How to Build a Course Platform as a Solo Developer

What You're Building

An online course platform where creators can publish video courses, written content, quizzes, and structured learning paths. Students enroll, progress through modules, and earn completions. Think of it as your own Udemy or Teachable, but focused on a specific niche or built to sell your own courses.

Let me be upfront about something. If you just want to sell a course, don't build a platform. Use Teachable, Podia, or Gumroad. They handle payments, hosting, and delivery. Building your own platform only makes sense if you want to create a marketplace for multiple creators, need custom features those platforms don't offer, or plan to make the platform itself your product.

I say this because I've seen at least a dozen solo developers build custom course platforms when they should have just used Teachable. They spent months on video hosting and payment processing instead of actually creating course content. Don't fall into that trap.

Difficulty & Timeline

Recommended Tech Stack

Next.js for the frontend and API. Video hosting through Mux (their pricing is reasonable and they handle adaptive streaming, which is something you absolutely do not want to build yourself). PostgreSQL for the database. Stripe for payments.

For the video player, use Mux's player component or Video.js. Rolling your own video player is a rabbit hole that never ends. Trust me on this. Adaptive bitrate streaming, DRM protection, resume playback, playback speed controls. Mux handles all of it for about $0.007 per minute of video delivered.

If you're building this as a marketplace for other creators, you'll also need Stripe Connect for splitting payments between the platform and creators. This adds complexity but Stripe's documentation walks you through it well enough.

Step-by-Step Plan

Phase 1: Foundation (Month 1)

Start with the data model. Courses contain modules. Modules contain lessons. Lessons have content (video, text, or both). Students have enrollments. Enrollments track progress per lesson. Get this right and everything else flows from it.

Set up authentication with role-based access. You need at least three roles: admin, instructor, and student. Use Clerk or NextAuth for this. Implementing role-based permissions from scratch is tedious but necessary if you're building a platform.

Build the instructor dashboard where creators can create courses, add modules, upload videos, and write lesson content. This is the unsexy but critical part. If creating a course is painful, no one will use your platform. I've used course platforms where uploading a single video took five clicks and a page refresh. Those platforms didn't last.

Phase 2: Core Features (Month 2-3)

Build the student experience. Course catalog, enrollment, lesson viewer, and progress tracking. The lesson viewer is the heart of your platform. It needs to play video smoothly, display written content alongside it, and save progress automatically.

Implement progress tracking at the lesson level. When a student finishes a lesson, mark it complete and update the overall course progress. This sounds simple, but the edge cases add up. What if they watch 90% of a video? What if they skip around? I'd recommend marking a lesson complete either when the video reaches 90% or when the student clicks a "mark complete" button. Don't try to get clever with tracking exact watch time unless you have a specific reason.

Add a simple quiz or assessment system if it fits your niche. Multiple choice questions stored as JSON in your database work fine for v1. Don't build a full assessment engine. A few questions after each module to reinforce learning is enough.

Phase 3: Polish & Launch (Month 4-5)

Handle the video pipeline properly. Instructors upload raw video files. You process them through Mux (or your chosen provider), which generates multiple quality levels and a streaming URL. Store the Mux asset ID in your database and use their player to stream.

Add email notifications. Welcome emails on enrollment, reminders for incomplete courses, and completion certificates. These seem like nice-to-haves, but they dramatically improve course completion rates. Resend or SendGrid handles the transactional email side.

Build a proper landing page for each course. Title, description, instructor bio, curriculum overview, student reviews, and a clear "enroll now" button. This is your sales page. Every conversion optimization matters here.

Monetization Strategy

There are three main models for course platforms.

Sell your own courses. If you're the instructor, you keep 100% minus payment processing fees. Price courses at $49-199 for one-time access or $19-49/month for a subscription that includes all courses. One-time purchases are simpler to implement but subscriptions generate recurring revenue.

Marketplace with revenue share. Charge instructors a platform fee (10-30% of each sale). This is how Udemy and Teachable work. You need a critical mass of instructors and students for this model to work, so it's harder to bootstrap.

Subscription platform. Charge students a monthly fee ($15-39/month) for access to all courses. Pay instructors based on engagement (watch time or completions). This is the Netflix model, and it works well when you have a library of content.

For a solo developer, I'd start with selling your own courses. Build the platform, create one excellent course, and sell it. Use the revenue to fund platform development. Only open it to other instructors once you've validated that the platform itself works.

Completion certificates are a surprisingly effective monetization lever. People share certificates on LinkedIn, which drives organic traffic. Make certificates look professional and include a verification URL back to your platform.

Common Mistakes to Avoid

Building the platform before creating any content. The platform is worthless without courses. Write or record at least one complete course before you build anything. Use Google Docs and Loom recordings. If people buy the rough version, then build the platform.

Hosting your own video. Video hosting, transcoding, and adaptive streaming are incredibly hard problems. Use Mux, Cloudflare Stream, or Bunny Stream. Self-hosting video is a full-time infrastructure job. Your S3 bill alone will surprise you, and you'll still have buffering issues.

Overcomplicating the course structure. Courses, modules, lessons. That's all you need. Don't add learning paths, prerequisites, branching logic, or adaptive learning in v1. Every feature you add multiplies the complexity of your instructor interface.

Skipping mobile optimization. A huge percentage of online learning happens on phones and tablets. If your video player doesn't work well on mobile and your lesson text isn't readable on a small screen, you're losing students. Test on real devices, not just browser dev tools.

Is This Worth Building?

It depends on why you're building it. If you have expertise to teach and want a custom platform, yes. The online education market is enormous and still growing. People pay $50-200 for a good course without blinking. If you build the platform and the content, the margins are excellent.

If you're building a marketplace to compete with Udemy or Coursera, that's a much harder sell. You need both supply (instructors) and demand (students), and the chicken-and-egg problem is brutal. You'd need to recruit instructors first, probably by offering them better terms than the big platforms.

My honest advice: start by selling a course on an existing platform. If it does well, then consider building your own. The course content is the hard part. The platform is just plumbing. I've seen developers spend six months building a beautiful course platform and then realize they had nothing to teach on it. Don't be that developer.