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Hi, 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://builda

by nickjj 9y ago

Hi, 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/ 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/?couponCode=NJ_1099 https://www.udemy.com/the-build-a-saas-app-with-flask-course...

bitL 9y ago
Yeah, I've read your blog post recently why you are quitting Udemy and am sorry about it as I enjoyed your course very much! I guess Udemy's only way to stay afloat is to push the price as low as possible to attract more paying customers all around the world (given they have competition). It's tricky to figure out a good business model for both platform and course providers; probably you could consider keeping simpler parts of your course on Udemy and then suggest getting advanced courses on your own platform? You leave the most problematic users on Udemy and get only the dedicated ones. I think in the future it will always be some version of freemium; free to get your course known and premium to make some money.
- nickjj 9y ago
  Yep, my long term goal is to not use Udemy, but in the short term, something like you mentioned is how I plan to move forward. 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.
alex_hitchins 9y ago
Thank you very much for taking the time to reply and also in giving that link - very much appreciated. I'll look at your site and the Udemy one and weigh up what's best for me at the moment. 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?
- nickjj 9y ago
  It's worth noting that the course description page on my platform doesn't mention the new bonus RESTful API section yet. I was going to update that once all of the videos are recorded. That's on my short term radar and it's what I'm working on for a few hours a day as we speak. 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.
  - alex_hitchins 9y ago
    Interesting, I think PS have at least a few long courses. I'm sure I've seen a few in the 10 hour region. It's been a while since I browsed about looking for something interesting though. 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!
    - nickjj 9y ago
      I'm not too close with PS but the last time I talked to their content director they mentioned wanting to focus on shorter courses and much preferred a bunch of short courses that are loosely coupled but still related vs. 1 longer course. 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.
mrisoli 9y ago
Found the course very interesting and it's something I intend to build upon. However, I've done similar stuff with rails since it has more batteries included and found it easier of course. However, this comes to mind: https://elsyms.com/the-art-of-over-engineering-your-side-projects/ 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?
- nickjj 9y ago
  Thanks a lot for signing up. 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.

by nickjj 9y ago

bitL 9y ago

Yeah, I've read your blog post recently why you are quitting Udemy and am sorry about it as I enjoyed your course very much! I guess Udemy's only way to stay afloat is to push the price as low as possible to attract more paying customers all around the world (given they have competition). It's tricky to figure out a good business model for both platform and course providers; probably you could consider keeping simpler parts of your course on Udemy and then suggest getting advanced courses on your own platform? You leave the most problematic users on Udemy and get only the dedicated ones. I think in the future it will always be some version of freemium; free to get your course known and premium to make some money.

nickjj 9y ago
Yep, my long term goal is to not use Udemy, but in the short term, something like you mentioned is how I plan to move forward. 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.

alex_hitchins 9y ago

Thank you very much for taking the time to reply and also in giving that link - very much appreciated. I'll look at your site and the Udemy one and weigh up what's best for me at the moment. 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?

nickjj 9y ago
It's worth noting that the course description page on my platform doesn't mention the new bonus RESTful API section yet. I was going to update that once all of the videos are recorded. That's on my short term radar and it's what I'm working on for a few hours a day as we speak. 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.
- alex_hitchins 9y ago
  Interesting, I think PS have at least a few long courses. I'm sure I've seen a few in the 10 hour region. It's been a while since I browsed about looking for something interesting though. 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!
  - nickjj 9y ago
    I'm not too close with PS but the last time I talked to their content director they mentioned wanting to focus on shorter courses and much preferred a bunch of short courses that are loosely coupled but still related vs. 1 longer course. 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.

mrisoli 9y ago

Found the course very interesting and it's something I intend to build upon. However, I've done similar stuff with rails since it has more batteries included and found it easier of course. However, this comes to mind: https://elsyms.com/the-art-of-over-engineering-your-side-projects/ 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?

nickjj 9y ago
Thanks a lot for signing up. 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.