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The great majority of that came from 2 backers, who also received these services:

  - I will do a case study on your app and it will be featured on the project's website. 
  - 1 hour remote consulting session to help you get unstuck with the project. 
  - E-mail support within reason. 
  - Both screencast series. 
  - A PDF cheatsheet of all of the tasks and deploy commands you can run. 
  - A Flask sticker that you can place anywhere!
So essentially they paid a few grand for a Flask course, decent support package (1 hour live support, unlimited email support), some videos and swag.
wait, wait, wait on your third point - a whole hour for each of all two backers you mention?
I think I detect sarcasm? That seems like a fairly reasonable rate.
This wasn't something that happens every day.

The Flask screencasts were my first attempt at a Kickstarter. My goal may have been ambitious but I looked at other programming books/material and tried to price it around what those projects got funded for.

Long story short, my campaign tanked for nearly the full month and 36 hours before it ended an Australian businessman nearly solo backed the project and we've been in contact since working on various things.

I don't want to mention his name unless he gives me permission, but I wanted to post this now to clear up how this took place.

It says 2 backers pledged $3,000 or more for:

  - Case study on your app and it will be featured on the project's website
  - 1 hour remote consulting session to help you get unstuck with the project
  - E-mail support within reason
I agree, that is quite impressive! Looks like the author discussed how this managed to come together though, so I probably wouldn't be too excited to follow in his footsteps.
IT education is a huge market. Unfortunately it also attracts a lot of fakers and cheapos -- in this case, the Udemy owners.
Its amazing how many phone calls you get in a week for IT education even at a small business / community college. These course aren't cheap either.
> Unfortunately it also attracts a lot of fakers and cheapos -- in this case, the Udemy owners.

Or, from my experience, most Udemy courses.

The author might be better off going with the flow and treating Udemy-imposed discounts as a loss-leader for consulting gigs.

Udemy is creating a race to the bottom for their course creators, to the benefit of the students, who will always be able to find quality courses for $10. The winning course creators will be the top 2%, plus those in the top 10% who are able to convert the courses into other forms of income.

However, this is not much different than almost every other form of content creation and centralized distribution these days, where there are winners who are good enough that they can make a break and create their own distribution channels, another tier who can make a living by hustling in multiple modes, and the hopeful replacement-level masses who keep the broad distribution channels afloat with a deep catalog.

You can also split your course into multiple parts -- part 1 can always have the $10 price, then the next part(s) could have the higher price point. This also gives the student a cheap way to sample your course to see if it is worth purchasing the higher price ones later on.
While that obviously works out to a surprising amount from each individual, if the author really spent two months putting the course together, well ... it wouldn't be particularly well-paid client work for a contractor in the Bay Area.
Yeah, I was definitely mostly surprised by the amount per individual
13 people who didn't realize they could get a similar course for $10 on udemy... ;)