Launch Your Startup Idea Without Writing Any Code

Why Being Non-Technical Puts You Miles Ahead

Realize That Being Non-Technical Puts You Miles Ahead
First I want to talk about why being non-technical is an advantage.

You can't just sit for months on end developing something no one wants.

Trust me - when you know how to code this is a huge temptation. It's so much easier to dive in and build features than to actually see what the real world has to say.

I've made this mistake twice now.

When you don't know how to code, and when there's a limit on how much you can build, you'll run out of things to do pretty soon and have to focus on customers.

In the words of Paul Graham, the founder of YCombinator,

"It would be a little frightening to be solving users' problems in a way that wasn't yet automatic, but less frightening than the far more common case of having something automatic that doesn't yet solve anyone's problems."

It may be hard to believe, but trust me - you're at an advantage.
Focus Your Mind on Customers
If you've ventured at all into the startup community, you probably already have the term "Lean Startup" coming out of your ears.

Lean Startup doesn't mean cheap, frugal, or hungry - although people assume that's what it means.

It means simply to start with customers, not code. And progress your business around those customers and their needs.

Lean Startup is probably the most popular paradigms for starting an innovation business - and it's all about NOT coding.

It's meant for huge companies with massive resources, and the moonlighting entrepreneur. Neither one wants to waste time on building something no one doesn't want.

As far as this course is concerned, I'll let Ben Ogle sum it up:

"Build almost nothing at first (MVP!), pound the pavement and get customers to pay right away ... then build things ... as they get more customers."

MVP stands for minimum viable product. We'll talk about this briefly later.

I'm no "lean" expert - so if you're interested in this topic there might be more blog posts and online courses about this than anything else on the web (it seems!).

Of course, there's a few skillshare classes too:

Minimum Viable Product: Launch Your Startup Idea for Less than 1k

and

Running Lean: Raise Your Odds of Building a Successful Product
Get Over Your Heebie-Jeebies
In this course we'll build a real working product that customers can use. It will definitely not be as scalable as what you'll build in the future, and it won't fit the image you probably have of a tech startup starting out - but stick with me! It's worth it.

Here are some common questions I heard when I proposed this course idea to potential students:

Won't my customers not take me seriously if they realize my product isn't entirely original code?

I'll answer this with a quote:

"Customers don’t care how you get things done – just that you get it done and solve their pain." -Ben Yoskovitz, GoInstant

If a customer is paying you for something, and it gets done, what do they care? We'll go over tons of examples of how successful startups like Diapers.com, YipIt, or even Stripe succeeded by this thought.

What will investors think when I approach them with a product that's not brand spanking high tech and totally automated? What will happen when I tell them I've actually figured out a way to cobble it together until now?

They will think you are clever, resourceful, flexible, persistent - and know how to focus on the right things.

If they are put off, then you're not talking to the right investors.

This also goes for future cofounders, partners, and advisors you want to attract. People respect do-ers, especially traditionally unlikely do-ers.

If I don't build all the technology needed to get going, when I get users, I won't be able to scale! All these tricks are nice but they're going to hold me back.

Whoa, hold on pardner. As the great Marlo Stanfield said,

"This must be one of them good problems."

This is a very understandable fear. It's a scary situation to think, great, we got our customers, and now we're going to disappoint them.

But your options aren't black and white. You can launch a product without a developer, and have the developer work in parallel - or shut off signups and call it a "closed beta" if you can't keep up with demand. That would actually make your demand skyrocket as you probably have seen yourself.

There's a spectrum between do-it-yourself and full-robot-revolution. You could hire a few people in the meantime (with the revenue that their hire would naturally generate) while also developing the scalable product.

To quote Paul Graham again:

"By intentionally doing things the unscalable, unconventional way you can beat out competitors to market, you can delight customers, prove your idea, raise revenue from day one, and raise funding far far more easily. In short, doing things unscalably is exactly what will help you scale in the long term, by getting you the momentum you need."

What situation would you rather be in - build something and hope they come, or have a ton of people clamoring for your product or service as you build version 2?

Okay one last quote (in this step), I promise

“If people don’t laugh at how you first implemented your product, you probably spent too much time on it.”

- Vinicius Vacanti, Yipit
Give Your Project Page a Title
What's great about doing this class on Skillshare is that as a student you get your own "Project Page" for this course.

This makes your experience in this class very concrete and practical.

With each unit in the class, we'll update the project one small step at a time. By the end you'll be amazed at how much you've accomplished - not just learned, but also done.

Most of all, you'll join a community of students who are going through exactly the same process as you, and you'll be able to get feedback and get help from many different points of view.

For now, let's do one simple thing to get this course started: start your project page by giving it a title.

This could be the tentative name of your startup, or it could be the "high-level concept" of your idea. Who are your customers and what does your idea let them customers do?

A way for _____ to _____

A faster way to ______

A place for ______ to _______

Looking forward to seeing the first spark of your new project. And congrats: by putting to paper your concept, you've officially dived in to your entrepreneurial journey.

-Tal

P.S. If you want your idea to stay private but still get the benefits of building a project page, no worries. You can keep it only visible to you with privacy settings. However, you'll miss out on amazing feedback. Read this if you're on the fence whether to make your idea visible to the class or not

Startups in Stealth Mode Need One Piece of Advice

(This is one of Jason Friedman's less polite blog posts and not for the faint of heart, but the personal story he tells is worth it.)

Put Your Idea Within Reach

Write Your User Stories
User stories are a great way to start defining a product. Writing them makes it easy to go from 30,000 foot vision to a specific feature set.

Instead of defining user stories, let me show you examples. You'll pick up the pattern pretty quickly.

Right now we're re-building Ecquire's billing system. To start, I wrote these user stories based on what our customers asked us for:
- As a team leader, when I buy Ecquire for myself, I want to be able to easily buy for my teammates too.
- As a team leader, even if I never used Ecquire before, I should be able to buy several accounts for my employees.
- As a team leader, I want to easily change my billing info.
- As a team member, it would be great if I just had to click one email link to both sign me in and connect my license to my company.
- As an individual or as a team member going through checkout, I don't want to have to remember or type in any coupon codes. I want discounts and trial extensions to simply "happen" from my point of view.
Do you see the pattern? They are simple sentences that start with who the person is, what they're trying to achieve, sometimes the why if it's not apparent.

This should be a list that's as long as you want - it may even help you brainstorm use cases you didn't originally envision.

Simple and short is awesome.

This list should be readable (and relatable!) by a completely non-technical customer.

I recommend doing this in your project page. That way you can get feedback or additional ideas from other students.
Axe Your User Stories
The brainstorming session is over. Now we're going to get tough with our user stories, and see who makes the cut.

Open your Project Page with all the user stories you wrote down, and go down the list:

Read each user story out loud and say:

"If my product doesn't do this, will it still solve the core problem?"

Another question is:

"Based on talking to customers, is this feature critical to making my first sale?"

If the user story doesn't make the cut, then move it down below to the bottom of your project workspace. You could make a list and call it "future product plan" and leave it in there.

Right now we're only going to work with the most important, critical user stories that a customer will pay for. You'll start there, and hopefully your success will let you expand outward. But we gotta start focused.

To help you get in the mindset, here's 0:32 seconds of brilliant youtube wisdom.

The biggest mistake both new and experienced entrepreneurs make is they get too excited about the possibilites and start planning a huge empire - that they fall in love with.

You end up feeling very attached to exciting features that you'd never want to release without.

Have you ever heard yourself say "If we don't include X feature there's no point in doing it at all." Try to see above this - you're going for your first sale at least - you'll get to all those features soon enough once you start making some traction on one point.

As Dan Shipper wisely wrote,

"A great company is not birthed whole into the world. It starts as a small product that fits in to a larger vision that you can expand aggressively with market feedback.

You get market feedback by selling. The more you sell, the more you understand the product, and the more you understand what kind of company you’re going to be."
Post to Your Project Page
Now that you have a plan for your product - a minimal set of very important goals - go ahead and mark your success by posting your chosen user stories to your project page.

You can even put two sections in your workspace: what you chose, and what you've set aside for later.

Your project is a great place to save your user stories since we'll be coming back to them at the end of the class.

---

What's next, you ask? On this front, you're done. Congrats.

If you were a developer, I'd tell you to turn those user stories into features... and those features into mockups... and so on.

But to us, code is only a means and so we are going to leave our product description in terms of ends only.

This will keep our minds open to many different ways of solving our user stories.

You're absolutely ready to start learning how to satisfy these with technology.

The Wizard of Oz Method

Be a Middleman
Entrepreneurs who want to build marketplaces (a place where two parties can easily find one another), have the ultimate vision of eliminating middlemen or at least make a market more efficient.

However, the best way to verify there's demand for your efficient marketplace is to start by being a middleman yourself! At least a super inexpensive one.

TasteMaker is a startup that connects interior designers with small design jobs. They wanted to make sure that there was actual demand on both sides (designers and homeowners) for this niche, so they first made the connections themselves.

The TasteMaker founders simply started calling around and found three interior designers, and then started finding them jobs.

Over time they created a website interface for their (still human) service, and eventually made it fully technological.

Another example is LaunchBit: these two founders forced themselves to get launched in 2-4 weeks. In Elizabeth Yin's words:

"This meant there wasn’t a lot of time to build much technically. So, most of our MVPs have been very concierge-style. To put it bluntly, the product was just us doing operations manually behind the curtains."

The LaunchBit concept is to connect content creators who wanted to monetize their email content with advertisers looking for better reach.

Here's what the founders did:

"...our advertisers emailed us their creative, and our publishers would copy and paste it into their newsletter. Advertisers would send money to my personal PayPal account. There was no ad server. No dashboards. Virtually no technology in version one."

Is your startup a marketplace, or has a marketplace component? Think hard - can you do it manually for a while?

Later in the course you'll learn how to put up a website with complex forms that will allow you to make things look more automated than they are.

So, appearances aside, can your fundamental innovation be done by a person at first?

It's a lot easier to build technology than to pick up the phone and ask someone if they need ____, so this is a scary switch to make in our thinking.

Because it cuts out so much technology, we're put face to face with our actual business.

At first this is intimidating but it's why we're here isn't it?
Act Like a Super Complex Algorithm
Does your idea involve some intense computation?

Does it involve massive canvassing of the web?

Does it involve a very unique process that can only be performed by cutting-edge technology?

Perfect.

I'm here to tell you something we often forget as tech entrepreneurs: much of what computers can do, humans can do better.

The founders of Yipit didn't have a lot of time to build their idea. They wanted to aggregate all the daily deals from all over the web (Groupons, LivingSocials, etc) and send you what was actually relevant to your interests.

One half of this was easy to build: a simple form for people to specify what kind of deals they were interested in.

The second half of this idea was really heavy: an algorithm that would scan all the daily deal sites and categorized the deals by category.

Vinicius Vacanti reveals their workaround:

"So, we took a shortcut. Instead of building a crawler, my co-founder and I would crawl out of bed at 3 am and manually enter the deals into our database. Plus, when you’re doing it yourself, classification was easy. We did it all manually."

On the third day, they launched. Yipit became known as the industry leader and they raised $7.3 million dollars.

Even after they raised their first million and signed up hundreds of thousands of users, Vinicius and his co-founder still didn't code that crawler algorithm. They just kept hiring data entry employees to keep up with demand, and only after 9 months did they automate the process.

If you still think your product is too complicated or technological, know that of ALL the business card scanning iPhone apps out there, the one that saw the most success (and eventually got bought by LinkedIn) was the one that used real people to transcribe the cards.

The process wasn't instant, but when it came to business card transcription, turns out their customers didn't care about speed, they cared about accuracy.

One more example - for the real skeptics out there.

David Quail is a super talented developer (and friend). He recently sold Atassa to YouSendIt, and decided that his next startup would be to tackle the annoying nature of scheduling a meeting over email.

His vision was that you could just hook up your email to his app and it would use artificial intelligence to read the back and forth, and schedule meetings automatically.

Since AI engineers are a little bit on the expensive side, he thought of paying mechanical turk labor $0.05 to read a few emails and schedule a meeting.

But what's better than $0.05? How about free labor?

David's original product, to get his first few customers, simply involved himself. He created meetings@zenlike.me and just told his first few beta customers to cc that email (of course, just himself with a domain he purchased in a few clicks).

He scheduled the meetings manually whenever he was cc'd, and quickly saw how much his customers fell in love with the "product."

He kept the 'cc method' the same, and slowly scaled to more customers with cheap labor, then moving on to building an automated algorithm.

---

Maybe your idea really is too complex to be done "auto-manually" - but think super hard about it first, because there's huge opportunity and time savings to get started this way.
Hardcore Fake It Till You Make It
The Wizard-of-Oz method works even for faking your core innovation at first.

In later units I will show you how to hide behind technology. But for now, I'll try to open your mind with some crazier examples of startups that even faked their competitive advantage.

Stripe, the popular payment processor, originally boasted that it could get customers "instant" merchant accounts (usually a very tedious process). This was one of the many advantages of using Stripe over long-entrenched competitors.

Except one thing. At first, it was just the founders behind the scenes doing all the work, signing up customers for traditional merchant accounts.

Is that a fraud? No - customers still got what they were promised. The way it was done was just not what they expected.

To quote Paul Graham (who has probably seen more examples of this firsthand than anyone else):

"When manual components look to the user like software, this technique starts to have aspects of a practical joke."

So the worst Stripe can be accused of is of a practical joke - but one that made their early users very happy.

You may remember the company Aardvark, which Google bought a few years back. It was a human search engine - you'd ask questions that someone qualified would answer, anywhere the world.

You'd think that to get started they'd need to build a crazy real-time routing system and whatnot.

Instead,

"...for nine months, a human being was involved in every single interaction ...classified the query and otherwise managed the conversation from behind the scenes."

The original questions they answered themselves and slowly started forwarding them to qualified users. The automation of the process was very gradual - they didn't set out to build a massive system first. They just started manually and worked backwards to an automated product. And then sold to Google for $50 million.

Let's take a break for a second and reflect: they definitely don't teach this stuff in business schools, do they.

One last example: today Diapers.com (which sold to Amazon for $540 million) is known for their massive automated supply chains, warehouses, and efficient logistics. Did you know that when they started out, they couldn't get manufacturers to sell to them?

All they built at first was a simple ecommerce website that could take payments. They had no inventory. Every time they received an order, they'd take the truck down to the local Costco and buy what the customer ordered, then ship it through the post office. Soon this became an 18-wheeler (still at the store), and eventually their own supply chain.

But they weren't afraid to fake it for the sake of launching something quickly. And I bet the customers didn't care how they got their diapers for that price, as long as they did.
Capture Your Thoughts in Your Project Page
Right now in your Project Page you have a title, and a short list of crucial user stories.

Underneath your user stories, write down some ideas on how you might "Wizard of Oz" some of your customers' needs.

Even if it's totally unscalable at first - that's okay. Just think about when you only have three customers. How could that be done with human involvement?

Capture what you're thinking by making a short note in your project workspace.

This definitely requires some thinking differently, so if you're not sure and want some creative dialogue, feel free to post in the class feed for feedback.

The Web Is Full of LEGO Pieces

Whip Up an Online Form
When I originally thought of creating this course, I went on the Skillshare website and clicked "Teach a Class." It took me to a beautiful form that looked just like the same colors as Skillshare.

Except, being a web dork, I noticed one thing - it wasn't hosted on Skillshare! The form was built on Wufoo and customized to look like Skillshare.

Proof in the email I got back:

Why would Skillshare - a company with plenty of developers and kickass technology - use a Wufoo form?

Plenty of reasons: the person in charge of vetting teachers could build the form to their liking without bothering a developer. And she could also change the form at any time, or add logic to the form at 3AM in the morning if she wanted. She could store all responses - or receive them as emails.

By using Wufoo to build the form, she could do a lot of things - without writing a line of code.

The form is the building block of interactivity on the web. Forms are used from capturing emails to registrations to filling out applications, to making requests. Even payments - but we'll discuss that separately.

There are features you'd never even imagine you'd find in a form, without even any coding... like adding captchas, limiting number of people who can fill it out, all sorts of conditional logic on what questions to display, redirection to any webpage you want (that I'll show you how to build next) and of course designs and logos.

Something else I just discovered... when a form entry is filled, it can publish a tweet to your feed! Or create a contact in Salesforce... or any third party for that matter.

The entire list of third party integrations is here: http://www.wufoo.com/integrations/

The most important part is customizing it to look like your brand. You can customize anything, from fonts to backgrounds to logos to where the label goes near the field.

You can customize the "Thank You!" prompt that's shown after submission. Or send them to a separate page entirely that you built elsewhere. To quote the great Zombo.com, "The only limit is your imagination."

Your gears are probably turning right now. Can you see how the simple power of a form that looks like you coded it - together with "a man behind the curtain" approach - can already cover quite a bit of product?

Customer fills out form -> You get an email and do something -> Customer gets email back

It can get more complex than this. You can create several forms... or conditional forms.... you can use forms to replace registrations and a database for the time being.

I worked with a company that was a marketplace for open desk space to release their first product. In order to cut down on development time, the CEO and I decided that the part where suppliers signed up would just be a form that would then email the founder. He could then call them, interview them, and add it to the database.

We went on and even made the reservation process (for people who wanted somewhere to work) entirely a form too. It just emailed the founder, who then called the supplier, and emailed the customer back with an official-looking template for a booked reservation!

Can you imagine how much time it would have taken to build a proprietary reservation system vs. skin some online forms?

Take some time and play with Wufoo, Formstack, or TypeForm.

Form builders are the most important tool to have at hand in your toolbox.
Launch a Kickass Website
These days, there's no excuse not to have a beautiful website that has everything you wanted on it.

This could mean a killer landing page from Strikingly or Unbounce, or a brochure site from Weebly and SquareSpace.

Easy webpage builders are nothing new to the web. But the deep functionality you'll find at these sites is relatively new - and not known to most people building their first web presence.

There's the more specific tools like LaunchRock which specialize in collecting emails pre-launch, building an audience, and social sharing features.

I won't go into detail; I highly recommend building a fun page on Unbounce and seeing just how much you can do without a single line of code.

Design-wise, there's nothing that you can do on a hand-coded site that you can't do with these tools in terms of customizing to your brand and style.

For general purpose websites with multiple pages that you want full control over, I recommend Weebly or Squarespace. Nearly 0.1 percent of the internet is made up of Weebly sites. That's how popular and powerful of a tool it is.

These tools are all drag and drop, so you can really add anything you want anywhere.

Webpages are a great LEGO piece because you can create them as landing pages, confirmation pages, explanation pages, contact forms, and all the things you'd want to glue your product together.

These site builders also allow you to copy and paste code snippets - so for example if you want to add a widget from say, an online scheduling tool, to your site, you can simply copy and paste what they give you.

Here's a simple story of how copying and pasting the Skype "Call Me" widget helped start Lawdingo, from Nikhil Nirmel:

"The very first version of Lawdingo was a single field form with a submit button. It said, 'Hi, I’m a lawyer,' which I’m not, 'I would like to give you some advice over video chat. Please enter your problem and I will handle this for you.' So that took me a long time because I never had a webpage on the internet. I made a form and did a bunch of googling and finally got a page on the internet."

"The second version, I got a guy in Nepal to build a website that was a Skype button that said ‘I am online or offline’. I listed five lawyers and saw if people would talk to them."

You don't even need a guy in Nepal to paste widgets into your site... Skype provides a wizard for generating the button code where you just select a few preferences.

Tools like Weebly or Unbounce have places where you can paste this code anywhere you want on your site:

We'll also talk about Wordpress later in this course. These are the easiest options without using Wordpress.
Be Super Accessible to Your Customers
Want to talk to your customers when they land on your website? Olark and its competitors are very simple copy-paste tools that let you talk to visitors to your site right from your GChat window.

Want to collect feedback and let users chat about ideas for your product? In a few clicks you can create a Uservoice or GetSatisfaction site - a page entirely about your product, where you can join the conversation. These are the services used by the big brands by the way - no one wants to develop these from scratch!

Wish you had an online database of support articles so users can get instant help before they email you? Zendesk, Freshdesk, Desk.com are robust support platforms designed for customer service VPs and not the engineering team.

With a few clicks, you have a full support site of your own that you can link to from your webpage.

And of course, full branding and design options.

Using these sites can increase your web presence, improve the impression you make on potential customers, and recover sales you may have lost to confusion or technical problems.

At Ecquire, our support channels have been our best conversation starters for customer feedback. These tools make it easy to make it easy for customers to reach you.
Build a "Database"
Let me cut to the chase before I dive into a story: use a collaborative Google Docs spreadsheets as your database. Update it personally or as a team based on form and phone calls with your customers.

Arram Sabeti never thought his spreadsheet would be the core asset of his startup. He was just keeping a list of area restaurants for ordering lunch for the company he worked in.

When he realized that every office manager had this pain, he started offering to do the ordering for others as well:

"I remember being deathly embarrassed that my “tech” startup consisted of 0 lines of code, an inbox, and an enormous spreadsheet.

...a year went by and the company grew. The spreadsheet I used for scheduling grew to five hundred columns and the processes I had in place started to break. Billing grew to take 20 hours a week. I started looking for a technical cofounder to build software."

Arram simply kept pushing the envelope on what his spreadsheet could be used to do, and it kept him in business without a technical cofounder for over a YEAR.

He eventually raised $1.5 million on that success. Today Zerocater has ordered over a million meals.

If a spreadsheet can be stretched that far - chances are you can use it as well.

Message from our sponsors: my company Ecquire has a way to automatically add rows to your Google Doc right from Gmail, Linkedin, Facebook... and many more places.
Accept Payments, Beautifully
It's not a real company if you can't take people's money, right?

Accepting a credit card online isn't something new. But doing it in a way that doesn't look like you're selling your dad's stamp collection on eBay is.

The most beautiful part of taking payments online without a line of code is the "hosted payment page." I have used this feature at Ecquire probably way past the point it was ever intended to be used.

Hosted payment pages are simply checkout pages that are unique to your product - and are entirely taken care of by a payment provider.

That means no worrying about PCI compliance, storage of financial details, validation of credit card information (and informative errors to help users), totals, coupon codes... are you starting to get the picture?

Hosted payment pages can be created simply by filling out a few details. They can be customized to look just like your brand and include your logo.

Different payment providers specialize in different kinds of checkout software.

Recurly is very strong at recurring subscriptions. Its strength is in recurring subscriptions, but you can accept one-time payments as well.

You can create coupon codes, free trial periods, setup fees, anything your greedy heart desires - Recurly (and most of these services) can handle.

What's amazing is that you can completely administer the accounts from their admin interface. That means you can take care of refunds, proration, upgrades, etc. from one of the prettiest interfaces I have worked with.

Recurly even has a link for people to edit their own billing information. That means you never have to touch a credit card number. Just send people a secure link that they can use to edit their info.

Doing billing this way lets you look like the most advanced company ever.

Are you realizing how much code you don't have to write? It also looks fantastic.

Let's keep going. Recurly takes care of notifying customers about credit card failures, and automatically creates PDF invoices and can even integrate with Mailchimp so your customers can get your newsletter.

I sound like I'm being paid to say this but I've just been their customer for two years now and they have saved my team so much coding and work.

You can customize the emails customers get - to say anything you want.

You can add your logo to any touchpoint with a customer.

Also, now that we've outgrown using hosted payment pages (two years in I should say) Recurly has a fantastic API so it continues to power our transactions seamlessly. There's no painful data migration to be done.

However, I never really shopped around for providers once I found Recurly, but I know that this kind of excitement can be paralleled on other services, depending on your business model.

There are many others out there with comparable features for recurring billing - I know Chargify.com is one.

Moonclerk, Helium, and others are very design-oriented and built for the non-coder. Moonclerk also specializes in offline services - not just digital.

Gumroad is super elegant and simple. Also takes preorders.

Celery specializes entirely in pre-orders so you can delay charging customers until the goods are ready. This is super useful for proving your idea really is viable - see the power of asking for pre-orders as true feedback here.

There's always full-blown online store that Shopify will create for you and take care of everything. Shopify might either be your entire startup or not relevant one bit. Give it a quick look - it might save you months of development.

The key here is that you can spin off GORGEOUS checkout processes that look entirely your own - again, without any code.
Build a Habit of Googling First
If you are using it in your product, chances are that someone's already commoditized it and made it super easy to get going.

The key is to always think to use Google first.

It might sound funny for me to tell you to Google for what you need - but it's not obvious at all. After all, you can't search for what you assume doesn't exist.

I want to inspire your imagination a little bit and tell you about services you might never have thought existed - that you can use in your product:
- For logos you can use 99designs and its many competitors
- MailChimp and AWeber can take care of delivering your emails and good-looking templates. AngelList started as just an email list and a google doc, with Nivi and Naval matching startups with investors.
- Twilio allows you to work with phone lines and SMS. The bottom of this page lists what you can do without code.
- You can create a basic SMS service without coding (I used Textmarks to build my first product, while my competitor spent six months rolling their own) EZTexting is also an option
- You can build entire mobile apps without code at sites like Appery, Viziapps, or AppArchitect (many more if you search)
- One education startup that I shared an office with built their class platform entirely on Google Plus Hangouts. They skipped the hard part by reusing what everyone already knew how to use.
- Want a slick intro video? Use Powtoon or iShowUHD or Camtasia or... any screencast software.
- You can even incorporate game mechanics with PunchTab.
If there's one takeaway from this class it's that I want you to have the confidence that you can build things yourself.

I can't list everything in this course, and as I write this new services are being launched - so that comes down to you remembering to Google for things first.
BONUS: Launch a Kickass Website, Continued
Below is a tip that wasn't originally included in the course, but I decided to include it because it's helped me so much in the past.

If you have a very specific vision for how your site looks, there is a cheap and quick way to get that implemented.

If you can create a photoshop file (or even powerpoint in the worst case) describing your site pages, you can send it to an HTML slicing service.

These are overseas firms that take your graphic designs and turn them into static web pages that can be displayed on your browser.

I have personally worked with HTMLBoutique but if you google for "HTML slicers" you will get many options.

They can:
- Include interactions, like spiffy menus, mouseovers, and basic animations. (Remember that you need to include them in your comps!)
- Handle multiple pages and navigation
- Include specific widgets that you identify for them on the web
- Iterate with you until it is pixel perfect to your original specification.
The downsides (why I didn't include this tip originally):
- This is not a dynamic website - it is only static HTML that will be the same experience for every visitor. You might be able to draw a login button but it doesn't mean it will work.
- Making modifications later will be difficult and require favors from friends or additional fees. If you stick with the same service it might be affordable for you though.
- Uploading to the web will require help from a technical friend.
- You may not be able to re-use the code down the line, some developers will prefer to start over and do things in a more professional way (looks the same from the outside but easier to develop with)
It's worth saying that you can in some cases pay an extra fee to turn your design into a standard Wordpress themw (more on Wordpress later).

Making These Live on the Web

When you have the resulting web page files in a zip file, you will need to upload them to a web server in order for others to access them.

At this point I would recommend having a technical friend (or contractor) help you "upload your static files to a static web host."

At least at this point, it is a very easy last step - you've completed everything else and minimized the technical help you need.

When to Do This
- You have a very specific vision of how things should look
- It's more important to you to communicate a vision than to have something functional you can modify yourself later
- You have (or have access to) very good design skills.
Update Your Project Page
Which of these pieces seem like they'd be useful?

Create a section in your project page called "LEGO Pieces Shortlist" and capture the moment with a few online tools that stand out to you.

If you can imagine others that I didn't list, but not sure exist, write down the phrase you might Google - describe the tool as best you can in words and put it in quotes.

Other students in the class as well as myself might be able to think of something that fits the bill!

The Magic of Wordpress

Is Your Idea One of These?
Everyone starts with the core Wordpress software. It's open source, which also means that it's free. (We'll go over how to get it in the last step of this unit).

To extend the functionality of Wordpress, you can install relatively inexpensive (or free) plugins. Plugins are how you can turn Wordpress into much more than a blogging platform.

Since the Wordpress community is so large, you'll find plugins for almost anything you'd want to do. Just Google for "Wordpress plugin for ______" and chances are you'll find what you need.

Here I'll highlight some platforms you might want to build, where Wordpress can save you months of development time, at least for getting out of the gate.

Build a Membership Site

A membership site is a content site with a members-only section. People pay to join the community and get access - a great way to monetize content with a recurring revenue model. An example of this is the massive Mixergy website - they're powered by Wordpress using the Membership plugin.

This doesn't have to just be content or blog posts - a graphic designer can offer access to useful graphic design files or a lawyer can offer access to document templates. Gilt.com offers access to deals.
- Membership plugin
- Wishlist
Build an Online Store

Want to build an online store, but a one-click solution like Shopify not customizable enough for your vision? You can turn Wordpress into a ridiculously powerful online eCommerce portal.

Features you'll find out of the box include inventory management, administrative dashboard, easy billing integration, custom checkout pages, discount codes, taxes, multilingual support... and the list goes on. Everything you'd want.

Vandelay Design has published a great list of top Wordpress eCommerce Plugins with pros and cons of each one. Some of them have additional plugins that people have created to extend them even further.

Build a Community Portal or Social Network

Want to build a site that connects African entrepreneurs with investors? A talent networking site for singers? A social network for yarn enthusiasts? A site for architecture students to share their work? A site for people to share workouts and health advice?

These are all real websites built on Wordpress.

How? With the FREE Buddypress plugin.

The plugin gives you the power to create a social networking membership site with features like a news feed, groups, individual profiles, and many other features. It's totall customizable so you can pick the features you want. There are also many plugins that extend Buddypress even further - for example, if you want to include "events."

Mingle is a plugin that can be installed in addition to Buddypress to make administration and customization even easier - drag and drop style.

So many websites share the same core social networking engine. Who wants to reinvent the wheel?

Build Your Own E-Learning Site

Want to build your own learning portal? Launch an online course website with WPCourseware. Just don't call it ShareSkill ;)

Create a Mobile App That Focuses on Live Dynamic Content

When I learned that it was possible to turn Wordpress sites into mobile apps my reaction was "Do you people have no limits?!?!" This is incredible to think that anyone can operate a content mobile app with the ease of administering a Wordpress site.

But then again, why not? The idea is you continue to operate your site as normal. Pretty exciting.
- UppSite
- Mobiloud
- Wiziapp
Launch a Daily Deals Site

In case you're still skeptical about this class, here is Andrew Mason's story of how Groupon started:

“All we did was we took a WordPress blog and we skimmed it to say Groupon and then every day we would do a new post with the points embedded. It was totally ghetto. We would sell t-shirts on the first version of Groupon. We’d say in the right up, ‘This t-shirt will come in the color red, size large. If you want a different color or size, email that to us.’ We didn’t have a form to add that stuff. We were just, it was so cobbled together. It was enough to prove the concept and show that it was something that people really liked. The actual coupon generation that we were doing was all FileMaker. We would run a script that would email the coupon PDF to people. It got to the point where we’d sell 500 sushi coupons in a day and we’d send 500 PDFs to people with Apple Mail at the same time. Really the first, until July of the first year was just a scrambling to grab the tiger by the tail. It was trying to catch up and reasonable piece together a product.”

Appsumo, in Noah Kagan's words, built "a super-ghetto, barely-working version of AppSumo for $60. Nothing is automated, everything is done manually, and the site pretty much sucks."

These days you don't even have to do things as basic as those founders. You can just install a Wordpress plugin...
Keep Pushing the Limits

What's interesting about all these is that you don't have to use their plugins as-is.

You can mix and match with other plugins and themes. Not all, and not all the time of course, but the makers of the plugins will generally tell you what's possible and what has conflicts.

If you find that they don't do enough - there's plenty of Wordpress developers that you can hire to help extend these further. Sometimes even the company that created the plugin itself will offer consulting services, or a list of freelancers that are familiar with the codebase.
Beautify Your Wordpress Site with Themes and Frameworks
The first time my co-founder and I launched a fancy website, we paid $1500 for an impressive marketer-designer to come up with a look that said "We're a big company."

I could have paid thirty bucks for something ten times better looking.

Just look at this example of what you can buy these days: Vertex Theme

Wordpress allows you to change the look of your site without changing any of the content. It separates the functionality and the data of your site from the actual appearance. This allows you to install themes.

You can switch very easily between themes to your liking. Most high-end themes cost between $20-30 and look pretty incredible.

Take a look at these marketplaces for basic content themes:
Remember that if you're going to use special plugins like BuddyPress, there are themes that might need to be compatible with the elements found on that site.

Themes won't solve all problems, but the advantage of starting with a theme you like is that if you contract a Wordpress developer, you're starting with 99% of the work already in place, and asking them to make changes rather than starting from scratch.

Frameworks

Themes are generally configurable, but often limit your configurations. A framework is a starter theme that you can configure to build your own layouts and make your site even more unique. Frameworks range between drag and drop to needing some coding.

Below are a few frameworks that are optimal for non-technical entrepreneurs:
- Genesis
- Suffusion
- Headway
- Themify
The best thing to do is to play around with the demo sites on each and decide what you feel most comfortable with. There are many, many more... keep searching if you want more options.
Launching a Hosted Wordpress Site
There's two ways to run Wordpress - for free off of Wordpress.com or to host it yourself.

The free hosting is very easy, but you can't customize or do any of the things we discussed above. To do that you'll need to host it yourself.

Fortunately there are a ton of hosts that require zero technical knowledge to sign up for and to launch. These hosts will get you to a point where you can start configuring your Wordpress site through the Wordpress dashboard.

Self-hosting sounds like a headache, but it's pretty easy - not only will these hosts help you install in one click, they'll even manage your security and updates.

From there, you can install plugins, themes and frameworks by simply uploading zip files (that you obtain) as easily as you'd upload an email attachment.

Prices for hosting range from $10-50 a month. I wouldn't save money here for the sake of it... higher prices usually mean much better support - if you get in a jam you'll thank your lucky stars you didn't try to save twenty bucks.

WPEngine, DreamHost, and Bluehost are well-known reliable hosts at two ends of the pricing spectrum.

Common Sense Security

Wordpress is good about security and releases frequent updates (and installing those updates is just one click - they'll even let you know). Many hosts will simply update your software automatically as fixes are released.

The other thing is to avoid downloading shady plugins that don't have a lot of good reviews or community reputation. Some plugins are just ways for hackers to inject bad code onto your site. Popular and well-known plugins are not a problem. Basically, don't take candy from strangers.

The Part Where I Tell You to Keep Googling

With Wordpress more than anything out there, Google is your friend! Google for help. Google your error messages if you get any. Google questions you have.

Wordpress and its plugins have such an active community that you're bound to find an answer super easily.

Don't Be Afraid to Hire a Wordpress Expert for a Few Hours

If you still, REALLY don't want to touch technology, that's cool. Hiring a wordpress expert will take a lot less time to create something than a developer building things from scratch.

You can sit down with a Wordpress developer and work together to put themes, frameworks, and plugins together in a way that gives you peace of mind.

A few billable hours at a coffee shop are a lot easier to finance than three months of contract development.

No Code Necessary, But There Is a Learning Curve

Wordpress has some jargon and concepts that are easy to understand but intimidating at first. Spend some time reading beginner Wordpress guides and getting to know your way around the admin panel.

Notice what all the guides have in common and you'll start seeing concepts repeating that you'll also internalize. Reading several guides will help you see things from different authors' points of view.

If you're just a little bit determined, Wordpress is very learnable and will be second nature to you in no time.
Your Project Page - Can Wordpress Help?
Do you think Wordpress can help your cause? If so, make a note of it in your Project Page.

What about Wordpress do you think sounds relevant to your use cases? Put a short note in your workspace with the tools that stand o

Jack Crish

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