90 days to SaaS

[TheGeneral]

Hey All!

This is the start of my progress thread, and I’ll introduce myself to start:

I’m a mid 20’s military veteran. I read Millionaire Fastlane a few years ago and started a business venture around that time. The idea was a web application for the charitable fundraising industry. I hired a local developer who gave me two options: 1)custom coding the entire application, or 2) using a third party backend system to provide the “engine” while the development team worked on the front-end. Fully custom development was priced in the low 6 figures, and the option of using a third party backend cost about $20k-$30k.

The service that provided the third party backend had some amazing salespeople. They answered “YES!” to every question we asked in terms of its functionality. It turns out they highly oversold the system. The project was supposed to take 9 months and cost around $20K, but it took over 2 years (the development team was pretty nice about eating the additional cost).

So 15 months late and over budget, I got a product that simply did not meet expectations.

At that time, I had ZERO experience in computer programming. The night I got the product and realized I had just lost 2 years of time and $20k, I sat down, over a nice cold beer, and thought “had I started to learn programming 2 years ago, I probably could have developed a sellable MVP (Minimum Viable Product) by now”.

The next day I applied for readmission to my state university. I had originally studied two years of business/entrepreneurship before going on military leave. Instead of jumping back into business, I swapped the degree plan over to Computer Science. I kept a minor in business so I could take some additional entrepreneurship classes.

Luckily, I found that I have a passion for programming. It was great. It was like one interesting puzzle after another. Homework was fun instead of a chore, and I was always at the top of my classes. I took the classes more seriously, given my age, previous experience, and passion. I definitely put in much more effort than when I was a partying business student.

I did TONS of self study outside of classes, mostly with Udemy courses. Eventually I was helping my professors by writing tutorials for the classes instead of the regular homework assignments for other students. I developed a couple online web tutorial courses as well.

I built my first fully custom coded web application for a friends construction company in my second year. It was a web based project management software that allowed their project managers to update the project status and access pertinent project information in the field. The code was ugly, but the thing actually worked! I went on to develop about 10 more web applications for various projects, deploying them on dedicated web servers, and managing them as they grew.

While I like to study more complicated aspects of programming and computer science (I’m studying neural networks now), web development is tons of fun for me. It’s not particularly challenging at the programming level. The challenge is more about correctly integrating all the different applications , but it’s really cool to see real live people interacting daily on my sites. It’s great waking up and seeing all the traffic that took place during the middle of the night while I was fast asleep!

I am now fully confident that I could design, develop, and launch the original charitable funding web application. While I still have a lot more to learn, I can definitely launch fully functional MVPs for any ideas I have.

My previous projects all have been developed for clients or personal projects I was not trying to monetize. This time I intend to change that. I intend to develop a SaaS web application, beta test, launch it, market it, and eventually hire on a team of developers that I will oversee. I mean, it sure as hell sounds like a lot more fun than going and getting a job…

My timeline will shoot for a beta test in December/January timeframe. That gives me approximately 3-4 months for design/development. I’m expecting around ~300 hours of development time (20-ish hours a week), plus the additional time needed for opportunity analysis, product definition, market research/analysis, marketing, etc.

I do have some ideas in mind. I will put them on paper, run some numbers, do a simple feasibility analysis, and see what sticks. I will go through that process in the next post.

Please join me in this venture and help me keep my mind focused and on track. I’m sure there is a lot I can learn from this board. Hopefully I can return that favor and provide some value as well. Thanks in advance!

 

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[Scot]

Dude, great post! Welcome from a fellow vet. I'm looking forward to seeing your updates. There is a lot of gold on this forum, definitely advise checking out the gold threads, especially those related to software and marketing.

I'd even suggest looking into an INSIDERS subscription. I recently got one, it's already paid for itself. I run two progress threads, one with general info on my app, the INSIDERS thread with all the particulars and actual market I'm working in.

This forum is very similar to the military mindset. We help those who help themselves. You're already executing, keep up the good work.

 

[DaRK9]

I built my first fully custom coded web application for a friends construction company in my second year. It was a web based project management software that allowed their project managers to update the project status and access pertinent project information in the field. The code was ugly, but the thing actually worked! I went on to develop about 10 more web applications for various projects, deploying them on dedicated web servers, and managing them as they grew.

F the charity fundraising project. Sell this. Construction SaaS is big $$$.

Need: A company is currently using it. Step one of validation complete.
Entry: The MVP is done. Clean it up, get a sales and support team.
Scale: "Number of construction companies in the US 729,345"
Control: Hopefully you own the code?
Time: Depends on how far you want to scale it and what the price point is and how you delegate.

http://www.statisticbrain.com/construction-industry-statistics/


Whichever way you go good luck.


I'm in the same area (SaaS) soft launching into beta this Friday.

 

[TheGeneral]

Scot - I did read your thread, I'm following it. All my previous clients have been direct referrals from friends, family, or previous clients, no marketing needed. So the marketing stuff you're going covering right now is very interesting to me.

Dark9 - The project management app is a couple years old now. The code is sloppy and rather poor. It's also designed for one specific user. It could be sold as stand-alone software where a team would have to make small changes for new customers. In order to launch it on a large scale, it would need to be completely redeveloped. But it is on my list of things ideas to evaluate.

Also, good looking out on the satisticbrain.com. Lots of good data on there. Good luck on the soft launch!

 

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[Niptuck MD]

Dude, great post! Welcome from a fellow vet. I'm looking forward to seeing your updates. There is a lot of gold on this forum, definitely advise checking out the gold threads, especially those related to software and marketing.

I'd even suggest looking into an INSIDERS subscription. I recently got one, it's already paid for itself. I run two progress threads, one with general info on my app, the INSIDERS thread with all the particulars and actual market I'm working in.

This forum is very similar to the military mindset. We help those who help themselves. You're already executing, keep up the good work.

thank you both for your service to this nation

 

[Scot]

Scot - I did read your thread, I'm following it. All my previous clients have been direct referrals from friends, family, or previous clients, no marketing needed. So the marketing stuff you're going covering right now is very interesting to me.

Dark9 - The project management app is a couple years old now. The code is sloppy and rather poor. It's also designed for one specific user. It could be sold as stand-alone software where a team would have to make small changes for new customers. In order to launch it on a large scale, it would need to be completely redeveloped. But it is on my list of things ideas to evaluate.

Also, good looking out on the satisticbrain.com. Lots of good data on there. Good luck on the soft launch!

Keep in mind, my marketing is untested, but I'd love to talk over some ideas if you want.

 

[WebMedic]

Great post @TheGeneral

Can you share more on the technical aspect of the SaaS you are building? what challenges are you facing?

Ideally you want to be using a framework (ex: Symphony 2, Laravel) and build on top of it.

This way you don't have to re-invent the wheel when it comes to the foundation of your application (routing, authentication, database, templating, etc) and you get a standardized code that comes with documentation when you are expanding and need more developers to jump on board - they don't have to learn your new system from scratch.

All the best with your venture, don't hesitate to get in touch for any help on building the web application.

 

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[TheGeneral]

@Scot - I'll be following you thread. I'll probably have some questions to post in there soon.


@WebMedic – You’re exactly right that a web app should be built upon on existing framework. The construction management app I talked about in my post was pure LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP). I did all the routing, authentication, database, templating, etc from scratch. I did it because at that time I no clue what a web framework was, and thought all web apps were built from scratch haha. I’m glad I did it though, it gave me a lot of insight into what these fancy web frameworks are actually doing under the hood. I’ll be using Django/Python framework for this app, as that is where most of my experience is.

Okay! The last few days have been a lot of brainstorming ideas, and writing them all down regardless of how realistic they sounded. Last night I worked through all the ideas using this process:


1. Scrub Ideas


I quickly went through the brain dump of ideas I had jotted down and spent a couple minutes thinking about the process each idea required. Then I would decide if it was an idea worth pursuing further.

For example: a service providing live tracking of delivery vehicles sounds like a great idea. Then I think about the process, where you would need a GPS tracker on each vehicle, a list of tracking numbers that were present on that vehicle, and a network to monitor it all. That would require massive capital (purchasing GPS trackers, monitoring bandwidth, etc) and it would also require cooperation/negotiation with the major shipping carriers. All of that for the small advantage of being able to see exactly where it your package was, as opposed to getting updates only when it was scanned in/out of a facility.

Too much work for too little benefit, pass!

Another was: Monitoring equipment for bars/restaurants CO2 based beverage dispensers.

For this one you would need to install some measuring equipment on every keg. I’d probably go with a simple flow meter, and then have that talk remotely to a monitoring station. Then your web based SaaS app would generate all sorts of fancy charts/reports on the usage, automatically reorder when stocks are low, email/text alerts for suspicious activity (discrepancies between flow meter and cash register charges).

I have built something similar, an at home kegerator monitoring system, so it is definitely a do-able idea. But physical installation/repairs requires on site visits, lots of initial capital for development/inventory, etc.

I’m just not interested in something of that scale right now, pass!

2. CENTS Analysis

I then built a simple spreadsheet with CENTS on the X-axis, and Ideas on the Y-axis. Then I simply put a 1 if an idea satisfied its corresponding CENTS requirement. Summing the entries of each idea, I got a value (0-5). This allowed me to quickly look down the list and narrow my focus on which ones to analyze further.

I also added a “bonus” category. This is for passion, it gets checked if I am particularly interested or passionate about an idea.


3. Market Analysis

Now that I had my initial list narrowed down to a handful of ideas, I wanted to run some simple numbers on the health of their respective industries. I would also verify the initial CENTS analysis with the data I found.

There is no simple “how-to” on how to do this. This is essentially what I did for each idea:

-Google for keywords related to the idea
-Note how many competitors ranked on the first page
-Give a quick glance to their pages noting how professional they looked, what they charged, and looking for clues as to how many registered users they had.
-Google for keyword+” market analysis” or keyword+” industry health”. I’m really looking for results that give me yoy (year-over-year) growth for the past few years
-If the idea contained a physical component I would sell, I would look at amazon, ebay, and craigslist to get an idea on pricing/demand.

This wasn’t designed to be an in depth analysis. I was just trying to get a warm and fuzzy about each idea: how much competition? what are other companies charging? are people using their product? Is the industry expanding? Any quick ‘red flags’ in their business models that provide an opportunity to disrupt the industry?

4. Feasibility Analysis

Armed with my CENTS analysis, my insight into the competition, and some market financial metrics, I worked on the final step. On a giant white-board in my house, I drew a simple scatter chart. The X-axis measured feasibility, or can I actually do this idea? The Y-axis measured potential, or how much money can this actually make?

Attached is a quick example drawing. The further right an idea is, the more feasibility it is. The further up an idea is, the greater potential for profit. Ideally I’m looking for something in the top right corner (max feasibility, max potential), that never happens though .

The photo below is very similar to what I had on my white-board (the letters in this photo do not represent the letters in my spreadsheet above). I noticed most of the ideas were very feasible, and they were all right around the same profit potential.


5. Decision time!

When all the above was said and done. I had a friend come over (a successful entrepreneur himself), to play devils advocate to all my ideas. He brought up some very good points that made me shift a few ideas left/right on the feasibility analysis.

Finally, I decided to go with the idea that corresponds to “G” on the spreadsheet (CENTS value of 4), and corresponds to “C” on the feasibility image.

It is a industry on the scale a few billion dollars, with 3-4 well established market leaders. It is a bit daunting to think about. I would prefer going into a smaller niche. But I am not impressed with how the competitors are running their businesses, and neither was my entrepreneur friend. We believe their is a potential for disruptive change.

Next up: Product Definition phase

 

[TheGeneral]

Update:

- Bought a domain name
- Set up a Linux VPS (Virtual Private Server) and installed all the required software
- Pointed the domains DNS record to the server and successfully tested it (just launching a simple "Hello World!" style html page)
- Did some keyword research and started building a marketing strategy
- Developed an alpha version of the web application.

I am looking to start alpha testing sometime in the next few days. I will push the current web app build to the server, making the alpha version live. The alpha version is completely free and far from polished, but I'm hoping I can get some early adopters on-board to get some valuable feedback.

 

[Goldman snacks]

Nice progress, I similarly did 2 years in business school before dropping out, I'm learning code now with the intent of designing apps&websites for other people. would you say your computer science degree was absolutely necessary? It passed my mind that to go back to university could be an option, however I like to believe that I can teach myself anything myself due to all the courses out there on the web nowadays, whats your 2 cents?

 

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[Nick The New Guy]

Dude, great post! Welcome from a fellow vet. I'm looking forward to seeing your updates. There is a lot of gold on this forum, definitely advise checking out the gold threads, especially those related to software and marketing.

I'd even suggest looking into an INSIDERS subscription. I recently got one, it's already paid for itself. I run two progress threads, one with general info on my app, the INSIDERS thread with all the particulars and actual market I'm working in.

This forum is very similar to the military mindset. We help those who help themselves. You're already executing, keep up the good work.

First off Scot... Rah. I got out of the Corps in 15 and got into the Corporate world. Hating relying on corporate structure to provide me with security, working on getting the DD214 from civilian work . 2nd I really do feel like Veterans have a lot of the drive that comes with creating something of value. I love the "we help those who help themselves" statement. It aligns well with what we have been exposed to.

 

[TheGeneral]

Nice progress, I similarly did 2 years in business school before dropping out, I'm learning code now with the intent of designing apps&websites for other people. would you say your computer science degree was absolutely necessary? It passed my mind that to go back to university could be an option, however I like to believe that I can teach myself anything myself due to all the courses out there on the web nowadays, whats your 2 cents?

Absolutely not. While I learned a lot in school, most of it was self taught.

For basic programming and web development, there is no need to have a solid foundation in computer science. It definitely helps understand what is going on "underneath the hood" for your programs, but it is not required.

If you want to design websites for clients, no need for comp sci. Take some programming tutorials and start selling. Your best bang for your buck is to get a little knowledge about HTML/CSS, take an intro course on a language that is used in a full stack web framework (for example: python), and after that course take a course on the actual web framework itself (for example: Django).

I'd say someone could go from zero programming, to churning out simple MVPs, in about a year of dedicated self study.

Plus, if you go back to university you are going to have start with the freshman level programming classes. You can be as proficient in programming as the average freshman level computer science student in about a month of dedicated self-study with free (or near free) study resources/tutorials.

 

[Goldman snacks]

thanks, I just wanted to make sure I wasn't missing out on anything I am using codecademy pro, I did the html+css course last week, Im learning java now. It probably sounds like im all over the place. I'm trying to learn to know whats possible and not possible with code.

 

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[TheGeneral]

thanks, I just wanted to make sure I wasn't missing out on anything I am using codecademy pro, I did the html+css course last week, Im learning java now. It probably sounds like im all over the place. I'm trying to learn to know whats possible and not possible with code.

Codecademy pro is good. Udemy has tons of good courses and is primarily what I use for online learning.

Java is a good language. Python is more friendly for beginners. Regardless of the language you choose, the programming concepts apply to all languages. If you know what a for loop does in java, you know what a for loop does in python.

Either way just keep chugging along, you'll look back in a year and be amazed at your progress.

 

[Nick The New Guy]

Codecademy pro is good. Udemy has tons of good courses and is primarily what I use for online learning.

Java is a good language. Python is more friendly for beginners. Regardless of the language you choose, the programming concepts apply to all languages. If you know what a for loop does in java, you know what a for loop does in python.

Either way just keep chugging along, you'll look back in a year and be amazed at your progress.

I'm doing the same thing! Yesterday if someone asked me what <img src="" was, I would have been like "I have 0 idea what you mean... " I am following the ideas and tips that people share through this forum and am already better off than I was a week before. Seriously can't thank the mentors on here enough! Udemy is next for me.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

 

[Goldman snacks]

Thanks for the advice, I'm going to do the python course next and then cancel my codecademy membership. I started the java course last night and I already completed the course, Codecademy seems to be an entry level site, I learnt how to make a calculator, but I have no idea how I could put that in an app, or do anything else app related such as creating pages, syncing with google maps etc, thats the stuff I want to be able to do.

 

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[gabeb1920]

Thanks for the advice, I'm going to do the python course next and then cancel my codecademy membership. I started the java course last night and I already completed the course, Codecademy seems to be an entry level site, I learnt how to make a calculator, but I have no idea how I could put that in an app, or do anything else app related such as creating pages, syncing with google maps etc, thats the stuff I want to be able to do.

Not to hijack this thread but @Goldman snacks this thread will probably help:
https://www.thefastlaneforum.com/co...-company-15k-per-month-within-9-months.69971/https://www.thefastlaneforum.com/co...-company-15k-per-month-within-9-months.69971/

 

[Jon L]

How much analysis have you done (and feedback have you gotten from experienced people) on your original 2-year project? Reason being, the only thing you've swapped out so far is the coder(s). And, the coder you're now using (you) is much less experienced than the guys he replaced. The product/project manager (you) is still the same, and I don't hear you talking about what you've learned on that side of things.

As painful as this is to hear, the problem is probably not on the coding side. Its probably the project management that killed your original project. I'd recommend that you thoroughly examine this part before you jump head-first into another project.

To get to the end of a 2 year long project, and have a project that didn't meet expectations, isn't the coders fault.

I recently had a very experienced software project manager look over the systems I have in place. He pointed out a few things that will really help me manage my projects better. And that is that I've been doing this a while.

 

[TheGeneral]

How much analysis have you done (and feedback have you gotten from experienced people) on your original 2-year project? Reason being, the only thing you've swapped out so far is the coder(s). And, the coder you're now using (you) is much less experienced than the guys he replaced. The product/project manager (you) is still the same, and I don't hear you talking about what you've learned on that side of things.

As painful as this is to hear, the problem is probably not on the coding side. Its probably the project management that killed your original project. I'd recommend that you thoroughly examine this part before you jump head-first into another project.

To get to the end of a 2 year long project, and have a project that didn't meet expectations, isn't the coders fault.

I recently had a very experienced software project manager look over the systems I have in place. He pointed out a few things that will really help me manage my projects better. And that is that I've been doing this a while.

With the original 2 year project I was neither the coder nor the project manager. I hired a web dev firm that handled project management and coding. The point of failure was the integration of a third party system that was unable to perform to the standard their salespeople claimed. The delays in the project were also a result of that.

Fully custom code for the idea would have costed well into the 6 figures (especially at industry standard 120ish an hour). The third party software was used to significantly reduce costs. The third party software just plain didn't do it's job.

So lesson learned:
1. You get what you pay for.
2. Don't jump head first into a software based project with zero software skills.

 

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[nradam123]

@Jon L Isn't this the stuff we discussed earlier?

@TheGeneral
I will write down 2 case studies about businesses built by Neil Patel.

Case Study 1 - KISSMETRICS
When Neil Patel launched KISSmetrics they had a million dollar in funding. So they decided to make this analytics solution that will figure out social media traffic of companies and help them save money. They started to create this complete product and spent a million dollars on it.

Once they finished they found that people do not need the product. Because social networks already showed the data for free. Social networks were not great at it but most companies were happy enough with what they have.There was no pain point for them.

So Neil Patel wasted a million dollars and a bit more than a year.

Case Study 2 - CRAZYEGGS
When Neil Patel started to build Crazyegg they did not have a lot of money. Having too much money can make you a little bloated.

Crazyegg is a tool that shows where people click on a website and where they don’t.

When Neil Patel and his team were doing consulting years ago they found that people were coming to them saying “Hey, we are spending money on advertising and we don’t know why people are buying and why others aren’t.

So they asked potential clients how they want it to be solved.

Most corporations came back to them saying that they see all these numbers but they are not number people. They wanted something visual that explains why some people are buying and some are not.

So Neil Patel created multiple versions of Crazyegg until they got it right. And they got feedback throughout the whole process until customers were like – “Yes, we will pay for this.”

Technically they were trying to get feedback every single week. But they had major differences in version usually in 30 days. And eventually when customers were saying little things and they were nitpicking, Neil Patel figured out that the customers were ready to pay.

It took 6 months and 6 major iterations before Crazyegg started getting paying customers.

And they also released the iterations to news websites as Crazyegg was getting built. They also blogged about the minor iterations. This created a lot of buzz and they had 10000 people on the waiting list before product launch.

________________________

Case study 2 is the right way to go.
Case study 1 is going to waste your money and time.

Read the above two case studies and see if you are able to relate to it. I just want you to avoid traps
You can also read about it in more detail in this link

 

[TheGeneral]

@Jon L Isn't this the stuff we discussed earlier?

@TheGeneral
I will write down 2 case studies about businesses built by Neil Patel.

Case Study 1 - KISSMETRICS
When Neil Patel launched KISSmetrics they had a million dollar in funding. So they decided to make this analytics solution that will figure out social media traffic of companies and help them save money. They started to create this complete product and spent a million dollars on it.

Once they finished they found that people do not need the product. Because social networks already showed the data for free. Social networks were not great at it but most companies were happy enough with what they have.There was no pain point for them.

So Neil Patel wasted a million dollars and a bit more than a year.

Case Study 2 - CRAZYEGGS
When Neil Patel started to build Crazyegg they did not have a lot of money. Having too much money can make you a little bloated.

Crazyegg is a tool that shows where people click on a website and where they don’t.

When Neil Patel and his team were doing consulting years ago they found that people were coming to them saying “Hey, we are spending money on advertising and we don’t know why people are buying and why others aren’t.

So they asked potential clients how they want it to be solved.

Most corporations came back to them saying that they see all these numbers but they are not number people. They wanted something visual that explains why some people are buying and some are not.

So Neil Patel created multiple versions of Crazyegg until they got it right. And they got feedback throughout the whole process until customers were like – “Yes, we will pay for this.”

Technically they were trying to get feedback every single week. But they had major differences in version usually in 30 days. And eventually when customers were saying little things and they were nitpicking, Neil Patel figured out that the customers were ready to pay.

It took 6 months and 6 major iterations before Crazyegg started getting paying customers.

And they also released the iterations to news websites as Crazyegg was getting built. They also blogged about the minor iterations. This created a lot of buzz and they had 10000 people on the waiting list before product launch.

________________________

Case study 2 is the right way to go.
Case study 1 is going to waste your money and time.

Read the above two case studies and see if you are able to relate to it. I just want you to avoid traps
You can also read about it in more detail in this link

Case study 1 was the 2 year long project

Case study 2 is the current plan. That is why I am rolling out the alpha version in the next few days while not expecting to have premium version for several months, if not more.

The goal of the alpha release:
1. Drive traffic to website to build a presence and test marketing strategies
2. Gather traffic data to determine user profiles and activities
3. Gather feedback through traffic data or user communication. Do customers actually want the features I'm developing, or should I pivot based on their feedback?
4. Incremental development while constantly returning to step 3.
5. Have X amount of paying customers ready when I implement the paid version.

Maybe the title "90 Days to SaaS" is giving the perception I'm rushing into pushing something to market. And In a sense I am, I am rushing to push a free version of a future product to market. Through feedback and incremental development I plan to develop a product that customers are willing to pay for.

"90 days to SaaS" is just a catchier title than "Incrementally developing a web application in hopes of delivering a SaaS product"

 

[Jon L]

With the original 2 year project I was neither the coder nor the project manager. I hired a web dev firm that handled project management and coding. The point of failure was the integration of a third party system that was unable to perform to the standard their salespeople claimed. The delays in the project were also a result of that.

Fully custom code for the idea would have costed well into the 6 figures (especially at industry standard 120ish an hour). The third party software was used to significantly reduce costs. The third party software just plain didn't do it's job.

So lesson learned:
1. You get what you pay for.
2. Don't jump head first into a software based project with zero software skills.

you *are* the project manager, though, as the client

With the original 2 year project I was neither the coder nor the project manager. I hired a web dev firm that handled project management and coding. The point of failure was the integration of a third party system that was unable to perform to the standard their salespeople claimed. The delays in the project were also a result of that.

Fully custom code for the idea would have costed well into the 6 figures (especially at industry standard 120ish an hour). The third party software was used to significantly reduce costs. The third party software just plain didn't do it's job.

So lesson learned:
1. You get what you pay for.
2. Don't jump head first into a software based project with zero software skills.

With the original 2 year project I was neither the coder nor the project manager. I hired a web dev firm that handled project management and coding. The point of failure was the integration of a third party system that was unable to perform to the standard their salespeople claimed. The delays in the project were also a result of that.

Fully custom code for the idea would have costed well into the 6 figures (especially at industry standard 120ish an hour). The third party software was used to significantly reduce costs. The third party software just plain didn't do it's job.

So lesson learned:
1. You get what you pay for.
2. Don't jump head first into a software based project with zero software skills.

you *are* the project manager, as the client.

If you hire a general contractor to build a house for you, and, 9 month into it, they haven't even poured the foundation yet, whose fault is it?

I'm beating you up a bit here because you're headed for the same exact problems again if you don't figure this out.

Also, 120/hr is standard for us-based development teams, or teams who add a ton of value. You can hire a seasoned developer in Pakistan for prices I'm not even going to post in a public forum.

 

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[TheGeneral]

I get what you are saying. And I learned multiple lessons from that situation. I was very hands off with that project due to location (being deployed) and not knowing enough to even know what I was doing wrong. Combine that with the third party software developers that went weeks without updates/contacts and all sorts of other hiccups. Just a bad situation in general. Chalk that it up to my rookie debut.

Two completely separate situations. Now I'm personally developing the entire web app and have no bottleneck points where I would have to rely on others. The contractor did a piss poor job building the house, so now I'm going to build it myself.

I've also hired the typical Indian/Pakistani/Cheap Labor before. I was never impressed and found, once again, you get what you pay for.

 

[JoeK]

Quick q for the OP and other members,

I am currently learning code through freecodecamp.com. It has an emphasis first on HTML & CSS, but then they eventually move upto to Javascript & Node.

Would this be sufficient to build applications? Maybe I'm thinking too much about the situation, but I've heard Ruby is the easiest to learn compared to the other coding languages. Should I also learn Ruby right after completing their full-stack course?

I understand my question is loaded with a lot of "it depends" and "what-ifs", however, I've always been extremely intrigued in tech and designing/creating. I have a degree in accounting and I am looking to make the jump from this traditional career into development to earn more and invest. I also want to launch my own website creation company to earn extra revenue.

 

[TheGeneral]

Quick q for the OP and other members,

I am currently learning code through freecodecamp.com. It has an emphasis first on HTML & CSS, but then they eventually move upto to Javascript & Node.

Would this be sufficient to build applications? Maybe I'm thinking too much about the situation, but I've heard Ruby is the easiest to learn compared to the other coding languages. Should I also learn Ruby right after completing their full-stack course?

I understand my question is loaded with a lot of "it depends" and "what-ifs", however, I've always been extremely intrigued in tech and designing/creating. I have a degree in accounting and I am looking to make the jump from this traditional career into development to earn more and invest. I also want to launch my own website creation company to earn extra revenue.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solution_stack

Those are common "full stacks". Basically you need a web server, a database (if you're storing data), and some way for the web server to move data in between the two.

My first web app was a LAMP stack. Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP. Now I'm using Linux, Apache, MySQL, and Python/Django.

A MEAN stack (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MEAN_(software_bundle)) would be good if youre going into Node. The benefit is that it is all written in Javascript, so no need to learn a new language. Many people also think javascript is the "future", so what you are learning will be in high demand for the foreseeable future.

The only thing your codecamp course doesn't seem to cover is the backend database. Although they may hit that when you start learning Node. I would say Node is more challenging than Ruby, but again that challenge is most likely going to be worth it due to the demand and popularity of Node. And again, the biggest benefit of going the Javascript/Node route is that you only have to learn one language.

When you complete their "full-stack" course give me a shout and we can figure out a good next step in your journey.

Edit - quick aside, if you are not comfortable working from your cmd prompt/terminal/shell/etc, you should start now. It will pay off greatly in the end. For example: A bit back I was managing some speech recognition software. I knew I had an error, I knew what the error was, I didn't knew which file the error was in. I had about 2500 files in the module I knew the error was in. Without working from the terminal, I would have had to open file and search for the error. Instead, I ran a simple search command from the command line and told it look in every file in the module. I found and fixed the error in about 5 seconds.

 

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[JoeK]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solution_stack

Those are common "full stacks". Basically you need a web server, a database (if you're storing data), and some way for the web server to move data in between the two.

My first web app was a LAMP stack. Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP. Now I'm using Linux, Apache, MySQL, and Python/Django.

A MEAN stack (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MEAN_(software_bundle)) would be good if youre going into Node. The benefit is that it is all written in Javascript, so no need to learn a new language. Many people also think javascript is the "future", so what you are learning will be in high demand for the foreseeable future.

The only thing your codecamp course doesn't seem to cover is the backend database. Although they may hit that when you start learning Node. I would say Node is more challenging than Ruby, but again that challenge is most likely going to be worth it due to the demand and popularity of Node. And again, the biggest benefit of going the Javascript/Node route is that you only have to learn one language.

When you complete their "full-stack" course give me a shout and we can figure out a good next step in your journey.

Edit - quick aside, if you are not comfortable working from your cmd prompt/terminal/shell/etc, you should start now. It will pay off greatly in the end. For example: A bit back I was managing some speech recognition software. I knew I had an error, I knew what the error was, I didn't knew which file the error was in. I had about 2500 files in the module I knew the error was in. Without working from the terminal, I would have had to open file and search for the error. Instead, I ran a simple search command from the command line and told it look in every file in the module. I found and fixed the error in about 5 seconds.

Awesome and informative post, TheGeneral.

Thanks for dropping all the knowledge. I first was determined to learn Ruby since it's the most recommended but after more meaningful research found that Javascript is "where it's at" like you mentioned. It has a good future and high paying jobs associated with it.

Thanks for the command line tip, I've actually done some basic courses on it to learn how to navigate through it, create, copy, delete files etc but I know I need to be more proficient so that when I do run into a problem like you described, I can quickly execute my thought.

I will definitely reach out to once I finish the FCC full-stack courses. By then, my goal is to be fairly proficient in web development.

The one thing I like about theodinproject.com however is that they actually want you to set up your own environment whereas FCC is set up to do all the coding through the web. I think it's important to learn how to set up your own environment so I'm going to learn that too throughout my progression.

 

[silentjay]

Good luck, I've got a few failed SaaS projects under my belt. Sounds like you're ready to launch already but for others I can't stress enough:

1. Make sure there's a market for what you're selling. Create a 1 page landing page to grab emails to gauge interest. Create mockups. Even bodge something together with off-shelf tools if you have to before you commit to months of your life building something nobody will ever use. Most people are building SaaS apps for pain points which don't exist.

2. DO THE MATHS. Will you ever get ROI on it. How much is your CPA, factor in churn rate. How much are you going to have to pay via AdWords etc Most likely you'll be competing with startups who have millions to burn but no chance of ROI, but that doesn't matter to them as their founders are still getting paid until the money runs out. Download some free SaaS spreadsheets and start punching in numbers.