24 Hour MVP

Free

24 Hour MVP

Course
97 Lessons

Stop making excuses - learn to build v1 of your SaaS app in a day with Ruby on Rails.

About Your Instructor

I'm Ryan, a 3-time startup founder and partner at Fork Equity. I've spent years helping people acquire small companies, become better marketers, and now: learn to code.

To evaluate my programming chops, check out these 5 live streams where I build SaaS apps (from scratch) in 7-12 hours.

X Youtube Website

What is this course about?

Learn to bang out a SaaS prototype in 24 hours, from someone who's done it many times.

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There are no "secrets to building quickly." Here's my exact process to building anything in a day:

Wireframe - remove surprises and scope creep
Data modeling - prevent technical debt
Frontend - use a proven design system
Backend - write the minimum code to accomplish each feature

Whenever I start a new project, this sequence ensures I waste as little time as possible on my hunt for The Truth. What's "The Truth?" Finding out if people care about what you built, or not.

What we’ll build in 24 Hour MVP

Powerpoint presentations and theoretical lectures are for losers. At Founder/Hacker we learn by doing.

In this course we'll build three Rails apps with varying complexity. We'll start with the simplest commands -- running “rails new” -- and by the end you'll be installing gems, integrating APIs, deploying to your own dot-com domains with working Stripe subscription payments, and even building admin panel with user impersonation and fancy charts.

Each app will explore the core steps I described above (Wireframe, Data modeling, Frontend, Backend) with increasing level of detail. And by popular request, code will be available in “freeze time” at the end of every lecture, so you never miss a beat.

Prerequisites

This course will not teach you to code from scratch. To maximize value from 24 Hour MVP, first enroll in our Fundamentals course, which will take you 20-30 hours to complete and make you proficient in Ruby.

Curriculum

Welcome

What to expect

Setting up your environment

Confirming your environment works

Overview of a SaaS application

SaaS Web Application Architecture

Preview

My proven process to build quickly

Terminology (CRUD, DRY, MVC, and many more)

Accessing our applications

[Action Required] GitHub invitations

App #1 - Anonymous Suggestion Box

Turn written feedback into anonymous, public Tweets for all to see.

What we're building

Preview

Naming our app

Creating a fresh Rails app

Wireframe - Single Page CRUD App

Data modeling - Creating a database

[Bonus] Version control with Git

Data modeling - Inserting database tables

[Bonus] Connecting git with GitHub

Frontend - Creating pages

Frontend - Implementing UI with Tailwind

Backend - Creating database records

Backend - Creating a Twitter App

Backend - Using the Twitter API

Backend - Integrating Twitter in our application

Backend - Connecting to the Frontend

Backend - Improving our Twitter service

[Bonus] Javascript listeners to improve UX

Backend/Frontend - Validations to prevent bad data

[Challenge] Saving and exposing Tweet URLs

[Solution] Saving the Tweet ID and URL

[Solution] Show Tweet URL on Home Page

Expansion ideas (how to earn back your course tuition)

Preparing to release our application

Deploying applications to a server

My simple process for turning source code into a production web app on a custom domain.

Overview

Domain setup and DNS

Provisioning a server

Deploying to a server

Debugging our deployment

Connecting our server to a domain

[Bonus] Accessing the production database

App #2 - Stakeholder Update Network

Private platform where founders can share monthly updates with other founders.

What we're building

Preview

Wireframe - Part 1

Wireframe - Part 2

Data modeling - Defining tables and attributes

Creating a Rails app from a template

Data modeling - Writing and running migrations

Data modeling - Adding associations to Models

Data modeling - Changing table names

Frontend - Landing page and Tailwind config

Frontend - Using partials and building an application form

Frontend - Admin panel and namespaced routes

Frontend - Dashboard and RESTful routing

Frontend - Finishing touches

Backend - Whitelisting form parameters

Backend - Whitelisting form "radio" inputs

Backend - Admin panel and private controller methods

Backend - Building transactional mailers

Backend - Creating user logins

Backend - Magic login links

Backend - Onboarding and forced user login

Backend - Dashboard and database seeding

Backend - Model scopes and subscriber form

Backend - Handling rich text

Backend - Update endpoint and DRY controllers

Backend - Digest mailer and better seeds

Backend - Viewing updates and DigestService batching

Backend - Getting started with Stripe

Backend - Implementing Stripe Checkout

Backend - Final cleanup

Backend - Enforcing free plan rules

Backend - Production mailers

Backend - Cron jobs and tasks

Backend - Deploying to production

Backend - Intro to delayed jobs

Setting up cron jobs in production

App #3 - Embeddable JavaScript Widget

Single line of code, embeddable on any website, that lets website visitors send you text messages without exposing your phone number.

What we're building

Preview

Wireframe - Interface + Widget UX

Data modeling - Sketching table names and relationships

Data modeling - Creating our app and generating migrations

Frontend - Widget CRUD

Frontend - Popup message form

[Bonus] JavaScript 101

[Bonus] JavaScript + DOM

Frontend - Creating an embeddable JS snippet

Frontend - Making our snippet embeddable on other websites

Frontend - Sending form data with fetch()

Frontend - Widget UX improvements

Frontend - Dynamic widget styling

Frontend - Messages view

Frontend - Landing page and live preview editor

Frontend - More challenges and cleanup

Backend - Widget avatar storage on AWS S3

Backend - Message CSV export

Backend - Async requests without JavaScript

Backend - Text Message API

Backend - User email notifications

Backend - Final cleanup and billing strategies

Backend - Predeploy challenges

Backend - Deploying with the Heroku CLI

[Bonus] Future lecture ideas