How I slipped into programming

The story of a simple WordPress website that changed my life

Ah, this is a fun one, great memories.

Going back to 2019. I just received my first grade at university, a 3.7 (D grading, nearly failed my first class).

Luckily the class just accounts for 1/90 of my overall grade, but it was a wake-up call. I have to approach this differently than school.

The content was not too hard, but what made exams at my university hard was the immense time constraint.

In german schools you have more than 3-4 hours for your final exams. This one was 30 minutes at 7:30am on a Saturday morning a week before Christmas.

Typical exam to filter out the first batch of students (only around 25-30% finish here).

Next up, the Math exam everybody was afraid of. While most of my friends had very good grades in the first exam and were confident already, I studied like never before.

After really understanding every topic, I spent hours to improve my speed solving problems.

And voilà, I got an 1.0 in the Math exam with 100% correct answers. My following exams went equally well.

Okay, I am not too dumb for this, I just have to change my approach.

Stepping onto the slippery banana peel

Math lectures are typically held in a pretty complicated way, which is why I spent hours creating blueprints for most tasks that I imagined coming up in the exam.

To support my friends who failed the Math exam, I created a small website and uploaded my notes. I also shared the link on Studydrive, a platform for students to share their notes, in exchange for feedback.

A few weeks later I received an email from a student who prepared with my awful website in pure HTML with a list of suggestions to improve the website.

Funny story. 2 years later we met in an assignment and now have been friends for a few years.

Becoming a tutor

After my second semester, the Math professor needed new tutors for the next semester. I applied and got the job.

I moved out of my parent's house and got my own flat, so earning extra money besides private tutoring was a great opportunity.

In my first tutorials, I noticed that nobody understood anything from the lectures and I felt like I was wasting my time because I explained the same topic 3 times per week, in 2 tutorials and in 1 private tutoring session.

Starting to slip

I decided to use the feedback from my website to create a product that would help students to prepare for the exam.

It is really hard to find private tutoring on university-level as most tutors are not familiar with the specifics of the exam at your university. And existing options like courses by ex-professors were super pricey, simply to expensive for most students.

So I launched my website, built in wordpress. Every tutorial I would start with a 15min presentation about the content of the lecture, but in an easy-to-understand way.

Having done this twice a week, I recorded a video of the presentation at home with all the feedback I received in my tutorials.

For my private tutoring, I created problem sets that I would also upload there week-by-week.

After a few weeks of this, I embedded DigiStore24, a german payment provider, to sell my product for 10€.

I also created a 1-minute-trailer in AfterEffects to promote my product in a Facebook group.

I slipped

To this day, I vividly remember the moment I received my first sale notification. It was 10pm and I was at home, working on the content for the next week. I was visiting my parents at the moment, so I ran upstairs, woke up my dad and told him.

In that moment, I knew that I wanted to build digital products, be it content (or even software in the future). I wanted to create something that people would see so much value in, that they are ready to spend their hard earnt money on it.

Sales went up 3x two months later, when I build a WordPress-plugin that let users realistically simulate the exam at home.

The power of software and the internet, the ability to basically edit a few text files and then be able to share something with hundreds, if not thousands of people, fascinates me to this day.

I went from repeating the same stuff over and over in person in my tutorials and tutoring, to helping thousands of students at my university.

In the last 4 years, more than 2500 students bought this exact course for Math at my university.

The aftermath

Still I really liked teaching in person. Being a tutor paid unexpectedly well, both financially and in terms of the fun I had. Unfortunately, my professor did not like my website and there being an "alternative" (I saw it as a supplement) to his lectures, even though I made 100% sure, that no content is subject to copyright infringements. Therefore, my contract was not renewed after the first semester.

Even though I was sad about this, the joy of creating something that people would more than 150 people in the first semester far overweighed!

And this is the story how I more or less slipped into programming.