We ship first and then announce dates because down the other path lies disaster, but LLCs are a great way to incorporate many tech businesses, and Atlas aims to incorporate most tech businesses.
https://www.udemy.com/the-build-a-saas-app-with-flask-course...
I found it very well made and you might ship a simple SaaS within a week, including Stripe subscription. You'd also learn about Docker deployment there. Themeable using Twitter's Bootstrap as well.
Now just get an idea for a profitable offering and you are golden! ;-)
Course author here. Thanks a lot for posting this (and for signing up).
But, it's worth noting that if you buy the course on my platform at https://buildasaasappwithflask.com/ there are additional perks you won't get on Udemy.
For example I'm in the process of adding a new bonus section to the course that goes over building RESTful APIs with Flask. I've already released the source code and 1 video for it on my own platform but this will never make its way over to Udemy.
I'm going to be adding some front-end related bonuses too (only on my platform). Plus you get better support and I'm even thinking about doing things like recorded office hours.
If you don't want the bonuses / updates and only care about the cheapest price possible, please use my Udemy link[0] below for $10.99 because otherwise Udemy takes 50%. I don't want to sound like a complainer, but yeah, it took me 4 months of real life time and years of experience to create this course. I can't afford to keep making courses on Udemy when I see $3-5 per sale.
It's also worth mentioning those Udemy "discount tricks" are out of my control. I can set the price to anything within reason, but ultimately Udemy pushes courses out for $11 all the time. It's partly why I'm looking to remove all of my content from there in the future, but building my own audience is a long process. :)
In either case, any support is much appreciated. Thank you in advance for anyone who signs up.
[0]: https://www.udemy.com/the-build-a-saas-app-with-flask-course...
However, this comes to mind: https://elsyms.com/the-art-of-over-engineering-your-side-pro...
This was followed by a discussion on HN which a lot of people enjoy over-engineering side projects because they use it as a sandbox to learn or test different things, and I relate, so I was looking for as much material on including as many buzzwords as possible on a saas app/business/tool set(microservices, kubernetes, docker, UI frameworks, mobile app, graphQL, whatever else is out there), I'm pretty sure I could get each piece from different sources, but is there someone who covers overblowing everything? Or maybe one could build a curriculum out of several different online courses?
In your case, I think you're best off learning each of those things from separate courses / learning material. Mobile app development and Kubernetes are simply not related at all.
This Flask course focuses on building a classic web app using server side templates. It happens to use Postgres and Redis while also performing background jobs with Celery.
To me that's the bare minimum for building a web app with Ruby or Python. Web app + DB + background worker + sprinkles of JS on the front-end. We use Docker Compose to get it all running because the alternative is rolling your own Python environment from scratch which is IMO more time consuming than using Docker.
That's also a good article you linked and I agree with pretty much everything they wrote.
I think it's more important to ship your app than try to incorporate every buzz word for the sake of doing it. I'll admit, sometimes learning new things is highly motivating but at the end of the day, the tech wins REALLY need to be there for it to make sense.
For example I choose not to use Kubernetes in production because 1 server deploys with Docker Compose is very easy to reason about and it works well, even for decently high traffic. I treat ops like I do code refactoring. It's important to get something working, and if you ever get to the point where it becomes a problem, then refactor.
The interesting thing there with ops is, if you have a SAAS app running with 800 customers and 50 of them are on concurrently, do you really need a self healing auto scaling Kubernetes cluster on multiple regions?
Probably not. Those 800 customers might be generating you $49 / month each or $39,200 per month in revenue and something like that could be running on a single $40-80 / month server with a Flask set up (or even Rails for that matter).
In my mind, I'd rather spend my time figuring out how to grow from 800 customers to 8,000 and even then you could probably vertically scale your server, but at this point you're rolling in so much cash that it's all irrelevant. You could just pay someone $100,000 to fix your scaling problems over the course of a few months (without outages) and continue growing your business.
Basically, front load your time in making your product really cool and successful, then invest the time (or money) into scaling when you need it.
I agree 100%. ~premature optimization is the root of all evil~
However what I meant is, what if building and iterating is the goal, not the means to the product? When you're building a SaaS app you have to worry about market fit, sales(as the article talks a lot about), if you're not concerned about finding users and growing, a side project app can be a great way to learn and show knowledge.
Perhaps the classic web app with server-side templates is the quickest way to launch an MVP, but what I want is a way to build something integrating as many different things as possible, a lot of companies will want to see your GitHub, if you can present a largely-complex yet well-designed application where you can showcase front-end development, backend APIs, containers and what not you're one step ahead.
I want a sort of sandbox to play with, not an actual product, would be interesting as a multi-part series course(start with simple web app, keep iterating, separate web app from server code, remove bootstrap or other UI kits in favor of self created styles, incorporate mobile, watch app, whatever you can think of. This could be a good exercise in writing maintainable applications.
It's going to be tricky to find a good balance (the bare-bones Udemy version still needs to have high value), but it's doable.
I have a lot of ideas this year for new content and I'm going to experiment with paid courses, free courses and even not putting some courses on Udemy just to see what happens.
Also interesting to hear a creators side of Udemy. I've used Pluralsight before where you have a set fee for everything. I wonder if something like that might work better for you as someone authoring these courses?
Pluralsight is ok but they are only interested in very short courses in a tech space that isn't already crowded with content. That makes sense because they are a membership site where the perceived value of individual sales isn't that important. Where as on Udemy, longer courses are considered "better" because each course is an individual transaction and a course with more content is perceived as more valuable (even though I don't technically agree with that, that's what their data shows).
This Flask course is about 10 hours of video for reference. Some of my other courses are in the 3-5 hour range.
I'm thinking I could do 10 hours as an hour or two a day over a few weeks. I need to decide if it's the tooling holding me back or the MVP. Easy to focus on technology, pitting this against that when really, anything up and working is key!
Maybe that's something they are pushing for moving forward.
For something like this Flask course, I've had people tell me they cranked through it in 1 day at 1.5x speed, and others have taken it multiple times over the course of a few months and still reference it a year later.
I think it really depends on your level of experience. I'm a big fan of "doing" and while the course does have a lot of watching, there are self guided homework assignments to make modifications to the code base (they are presented as real life feature requests).
If you did all of the assignments, there's probably 40 hours worth of content to go through, but those assignments are really your chance to get your hands dirty and start practicing what you learn.
A lot of people also build up their own app side by side while watching, which is a great way to follow along if you already have an idea. It takes longer, but IMO the goal here is to become a solid developer, not rush through it and do the minimum.
Thanks again for your comments and you discount link!
Maybe there are clear loop-holes.
I'd really appreciate it.
Edit: I see you updated it. Thanks!
Purchasing this for a saas idea of mine.
Funny i was meaning to learn flask the right way
I'm a B2B guy - so I never build anything until I have ~1M~2M/year in soft commitments. Then as I build it, I try to get the soft commitments to sign-off on early purchases (at a discount).
Usually - where it gets hard - is customer support if the "B"s you are selling into have a lot of employees that need a lot of handholding. That is a 24x7 hell that you don't want to deal with (but that I don't know how to avoid).
I'll not be in the position of getting anywhere near those figures you shoot for and considering this will be my first, I'm keeping my feet firmly on the ground. I've just spent all my career to date (15 years +) building products for other people that I feel I know enough to do my own. Again, it all comes down to finding that need. This is where physical networking and schmoozing pay off, sadly not my forte!
I found one. They didn't get it. I ended up quitting: "Fine - I will do it myself".
I remember the first meetings I had a 6.30am or 7.00am at breakfast places with VCs... They would listen and then (essentially) pat me on my head and say: "You're a nice boy. Go back to being an engineering cube-monkey".
It was so frustrating. I did not know what I was doing. I was a fairly competent engineer - but I did not know the code-words for the VC-world or the business-world (and there is definitely a tribal language).
Finally - mostly by luck - I found a guy to partner with. We ended up raising $100M, before we got caught in the back-wash of the dot-com implosion (we weren't a dot-com, but it didn't matter).
Now - I know how to speak their language to them. But I will say: It's hard. The only way to learn is to get into it. Go try to sell. Fail. Get dirty. You'll figure it out.
I believe in you! :-)
EDIT: I do remember this. This was the 90s, but I remember that I pitched customer-types and investor-types about 2000 times in about 350 days (a year). I am an engineer, not a sales-type, so this was uncomfortable. But I updated my/our pitch deck after every meeting. You do get better with practice. It sounds cold, but I would say: "Hit The Road".
I found that it was like a fraternity, though. I only learned it by hanging out with them. Kind of like how doctors call bruises 'hematoma's. They all know what it means, but it wouldn't occur to us normies to call it that.
If that book doesn't exist, maybe somebody should write it!
Really is good to hear your words of encouragement.
IF I knew then, what I know now - I would be too afraid to start. But all progress is made by people who are not too afraid to start. I wish you all the luck and fortune in the world.
edit: My details are also in my bio if you want to shoot me an email.
Feel free to get in touch if you want a sounding board. As I get older I'm more concerned with being useful, so I'd be happy to be a sounding board/alpha tester.
Coincidentally, Indie Hackers was acquired by Stripe via patio11.
Great blog, but part of me finds it sad that such an intelligent person spends a huge chunk of his life working on creating Bingo Cards.