808 - Teaching Online and Embracing Opportunities with Reuven M. Lerner

Live In The Feast

Today’s co-host is Reuven Lerner. Reuven teaches Python and data science to companies around the world and has been self-employed since 1995. In addition to his corporate training business, he also offers numerous online courses, as well as a free weekly newsletter read by 16,000 Python developers.

In 1992, Reuven was an undergrad at MIT working at the school newspaper. He essentially stumbled into working on the web when he and his classmates built a website for the newspaper.

Since wide use of the web was so new, he had to learn coding along the way in order to write software to keep their server running. As he continued to learn coding languages, he started doing software development. When he returned to school to complete his Ph.D. he began doing more and more training sessions.

Reuven made proactive changes within his business model to adjust for the COVID-19 pandemic, but rather than see it as a setback, he saw it as an opportunity. We talk about some of those changes and how he plans to move forward post-pandemic.

We also talk about having a skill that the market has a need for and being able to recognize that opportunity and capitalize on it, as well as how to look at opportunities and evaluate them effectively for your business.

“From the business perspective, it's scalable and I can sell many more and I can make much more money. So when, for example, over two months, I basically didn't have any courses in person, I was still able to sell a whole bunch of online courses to individuals around the world, using my platform and even to a few companies that wanted to buy my courses for their groups.” ~ @reuvenmlerner

Main Takeaways

• The best way to sell whatever you’re providing is to solve a specific problem. The better you can describe this problem and how you solve it, the more likely you are to get customers.
• Learning in person is ideal, but given the state of the world, there are advantages to distance learning in terms of accessibility, scalability and the ability to rewind and reassess topics.
• Sometimes B2B and B2C markets are totally distinct. The crossover between marketing to individuals and getting corporate gigs isn’t as pronounced as you might think.
• Leveraging your past experiences to create a foundation for your next endeavor is important. There are skills you gain from your hobbies and jobs that can usually transfer from one thing to the next.

Links and Important Mentions

• Python Workout by Reuven M. Lerner
• Reuven Lerner
• Reuven on Twitter
• Jack McDade

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