Treehouse has been around under the name Think Vitamin Membership for about a year and a half. We charge a subscription (from day one), and reached profitability before we took on our investors.
Believe it or not I am actually glad they are charging subscriptions. For me businesses that charge are a sign of quality (within reason of course).
I know I am getting tired of using "free" services that actually aren't free at all when you factor in the time I have to use to really extract value from them.
I am just hoping Treehouse actually provides a service that makes a difference, i.e. someone can learn faster and more efficiently with Treehouse than some other way.
So far this looks good. Can't wait to try it out later tonight.
Based on this competition [1] it seems that their business model is different subscription packages. The Gold package, for example, is supposedly $588 per year.
Just wanted to take a moment and thank you for the attention to detail in that you included closed captioning for the sample videos on the site -- it's something I rarely expect to see and I'm always very pleasantly surprised when it's there. Is that something that'll be carrying over to the rest of the videos on the site?
Have no idea what Treehouse is, clicked the site, took 300ms to look at the 3 giant buttons.
Clicked "web design" (the site looks very nice BTW)
... and started learning about web design.
Watched the first video, hit the only button "Let's Go" and found a collection of other videos to get me further down the path of web design, letting me skip directly to my problems areas instead of grinding through things I know.
Conclusion: Without ever knowing what you guys do, what the site is or how to use it "correctly" I was able to start learning in what was less than probably 3 seconds of thinking.
I still don't know what you guys do or what the plan here is (heading back to read more) but your flow is perfect.
Like abnormally simple and wonderful... really nice job.
I totally agree with your point. However, unlike you, I didn't click on anything because (a) my time is valuable and I can't waste it on a site which may not provide value to me and (b) I don't trust web sites which don't explicitly tell me what they do or have an obvious "About" link on the home page.
Please add a sentence or two at the top of the page to tell me your target audience and why I should use the site.
It distinctly asks at the top "What do you want to learn today?" and then gives you three options: Web Design, Web Development, or iOS (btw, it should say iOS Development not just iOS). That's enough to make any user realize they're a site that helps you learn these things.
We added the About page on the top nav (last second) but it broke the responsive layout. It's now at the bottom and we'll put it back up top when we can.
Aha, thanks for pointing this out–I was curious if there was such a thing too.
On the about page (http://teamtreehouse.com/about), why are the boxes so big for each person? I see picture, name, title, Twitter handle, and then a fair amount of whitespace that makes me think there'd be a short bio for each person.
+1 I was also confused in the same way. The homepage is good at getting you started using the stuff quickly, but I wanted an overview of exactly what it was first
I did click on "learn web design" and was taken to a video with no description. I turned it off after a few seconds of pleasantries (eg. "Don't worry if you're totally new to web design"). I really think you guys should consider putting a course outline up front so users can know the scope of what they're getting into in a few seconds of skimming text instead of having to watch the whole first video. I don't even know how long that first video was, it didn't have a 'play bar' at the bottom. There's a big difference between a 30 second intro and an hour long 'first lecture'.
There is this shallow navigation depth to everything interesting; I don't have to hunt. Very clearly demarcated signs everywhere indicating where you can go and what you'll get.
Topping all of that off is that the actual design/typography of the site is calm, easy on the eyes and attractive.
The UX is great, I agree, but I can't stand how you put emphasis on every other word in the web design intro video.
It reminded me of an Ira Glass segment where he talked about his early radio career (See http://transom.org/?p=6978 and scroll down to "1. Learning Curve"). He also made this mistake, to the detriment of the story.
Please fix this when you have time. Maybe consider hiring a professional actor to read the script in a more natural way.
Definitely agreed, and really great example. It sounds like he is speaking to a 3 year old, which is super annoying and a big turnoff. Just speak normally, and people will have a much easier time handling it
I didn't have such a flawless experience. I was first baffled because I didn't understand what kind of website that is. I thought, well doesn't matter, it looks nice, let's try iOS. Then I watched that intro video that promised a first look at Objective C. I clicked "Lets go" and ended up at an XCode tutorial. Huh? So I clicked the breadcrumb navigation, and thought "App Life Cycle" sounds interesting. I clicked that. I started watching the video, but after 30 seconds the video suddenly stopped. Underneath it says the video takes 7 minutes. Well, obviously somethings wrong. I looked around, and saw something about signing up and unlocking badges, and I thought, hmm, I just want to watch the rest of this video, I don't want to bother unlocking any badges, so I gave up, went back to hacker news, and wrote this rant.
I also had a similar unfortunate fate with the iOS tutorials. I was excited clicking "Let's Go", and I spent 8 minutes familiarizing myself with Xcode. Then, I didn't get anything to further me - just something about a quiz, which honestly I don't care to take right now this early, and then a video on Interface Builder and Editor and Utilities Area.
I know what IB is, but for a lot of other people, they probably won't even want to click it, and Editor and Utilities Area sounds kind of boring. Clicking around more, it seems like there are specific categories now - Xcode is just one of them. I thought I was going to learn how to build an iPhone app, but now I have to figure out the right subtopic.
Overall, not a good experience. I think it's a great design in terms of colors and such (and even the video page I watched was nice and simple), but the flow was terrible. To top it all off, iOS 4 Foundations is the name of the iOS page. This barely sounds relevant to a newcomer, I would rather see that say 'iOS Development'. Foundations sounds like it'll go through boring stuff, I really just wanted to start hacking away at apps.
1. They're just focusing on coding, whereas we're covering the whole landscape: Design and Development (and some Business topics to help people launch startups). We've launched with a large library of topics (HTML, CSS, CSS3, HTML5, iOS 4, Design Foundations, Introduction to Programming, and more), compared to their single topic (JavaScript).
2. They're crowd-sourcing their courses. We've hired full-time Expert Teachers who are carefully crafting courses and editorializing content so Treehouse Members know what order they should learn things in.
3. we're already profitable because we're charging for the product. I think their angle is to sell access to their users for people looking to hire, but I'm not sure.
Seconded, also on Win7/Chrome and http://i.imgur.com/XSfw7.png is what I get. I've seen this font in use several places on the web (some popular tumblr themes use it) and it always looks horrible.
This looks amazing, and I'll be signing up immediately when I arrive home from work today. Really great job, and congrats on launching.
My only question thus far: Is there an easy way for me to be informed when new badges/topics/videos are available? Either a digest email or some sort of RSS feed that I could customize based on personal interests would be fantastic.
Thanks for the kind words. On the Library page we list the new badges, but you're right. Not super easy for you. We should hook that up to the @treehouse account.
Badges aside, I have a problem with the business model. Sure, Wordpress/Simple etc are looking for these badges, but not a lot of other places are. What is to prevent someone from getting an account and just downloading all the videos? The value is mostly in the education, not the other stuff you offer. Hopefully this doesn't sound too harsh...
Badges aside, I have a problem with the business model. Sure, Wordpress/Simple etc are looking for these badges, but not a lot of other places are. What is to prevent someone from getting an account and just downloading all the videos? The value is mostly in the education, not the other stuff you offer. Hopefully this doesn't sound too harsh...
Hi Chris. Great news! We already have Captions. If you see any videos that don't have them, could you please email us and we'll take care of it: help@teamtreehouse.com
Subtitles should be available on all videos when viewed on the website. Any videos without subtitles are currently being subtitled currently and should show up soon.
Would you guys be willing to do something like a Bronze plan, where maybe you get access to the videos but no offline viewing? I'd love to pay something like $10-$15/mo for the most basic access.
Also, I'd like to toss in my obligatory "Awesome job with the design!" comment.
This is great. I've been watching things like codecademy get tons of buzz and quietly thought: has no one been over to Think Vitamin Membership? I think this rebranding is a great idea and the new design is wonderful. Now add in some of that fancy interactive-in-browser-coding/learning and you'd be unstoppable (not that the more in-depth stuff should be done this way, but it's a really compelling and addictive hook).
May be you could keep the 25$ at the beginning, then give discount to those who unlock badges? say 15$ if you unlock 10 badges, or something like that?
It might be useful for retention in some form. If people are earning badges they are probably more likely to retain the membership for longer so they end up spending more in the long run.
Great site; I would appreciate a bit more language on the homepage about what exactly it does and how it works.
Something like "Treehouse is a ...." what? An interactive subscription based learning platform? A online classroom? Whatever you want to call it but it took me a while to figure out
1. What is it
2. What can I do for free vs what do I need to pay for?
I'm interested in why you'd go with 'Treehouse' as the name considering the trademark space for educational content is already pretty cluttered for that term. Was this considered and dismissed?
There is a bit of clutter, in the traditional education space. However, there wasn't anything with a good online presence, so we thought it was a great name.
Not going to be able to buy treehouse.com for awhile though, as they want $1m for it.
I was more angling at whether you're concerned about litigation/C&D from existing players defending their TM. It's a great name, but potentially provides an unwanted complication down the line.
As a non-native speaker I wonder what is the relationship between "treehouse" and learning? Except that treehouses are typically being built by kids and kids usually go to school?
We chose it because people generally have good feelings towards Treehouses. Also, they're a place of wonder and fun. Finally, there wasn't anything already established with that name.
Am I missing something? That's your learning method? Nothing interactive? No coding? Videos may be a fine way of understanding a process but it's not good for something as in-depth as coding. You don't learn code by watching videos of others doing it, you learn by coding.
The site design is nice but you'd need to offer a lot more than videos to get me to sign up.
Several of the videos include Code Challenges, which test your knowledge by writing real code in the browser. We are going to be expanding this tool throughout Treehouse to offer more opportunities to code-along as well as take challenges.
I think this site is targeting the youtube generation--nothing wrong with that. I personally would prefer to see higher caliber technical books enter the market. However, it seems the acclaim here concerns more the site design than the service itself.
The site looks great and very user friendly, but as others have pointed out, the paid-tier-only seems too restrictive. Specially given the motto of treehouse is "Millions of people can't afford a quality technical education, or if they can, it's out of date immediately when they graduate. We aim to change that."
How can this compare to MIT (and other) Open Course Work and hundreds if not thousands of good free tutorials on the internet Vs $25/$49 a month?
FWIW, I learned basics of web development/design totally free, just took a bit of searching to find good resources, and once I was confortable with basics, the further education came through just googling-on-demand, videos only helped in the beginning.
I too learned Dev and Design through free resources and googling (It's still how I learn), but a lot of people find value in having a path laid out to them, and having consistency in the resources they learn from.
Of course a lot of people on HN are going to be people who taught/teach themselves everything, but a lot of people want some hand holding, and that's what we aim to provide with Treehouse.
Interesting that you say a lot of people want hand-holding - I agree.
But don't you think in an industry like software development, you need to be able to self-educate. Software just moves too fast. So a person that needs hand-holding is not going to "get" what it takes to be a good programmer.
Congrats on the (re)launch! I used ThinkVitamin a little bit earlier this year, and it's great to see you guys moving forward. It wasn't for me at the time, but may be in the future. I don't know if it was just the timing (I was really busy) or the format (video isn't for everyone), but I was impressed with the product regardless.
One thing to note on the new site: clicking "Sign your team up" on this page: http://teamtreehouse.com/groups just takes you back to this page: https://teamtreehouse.com/subscribe/plans, where clicking on "Sign up" takes you to a page with no indication of how to sign up for a group plan.
Thanks for pointing that out. We're working on a brand new Groups product that will come out in one month. It'll have a custom signup process.
For now, the way Groups sign up is like this: Sign up and then add "sub-users". It's not elegant, but it works for now. Then in a month, we'll launch something super sweet.
One thing I forgot to mention: Wordpress/Automattic, Living Social, and BankSimple are going to be interviewing Treehouse members who are looking for work and have unlocked certain badges. We'll contact Members who qualify.
I think that may be your biggest sell in this community. I didn't realize that at ALL when I checked out your site. I actually left thinking "eh, I'll just stick to openclassroom/courseware"... Knowing this really adds a whole new world of appeal. Incorporate that somehow!!
Any chance of launching an Android Development course? Treehouse seems to be exactly what I was looking for, but the topic that I am really interested in at this moment is not there.
Congrats for the product, the site is amazing and I enjoyed the free videos a lot.
Site looks amazing...however the fonts on Windows are hard to read and are jagged, especially in the testimonials section. I'm sure they look great on my MacBook but don't forget the Windows crowd when designing (Test case: Vista with Chrome and FF).
Good luck with the venture. I am a firm believer that online education in software development is going to be big in the coming years. Get recruiters to start using your service to weed out recruits ;)!
Hey guys! Great website design. I was wondering if there was a student pricing option. $49 a month is really really steep for a poor grad student and I would really like the project videos as well as the standard videos.
I'm a student as well that is just interested in learning iOS, not necessarily even to get a job.
I know you guys have put a lot of time into these tutorials and are looking to profit from them, but I think having a student plan would be helpful for us and for you!
I think 10-15 dollars a month is reasonable, maybe 20 dollars a month tops for a student pricing plan.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 240 ms ] threadEither way, a great idea looking forward to seeing more material soon!
When you click the "Sign Up" link it takes you there. Either $25/month or $40/month. The cheapest you can get away with is $300/year.
I know I am getting tired of using "free" services that actually aren't free at all when you factor in the time I have to use to really extract value from them.
I am just hoping Treehouse actually provides a service that makes a difference, i.e. someone can learn faster and more efficiently with Treehouse than some other way.
So far this looks good. Can't wait to try it out later tonight.
[1] http://thinkvitamin.com/asides/guess-this-badge-and-win-a-fr...
Just wanted to take a moment and thank you for the attention to detail in that you included closed captioning for the sample videos on the site -- it's something I rarely expect to see and I'm always very pleasantly surprised when it's there. Is that something that'll be carrying over to the rest of the videos on the site?
I've followed you for a while on Think Vitamin and some of the DocType guys (Nick and Jim) and I never imagined you were in Orlando too!
Makes me very proud!
Congrats.
-Vlad
http://bit.ly/treehouseoffice
Can't wait to get started.
Have no idea what Treehouse is, clicked the site, took 300ms to look at the 3 giant buttons.
Clicked "web design" (the site looks very nice BTW)
... and started learning about web design.
Watched the first video, hit the only button "Let's Go" and found a collection of other videos to get me further down the path of web design, letting me skip directly to my problems areas instead of grinding through things I know.
Conclusion: Without ever knowing what you guys do, what the site is or how to use it "correctly" I was able to start learning in what was less than probably 3 seconds of thinking.
I still don't know what you guys do or what the plan here is (heading back to read more) but your flow is perfect.
Like abnormally simple and wonderful... really nice job.
Please add a sentence or two at the top of the page to tell me your target audience and why I should use the site.
On the about page (http://teamtreehouse.com/about), why are the boxes so big for each person? I see picture, name, title, Twitter handle, and then a fair amount of whitespace that makes me think there'd be a short bio for each person.
There is this shallow navigation depth to everything interesting; I don't have to hunt. Very clearly demarcated signs everywhere indicating where you can go and what you'll get.
Topping all of that off is that the actual design/typography of the site is calm, easy on the eyes and attractive.
I'm not sure exactly what firefox is trying to do (since both IE 8 and chrome are better), but I thought I'd let you guys know.
It reminded me of an Ira Glass segment where he talked about his early radio career (See http://transom.org/?p=6978 and scroll down to "1. Learning Curve"). He also made this mistake, to the detriment of the story.
Please fix this when you have time. Maybe consider hiring a professional actor to read the script in a more natural way.
I was worried I was going to have to pay for the iOS videos but boy was I wrong - and I'm glad, I'm just a college student ><.
I really like the iOS intro video, y'all really put some time into making them, with the white backdrops and all.
And yeah the website has a really simple, amazing UX!
I know what IB is, but for a lot of other people, they probably won't even want to click it, and Editor and Utilities Area sounds kind of boring. Clicking around more, it seems like there are specific categories now - Xcode is just one of them. I thought I was going to learn how to build an iPhone app, but now I have to figure out the right subtopic.
Overall, not a good experience. I think it's a great design in terms of colors and such (and even the video page I watched was nice and simple), but the flow was terrible. To top it all off, iOS 4 Foundations is the name of the iOS page. This barely sounds relevant to a newcomer, I would rather see that say 'iOS Development'. Foundations sounds like it'll go through boring stuff, I really just wanted to start hacking away at apps.
2. They're crowd-sourcing their courses. We've hired full-time Expert Teachers who are carefully crafting courses and editorializing content so Treehouse Members know what order they should learn things in.
3. we're already profitable because we're charging for the product. I think their angle is to sell access to their users for people looking to hire, but I'm not sure.
My only question thus far: Is there an easy way for me to be informed when new badges/topics/videos are available? Either a digest email or some sort of RSS feed that I could customize based on personal interests would be fantastic.
Gracias
The Introduction to Development video does not currently have them and I haven't really poked around at other videos.
1. From first glance this is an education website
2. No free tier, so you can't actually take any of the quizes without paying at least $25.
3. This is when I closed the tab
1) Provide very high quality education because we can afford to hire full-time Teachers, instead of crowd-sourcing the curriculum
2) Be profitable, so we can stay in business and continue to grow the service, which benefits our Members
Also, I'd like to toss in my obligatory "Awesome job with the design!" comment.
Looks good. $25/mo seems too much. Can't take any sample tests without paying $25.
Looks awesome though!
Also, my opinion is $25/mo. is reasonable for access to your videos. Congrats on your launch!
Something like "Treehouse is a ...." what? An interactive subscription based learning platform? A online classroom? Whatever you want to call it but it took me a while to figure out
1. What is it
2. What can I do for free vs what do I need to pay for?
Not going to be able to buy treehouse.com for awhile though, as they want $1m for it.
Am I missing something? That's your learning method? Nothing interactive? No coding? Videos may be a fine way of understanding a process but it's not good for something as in-depth as coding. You don't learn code by watching videos of others doing it, you learn by coding.
The site design is nice but you'd need to offer a lot more than videos to get me to sign up.
How can this compare to MIT (and other) Open Course Work and hundreds if not thousands of good free tutorials on the internet Vs $25/$49 a month?
FWIW, I learned basics of web development/design totally free, just took a bit of searching to find good resources, and once I was confortable with basics, the further education came through just googling-on-demand, videos only helped in the beginning.
Of course a lot of people on HN are going to be people who taught/teach themselves everything, but a lot of people want some hand holding, and that's what we aim to provide with Treehouse.
But don't you think in an industry like software development, you need to be able to self-educate. Software just moves too fast. So a person that needs hand-holding is not going to "get" what it takes to be a good programmer.
Do you disagree?
One thing to note on the new site: clicking "Sign your team up" on this page: http://teamtreehouse.com/groups just takes you back to this page: https://teamtreehouse.com/subscribe/plans, where clicking on "Sign up" takes you to a page with no indication of how to sign up for a group plan.
For now, the way Groups sign up is like this: Sign up and then add "sub-users". It's not elegant, but it works for now. Then in a month, we'll launch something super sweet.
+50 on this launch guys.
I think that may be your biggest sell in this community. I didn't realize that at ALL when I checked out your site. I actually left thinking "eh, I'll just stick to openclassroom/courseware"... Knowing this really adds a whole new world of appeal. Incorporate that somehow!!
Congrats for the product, the site is amazing and I enjoyed the free videos a lot.
My guess is that it would be useful to review job sites and see which skills are in demand relative to some estimate of the supply of those skills.
I really hope this is the future of education - college is such a waste of time/money for learning practical skills.
Good luck with the venture. I am a firm believer that online education in software development is going to be big in the coming years. Get recruiters to start using your service to weed out recruits ;)!
I'm a student as well that is just interested in learning iOS, not necessarily even to get a job.
I know you guys have put a lot of time into these tutorials and are looking to profit from them, but I think having a student plan would be helpful for us and for you!
I think 10-15 dollars a month is reasonable, maybe 20 dollars a month tops for a student pricing plan.