Introducing Firearms Training Hub 2.0

[David S.]

Firearms Training Hub 2.0 is open for business. #pimpmysite .

As many of you know, I started a website a couple years ago with the goal of centralizing information and schedules for local, regional and national level instructors that "I" believe are teaching high quality, legitimate TTPs to private citizens.

I believe we are living in a golden era of firearms training. The available training options have never been so good. Finding quality training in near you can be challenging, especially for new student. Interested students have to (a) know who's worth training with, (b) go to their website, (c) determine if desired instructor is running a desired class nearby, (d) repeat until you find a match. I aim to combine all their schedules in a central location and make it easy to search for training. Using a map-based scheduling, the user could search by type of training and see who's coming to your area.

I built version 1.0 from the ground up using a inexpensive hosting service and bloated drag-and-drop web design plug-in. The results was an extremely slow website that sometimes took minutes to fully load. The backend was also painfully slow to upload events to the calendar, challenging my motivation to keep things up to date. Aside from website speed and ghetto-ness, most comments were generally positive. In November I engaged a professional web developer to re-build the site. They've maintained the core concept, added some color, and cleaned up the code to significantly improved load times. So far I'm pretty happy with the results.

Where we're at now and where we're going.
- The instructor schedules did not migrate from the original site, so they are currently out of date or non-existent. I do have current schedules for Active Response Training/ (Greg Ellifritz) and ShivWorks (Craig Douglas), and more will be added over the next couple weeks.

- I would like to replace several of the stock images and themes with something less tacti-cool. (Let me know if you have good pics that you'd like to donate to the cause, particularly panoramics that would be suitable for narrow headers and footers.)

- I have a bunch of instructors I'd like to add. I'll be contacting them in the near future. Some will be household names like the ShivWorks Collective, Active Self Protection, Gabe White, Vickers, some of the Primary & Secondary crowd (MSP, Pressburg, Reston, Blowers, etc). Some will be local/regional instructors, like QSI Training in MN, First Person Safety and The Complete Combatant in GA, Valor Ridge in TN, and so on. There's dozens of people doing good work.


If this interests you, I could use your help.
- Please beta test for me. Let me know what's working and what's not. What do you like and not like?
- Here's my current instructor list. Please PM/DM/email me or in this thread. Who should I add? Who should I be removing?
- I don't want to spam P-F with a bunch of updates and thread bumps. Follow and share "Firearms Training Hub" on Facebook if you're interested in the latest and greatest updates, along with articles I find interesting. #shamelesspimp .

Thanks for your interest and feedback.

Cheers,
David S.

Disclosures.
- This is a currently a labor of love. I'd love it see this pick up enough momentum to justify some form of monetization, but that's currently not in play.
- I'm not financially, or otherwise affiliated with any of the instructors listed on my site. I'm trained with several of them and know others by reputation only. No more than one or two know me from Adam.
- There are several instructors who have declined to be included. I have respected their wishes and omitted them from the site with no hard feelings. I would be happy to re-engage if they change their mind.

[Hieronymous]

I really like the map feature. It’s a great way to see what trainers will be in one’s area for a given month.

[pangloss]

I really like the map feature. It’s a great way to see what trainers will be in one’s area for a given month.

Definitely a great feature!

[SeriousStudent]

As a shameless Luddite who is not on Facebook, should I just check the site every few days?

[David S.]

As a shameless Luddite who is not on Facebook, should I just check the site every few days?

For you SS, I'll keep this thread updated. Like I said, I don't want to get spammy with a bunch of BTTs, so I'll probably update here less frequently.

We'll see what kind of traction this thread gets, and what Tom and the P-F community will puts up with.

[Pacioli]

I REALLY like this concept. It's such an obviously good idea I don't know why nobody has done it before (maybe monetization).

[RJ]

I’ve been following this for a while.

I look forward to using the 2.0 version in the future.


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[David S.]

I REALLY like this concept. It's such an obviously good idea I don't know why nobody has done it before (maybe monetization).

We'll see. I hope you're right.

I'm not sure if you were posing the statement rhetorically or not, but here goes:

There are certainly instructor networks out there. I believe both NRA and PDN have an instructor networks, for instance. I'm sure Rangemaster, Farnam or some of the other Instructor Development guys could put you in contact with their certified instructors. Or you could happen upon one of the few gun forums that discuss training.

That's where I hope we can step in.

I'm facing a couple of challenges.
-Nobody knows how many private citizens take open enrollment classes beyond the super basic NRA and CHL courswork. Of the millions of gun owners, I've heard a couple instructors suggest that less than a thousand people regularly receive professional training beyond state requirement. I'm not sure there's any data to support that claim. I'm guess it's low considering something like 300 people were at Tac Con last month. What's the number? 5,000? 10,000? I'd be really surprised if there were 10,000 people that actively and continuously train. Of those, how many are looking for my kind of training, as opposed to wiz-bang InstaFamous instructors? Presumably some fraction of that number would be the base for any monetization plan. Are those numbers big enough to support a business? time will tell.

- The map/schedule. It's awesome, but it's labor intensive. Someone has to do the tedious data entry and regularly check the instructor schedules for changes. Hopefully I can find an alternative, but that requires the site to gain significant traction and convert traffic into students.

I'm certainly optimistic, but we'll see.

[Will_H]

I'm not sure why I wasn't looking at this before, but it's got a LOT of potential to streamline class searches for all of us.

I'm having a little trouble navigating the map, as it only flags a couple events, yet lists more events when you click on one flag.



There's a calss loisted in Killeen, TX, yet no flags in TX at all.

[David S.]

I'm not sure why I wasn't looking at this before, but it's got a LOT of potential to streamline class searches for all of us.

I'm having a little trouble navigating the map, as it only flags a couple events, yet lists more events when you click on one flag.



There's a calss loisted in Killeen, TX, yet no flags in TX at all.

That’s because I released it early. The few classes that migrated over are missing data. I believe the Killeen class is Handgun Combatives (Dave Spaulding) “Combative Pistol.”

That should get cleaned up #Soon.