How To Build Your Own NFT-Gated No-Code Version Of Udemy

Using Pinata, Submarine.me, and LinkTree

Udemy is one of the most popular online learning platforms on the market. It has helped teach countless people a wide range of topics. It was the main tool I used when I learned to code in my 30s. As a platform, it’s positioned nicely to help educators get discovered. But what happens when you have an audience of students and potential students coming directly to you?

Today, we’re going to build your own miniature version of Udemy that leverages NFT token-gating, Submarine.me, and Linktree. Why NFTs? NFTs already help provide a sense of community. Buying an NFT as a pass to future education is not a new concept, but what we’re going to do is extend it to your own brand through these tools.

Setting Up Accounts

You’ll need a Pinata/Submarine.me account (on a paid plan) to get started. You’ll also need a Linktree (free account). Let’s start with Pinata.

Submarine.me is powered by Pinata and leverages Pinata’s user accounts. So visit Pinata’s website, and sign up for the Picnic Plan.

Once you’ve completed the sign up process, you’ll want to make sure a Dedicated gateway was created automatically for you. Visit the Gateways page, and you can easily create a gateway.

Next, you can visit Linktree and sign up for a free account. Once you’ve completed the sign up, you should be able to start customizing your Linktree page. We’ll come back to this. Let’s first make sure we can log into Submarine.me.

Go to the log in page and log in with your Pinata credentials. You should see an empty table where your submarine links will go. If you see any errors, make sure your Pinata account is on at least the Picnic plan and that you have a Dedicated Gateway set up.

Building The Tutorials On Submarine.me

Udemy is a bunch of video tutorials, right? So we need video content. This is going to be up to you to provide. Just like you’d record videos, edit those videos, then add them to Udemy, you can do that with Submarine.me.

When a video is ready, you would simply log into the app, and click Submarine New File.

Choose NFT as the unlock mechanism. Here, you can specify the NFT that the person accessing your video content must own in order to view the content. Submarine.me supports Ethereum, Polygon, Avalanche, and Solana.

On this page, you can also customize your page. You can add a background, add a logo, change the button style, and more.

Finally, you will upload the video file that should be Submarined. This will put the file on a private IPFS node controlled by you. The media is not accessible on the public network, but it can be viewed with a valid access token. Submarine.me takes care of generating that access token for you assuming the end user has the NFT you had specified.

Once the upload is complete, you’ll see your newly submarined file link on the main page’s table.

Repeat this process for each video tutorial you want to upload. Perhaps you have a series of videos that make up an entire project. You could upload all of them and then link each one on your Linktree page.

But wait, what about the NFT? There are many no-code platforms for creating NFTs today. We’ve written about Mintplex here, we’ve also partnered with Bueno. But you can even use OpenSea to mint a multi-edition NFT specifically for the purposes of unlocking content with Submarine.me.

With your content locked safely behind NFT ownership, it’s time to build your tutorial marketplace—better known as a landing page.

Creating The Landing Page With Linktree

When creating your Linktree page, you’ll have plenty of opportunity to customize it, but let’s start by adding the links. On the customization page, you’ll see an Add New Link button. Click that and you’ll be prompted to provide the link and some info about that link.

You can give the link any title you’d like, but the name of the video tutorial probably makes the most sense. The link should be to your Submarine.me unlock page for the video in question. You can then add a nice little thumbnail to make the link more attractive. Once you’ve done so, it’ll look something like this:

If you do this for each of the videos in the course, you now have a landing page, analytics, unlockable content, and audience-building tools. All without having to write a line of code. You can share your Linktree anywhere and start building your juggernaut video tutorial platform.

Conclusion

This is a simple example with powerful implications. Creators want easy tools to manage the distribution of their content and the revenue streams from their audience. Unlockable media through Submarine.me combined with the ease of Linktree’s link page builder lets you create an experience that in the past would have taken months and thousands of dollars to build. You can do it all for a few bucks a month and without any coding skills.

If you’d like to see the final test version of this, you can visit the Linktree here, and you can buy the NFT necessary to unlock the videos here (don’t worry, it’s on Polygon’s testnet).

If you’re ready to try it out for yourself, head over to Submarine.me and have at it. Hit me up on Twitter when you’ve got something running—would love to check out what you build.