Yes, I had become very good at this software but who was I to charge someone for a course? After all, I’m not a professional woodworker.

I started by creating and recording the content myself. It turned out to be a slow-moving process to get the new course up.

Take us through the process of designing your course.Īfter acquiring the website, the plan was to sell a new course that would teach a woodworker all the basics they needed to understand in SketchUp to design their project, create a plan and a cut list, and print it to take with them to the shop. But I decided to just take the risk and go for it. So I had very little basis for a valuation. I was nervous about the price because although it was getting a lot of traffic through organic SEO it wasn’t earning anything today. After a little negotiation, he agreed to sell the site for $5,000. So eventually I found the website owner’s email and worked up the courage to email him and ask him if he’d sell. If you have the skills to improve and market a website, this can be a great start. My advice for would-be entrepreneurs is to consider purchasing an existing website. And I felt that I had just the right set of skills/interests to help grow this: I have a lot of experience in software, I know how to build websites, I am a woodworker, and I’m a photographer/video editor. I looked at it as the digital version of flipping a house, but with a lot less capital needed upfront. I couldn’t help but think that I’d love to update this and make it relevant to woodworkers today. And I did some research with SEO tools like ahrefs and saw it was still getting a lot of traffic. But they were still the best resource explaining how to use SketchUp’s tools for woodworking. It had a great set of complete tutorials, but they were made for an incredibly old version of the software from 2009. And when I was searching for SketchUp tutorials related to woodworking or furniture, one site kept popping up over and over. When I started trying to learn how to create woodworking plans, I started just as any other person today would: Google. What's your backstory and how did you come up with the idea?

Sketchup tutorials woodworking