that's the case anymore. I see a lot more, what's the word? Cross-pollination? I don't really know why that is. We tried to launch an Instagram account, which is different. It's a publication, but I don't know. I just didn't feel like it was the right audience, and the audience agreed with me. They were not interested in. Jessica Chan: Instagram, it's tough to break into. I think especially for brands that aren't necessarily visually oriented. It's why travel blogs and DIY stuff, it's much easier to port over to Instagram versus like a publication or journal. Brian: I know. And somehow sticking my face next to every single post we did would not be a great idea. I mean, it would be okay idea. Don't know how that would resonate. So what about YouTube? I mean, your YouTube channel is equally as impressive because that came afterwards, right? Jessica Chan: That came afterwards. I think I'd made maybe like one video at the very beginning around the same time when I started Instagram, but I just put it to the side because for whatever reason, I decided to go all in on Instagram for a year. I had this sort of internal bet with myself of, I want to get to 10K because 10K is like this magic number where once you hit that point, Instagram will give you some special powers for linking your stories and things like that. Jessica Chan: So I think in 2019 was when I went all in on Instagram for several months and I'm not really all in as much on Instagram anymore. I think it's just tough because the ROI of what I felt I had to put in to get views and engagement was not worth it. Instagram is just a super fleeting platform. No one's going to see your content 24 to 48 hours after it's been created. Whereas for YouTube, it's very longterm. People can search for a topic and if you have a video on that, they could find it even if it's like years old. So in my mind shifting from Instagram more to YouTube now is just for my own benefit of just feeling like I can create this thing and it'll stick around for a while, it won't just disappear into the ether. Brian: No, that makes a lot of sense. It's kind of marketing, or if not marketing, you're thinking about it like a business. Jessica Chan: Yeah, definitely. Brian: I'm just thinking for YouTube, you don't have a newsletter, I've seen people launch newsletters. It always seems to be like that... The question I'm going to is like the final form for people is I'm going to start out doing kind of instructional lessons maybe, and then they go into content but I like that you started with content. Jessica Chan: I do have an email newsletter. I'm trying to diversify as much as possible in the channels that I feel like are efficient. I'm kind of lazy, so that's one reason why I'm not so much in Instagram anymore. If I put work into something I want to make it stick around and work for me. Brian: So how do you set goals then for either the YouTube channel itself or even the newsletter? Jessica Chan: My approach is again, being lazy is kind of minimal, so I'm only going to send out email newsletters when I have a new blog post or a new YouTube video just to let people know. I know that some people go super in-depth into email marketing and have all these automations and tagging, and lead magnets and stuff like that, and I tried that at the beginning, but right now I'm just sticking to just sending out emails for actual updates. Brian: I think that's enough, honestly. I can absolutely relate to being lazy. I hope a lot of people listening can as well. Jessica Chan: Work smarter, not harder. Brian: We're circling how you build a personal brand and why that's important. I see it a lot in the web dev space. It's like, should I build a brand? And you really even see if you spend any time on LinkedIn, which I don't know that I would recommend, but if you do, you see people are like, should I build a brand for me? I would imagine you would advocate building a personal brand? Jessica Chan: Oh for sure. I think there's a million reasons that people would want to build a personal brand or have an online presence. I think it just depends on what your end goal is. For example, for me, I do want this to be a company and a business where I make money from courses and other things related to content creation. Other people might simply want to have a reputation in the developer community. I think Twitter, like you mentioned earlier, that seems to be a huge place where developers of all levels of experience just congregate and talk about things. Jessica Chan: And so I think it's definitely a justifiable reason to want to have kind of an online reputation in a way with an online brand. And I do think it can help you with job interviews and applying for jobs, just being on the other side of that, where I've had to interview developer candidates and the first thing you do is you Google their name and see what pops up. If you type their name in, and you find a website that has weird conspiracy theory views, and you might not hire them versus if you find a Twitter account or a GitHub account where you see them being super active in the community, building side projects and stuff like that, it just gives you a much better, fuller picture of who that person is that you might not get to see just in the interview process itself. Brian: It's definitely the first thing I do. It's like when we get candidates, it's like Google folks and check out their stuff. Unfortunately we haven't had any candidates with super interesting personal brands like lizard people websites and stuff like that. I don't know that that necessarily guarantees success, but it does make interesting reading for me as I'm going through applications. But it is super important even just to mind what's on your Twitter, but if you're actually going for an engineering job for example, it couldn't hurt, right? Jessica Chan: Definitely. Brian: What do you think about influencer? Either the word influencer, the function as an influencer? I have thoughts, but I'm more interested in yours. Jessica Chan: I personally don't know anyone who wants to call themselves an influencer. It's more like this title has been bestowed upon you and you now fit into this category. What does it mean to be an influencer? Brian: I don't know. Jessica Chan: Maybe I'm an influencer just because I talk about different tips and tricks for coding and that influences how people think. But I think it's a weird way of applying a celebrity level perception on people who aren't classic definition of celebrities. But on the other hand, I do think that for example, it can be thought leaders. Going back again to the whole Twitter dev community, there's people there, like Jen Simmons, she's part of the CSS working group, Rachel Andrew, just these really big pillars of the web development society, I guess you could say. And it's cool being able to see what they're thinking and what they're doing and how they're working to make CSS more advanced through the years. And I would consider them influencers and not at all in a negative way. So it's a weird question. I think there are people who do influence thought and influence the future of the industry. I'm not sure I would necessarily think of influencer-ness as something to aspire to, but that just goes hand in hand with again, having a bigger online presence. So yeah, it's just a weird thing. Brian: I agree. And I also feel like I've just been watching it for years now. I agree with you. You become an influencer by doing things and actively contributing. And so sometimes when I see, we'll call them celebrities, I'm not really sure what it is they're working on and if what they're working on is stuff on social and that's the thing, then great. But sometimes that's not always clear to me anyway, but also, I think they are as say like developer advocates. That's a goal that you could get to and then you would actually require that. We are hiring for a dev advocate spot and I'm looking for somebody who has all of those skills which is not a plug for the job. Jessica Chan: Yeah, think of social media is a definitely a very important skill these days. Brian: Do you feel like you're good at it? Jessica Chan: I think I'm good at it in a very narrow niche of educational material about coding and web development. I wouldn't trust myself to give an opinion to a restaurant business or something to build their social media platform or presence. Brian: Is it something you've worked on with intent? Which is maybe a dumb question, but to go seek out and learn about? Because I'm not any good at it. I don't think. Jessica Chan: I haven't taken a course or anything, but honestly it's in some ways very similar to how I learned how to code. So I didn't get a degree. I didn't really take any courses, but as you try to do something, if you try to keep in mind how you can constantly improve or being critical about things you've done in the past, see what you can do better in the future, then I think you'll sort of naturally improve. So I think that's what I've done in web development under the threat of meeting my deadlines at my job. And it's also been true for my growth on social media since I'm always trying to get more likes and engagement. So I just try to see what other people are doing, see what works for them, try things myself, see what works for me. Brian: I guess that's more or less what do we do too, like iterative process. Although again, because it is hard for a brand or at least for our brand right now, it wouldn't make sense to go on Instagram and really spend a lot of time there, as an example. Going back to something that we talked about a little bit earlier at least I wanted to ask is, how do you prioritize what it is that you want to, or really just decide on what it is you want to teach? Like what you want to focus on? Is it just something that comes from what you're working on or? Jessica Chan: I've identified my niche as it were as beginner web developer skills. So sometimes it's an idea that I've just thought of. For example, right now in my blog, I have a post that's doing really well about Z-index, and the title of it is Why is This Z-index Not Working? And I came to that title because at some point in the past, it wasn't working for me, so why is it not working? Jessica Chan: And so just trying to think of things that people are going to type into Google. And this is just for the blog in terms of SEO and getting traffic from Google. But a lot of times I'll get ideas just from my audience. So if I have an Instagram post or a YouTube video, people leave comments asking about different questions or like, can you make a video on this topic? And if it makes sense to me, and if I think I can make a good video about it, then I'll go ahead and do that. So I actually have a Trello board that's full of lots of ideas for future posts and videos and stuff. So I just keep collecting them and then slowly making my way through the list. Brian: Believe me, I can relate to having a Trello board full of ideas. You've seen it, I think. Jessica Chan: Yes, I have. Brian: The reason I ask about like how you think about which topic to work on next is you're doing less than say a blog like LogRocket, So you're focusing on these very specific things that either resonate to you or with the audience, or as like, us, for example, we're doing a lot, we're covering a lot of things. And so I'm just kind of wondering like how other content creators think about making content as a priority. Is it like, this is new and it's just kind of cool and we're doing it. I'm sure there's an element to that too. Jessica Chan: Yeah, there's definitely like if an idea just kind of pops in my head and I feel super motivated to write something about it, then I'll go ahead and do that. But generally I just try to put myself in the audience's shoes, someone who's trying to learn how to code for example, and imagine what things they might be struggling with that I could help them out from my own experience. I think that's pretty important, remembering who your audience is. Brian: What I really like about the web dev audience is if you forget, they will let you know. And I appreciate that. I appreciate that very much actually. So when you're planning things to work on or post to write, to what degree do you consider the question, will this work? Will people care about it? Will it get views? How do you think about that? Jessica Chan: That's definitely in the forefront of my mind, because I want to create content that my audience feels is relevant, but at the same time, since I do want to run this like a business, and let's say at the bottom of my funnel are my premium paid courses, which I'm working on. The top of the funnel would be this free content like YouTube blog posts, social content. So my approach to things is I want to make every piece of content that I create a part of that funnel, so irrelevant to beginner web developer skills. Jessica Chan: So I try not to deviate too far from that, for example, on YouTube, there's a lot of dev channels who are more about this kind of meta. So just talking about how to get a career like interview tips, I'm trying to keep to that tutorial educational thing because that's the type of audience that I'm trying to grow. So if that makes sense, I try to keep things pretty narrow and not go outside of what my niche is. Brian: Us too. When I'm thinking about how to come up with content, we're thinking about it as a brand, as a business and we're obviously, we're very upfront about it. Sometimes I'll get comments where it's, if a post gets the hacker news that we did, and it's on the front page, this is obvious content marketing and the answer is like, yes, it is. We're being very obvious about it. And for me, the best way you can do that is be upfront and then we have a little plug for LogRocket at the bottom and you don't have to read it if you don't want to. Jessica Chan: For sure. Brian: But for individual content creators, I'm always curious to hear like, how do you think about whether or not it'll work? Are you doing things like SEO research ahead of time? I think you might be the first person, not as marketer mention the marketing funnel, as it relates to people who are consuming the content, which maybe everyone doesn't know. Jessica Chan: I took a deep dive into the marketing world maybe a year or two ago, I was just constantly reading books, listening to podcasts, watching YouTube videos. So I feel like I learned a lot maybe about business and marketing about that and also I learned like what I don't want to do, like pop up windows and stuff like that. Brian: Same here. I can relate. I just wouldn't work. You're just going to make people upset. Why would you intentionally ruin the experience? Jessica Chan: For sure. I've never, actually, this is a tangent, but I've never understood the whole argument of like, well, pop-up windows work, so we'll keep doing it. But I've never, ever seen a metric of the people who saw your pop-up window, left your website and never came back. No one says that. They just say it works because some people do fill out that form and click the submit button, but that's my little rant on pop-ups. Brian: I like it. If you want, you're welcome back to do like rats regularly, marketing rants. I think the podcast would change a little bit, marketing rants. I don't have any metrics because we don't do pop-ups at LogRocket so I don't know how web dev audience responds, I just kind of intuitively felt like probably you're not interested. Although it's interesting. I ran across a post from Sid Orlando, the editor for Increment, where she was like, "Hey, I'm considering putting together a writing course that's aimed directly at web developers." Because they were interested and everyone's like, I'm super interested in that, or at least it got a lot of response. So I wonder if marketing for web devs would be interesting too. Jessica Chan: I think so. There was a guy on Twitter, I think his name was Phillip Keeley or "Kylie". And he wrote an ebook about writing for web developers. How to either do technical writing or copywriting, but it's for a web developer audience, and it did really well. So I think that goes along with all the devs who want to build their online presence. They all want to sell eBooks which everyone on Twitter is doing these days. Brian: I know, and it must be working. It must be working. I have a personal bias against PDFs, I don't like them. I don't know why anyone likes them, but they exist and people buy them, and they work. What I really do like is seeing people who write for LogRocket either regularly or not regularly, sometimes they pop in and you'll see them come back two years later, and there's this huge change in their personal brand and the things that they're writing, and what they're working on. I think a lot of people there's mixed paths to that sort of success. Sometimes I see it and go, oh, you're just working through the process on their own versus reading, doing research, formally teaching themselves. I don't know what my point was, but thank you for listening. Jessica Chan: You're welcome. Brian: We should probably end now or else we'll just be talking about marketing content forever. Jessica Chan: I could do that. Brian: I know. Jessica Chan: I love talking about marketing and stuff. Brian: Come back. We could do more. Jessica Chan: Sure. Well, I can do a part two. Brian: Let's say that people wanted to find out how to access Coder Coder, what do they do? I mean, they should Google it, but beyond that? Jessica Chan: Basically I have a blog coder-coder.com, and I have a YouTube channel, Coder Coder, and also I'm on Twitter and Instagram @theCoderCoder. And I'm currently trying to create a course in responsive design. It's called responsive design for beginners. And you can find info on that probably on my Twitter account and it's also at my blog coder-coder.com/responsive. Brian: Cool. Thank you so much. I hope you come back. I want to talk more about marketing and content marketing. Jessica Chan: Yeah, definitely. Thanks so much for having me. This has been really fun. Brian: Hey, it's Brian again. So it turns out that running a podcast is maybe harder than we thought. And so I kind of want to hear from you. I'm genuinely interested in your feedback. We have to think about new topics, new guests, we have to find them. And don't get me wrong, we can do it, but it's a lot easier if everyone else who's listening helps. So if you'd like to suggest a topic or volunteer to be on PodRocket, we'd like to hear from you. So you can do that by going to podrocket.logrocket.com/contact-us, the hyphen is next to the delete key, if you're curious. If all of that is too long, you can just email me directly brian@logrocket.com that'd be great. Also if you're feeling magnanimous, be sure to like and subscribe to PodRocket. Thank you.