How I Sold My Python/Django Website for $41,000

hey guys so in this video I'm gonna talk about how I built out my first website using Django that ended up getting me my first job as a software developer and how I later sold that website for over forty one thousand dollars to my former employer and just basically go through that process and let you know how I did all that and talk about things like technologies I've used the process itself and so on so I normally don't like to go into numbers like this you know go talking about the $41,000 but I figured that would be a good story for people to hear and actually see what's possible out there and get some kind of idea of what something like this would take and maybe inspire some people and just give you some kind of insight into my story so I was working as a digital marketer and web developer at a forensics laboratory where we analyzed fuel samples so customers would send in things like diesel samples gasoline samples and our job was to analyze that data or the sample itself and send them back the data and let them know what was going on in there and I was working as a again a digital marketer so I was building out their website using WordPress HTML and CSS and I'm just doing things like SEO and so on and we got to a point at the company where there was the software that we were using that a former developer had built out that was in charge of storing all of this data that the lab would take in so we have taken that data put it into our system and then send it out to customers via PDF so that system was built in 2008 and you can imagine how outdated that must have looked so there was no styling to it they had a lot of issues it was just really outdated and we needed something new so we started looking for companies that could build us out for us and developers but I really wanted to build this thing out and I told my boss hey if you let me take a stab at this thing and give me a few months to learn I think I can do something like this so let me let me try this thing so I went ahead and started looking at books and reading online resources and studying this kind of stuff and the first thing I found was this book right here from a Barnes & Noble so it's just a local bookstore that we have and I started reading automate the boring with Python and started figuring out what I can do with Python and is it possible to build a website with it so I got all the basics done in about 20 days started feeling very comfortable with it but then I started hearing that I needed to use a framework to actually build a website just just to make this process easier so I started hearing about flask and Django and eventually ended up settling on Django so I chose Django and studied that for about another month and a half maybe two months and with that also wanted to use JavaScript on the front end to render my data so this was the book I chose for that and gotten my start there and started really piecing all of this together and started feeling pretty comfortable as a developer as a full stack developer and understanding how all of this works so I decided okay I'm ready this is about two and a half months into it I'll draw up a prototype I'll take it to a meeting and I'll see if I can pitch this thing so I if I go to my screen here I drew up this prototype and I'm so glad I kept the original because I this is exactly what I drew up for my boss this is the original picture and I sold them on this vision of let me build out what we currently have but let's actually add a client interface to this software so a client no longer has to receive PDFs in the in their email because that seems a little bit outdated let's let the client log in and view the data themselves and I had an idea of what kind of data they would see so we wanted to visually display that data in treta and things like line charts scatter plots and maybe even visually on a map as which you know which is what you see right here so everybody was sold on this idea and we started pitching to we started pitching this thing to clients on day one so we started taking this exact picture to clients and everybody loved it because in the industry I was working in this was new there was there's not a lot of tech there so this was kind of revolutionary to what everybody was seeing so everyone started pitching this I was also in those meetings pitching it but on my time off I was working on this thing and developing it and about four months into that I actually had our first product ready and set to go and launch it in the backend and actually take it to clients so we actually kind of did soft integration thing where we still ran on the old system but the data-entry guys in the lab or chemists were in charge of entering data into the old system and into mine just to have backups if something happened to mine because I was a new developer so we didn't want to trust that kind of sensitive data you know just trust that it could be lost somehow because with my inexperience that could be quite you know kind of a problem there so with that being said here was a product that I had developed it was a different version at the time but this was the final product that we took to market this is just the labs or the customer side of things so we took this product to market and gave this customer our customers this beautiful dashboard where they can actually see all of their data so I'll just go over the product itself and in the top here you can see the client can view all the samples they submitted samples they currently have in lab samples that they've historically completed and maybe samples that need to be revisited samples that have been failed or you know just kind of had some out of limits specs so they can be notified of any issues and down here I wanted to visualize just like in my mock-up I wanted the client to you have the ability to see the data in a map so anytime they provide us something like a zip code or some kind of city state address to us we were able to actually convert this into longitude and latitude coordinates and display it in a map and then not only that but display whenever there was a sample that was in that area that had maybe been run out of limits so we can see five samples two samples were failed and we were able to view that data and on the right here we can actually switch between and see which months that client sent in data and then have it graphed out here so if we scroll down right here here were the actual tests that the clients actually ran with the lab so you can see the test name here and also when I hover over it and whenever a client clicks on these tests they can actually see the test results graphed out on the right side so it's fully interactive and gave the clients a really good perspective of what was going on and gave them the ability to view their data in trending so this was done using zine charts on the front end and also we were able to expand this chart a client view this almost from a scientific perspective and analyzed our data and see it very specifically so we had that and down here we had the table of data which they can search by date and even have this advanced search filter right here and also download this data into an excel sheet and have it exported in any way they wanted if they wanted to take this to a meeting so we were providing the client a lot of data and the way we monetize this thing was to not sell the product itself but to offer it for free and just give the clients the ability to go with us and have this dashboard if they chose us as a service provider so let's talk about the sale itself we were delivering this product I was a sole developer for two years I had a little bit of help but not much of a budget to really hire experienced developers so I was the lead and I was working about 16-hour days and was really burnt out at this point it was a lot of stress dealing with clients and having to upkeep this with my inexperience so we got to a point where I actually had some disagreements with my boss and we just decided hey the best way to go about this is to part ways but we need to do something about the product itself because I never actually got paid for the software I was still a digital marketer and was building this thing technically on my own time using all my own stuff and even had paid for things like server cost and so on so what we decided was that I would get paid out forty one thousand dollars and he can have exclusive rights to the software and I was supposed to train up another developer just to make sure that that transition can actually move you know efficiently so I originally thought the product was worth a lot more and I still think it was but I really just wanted out so I just I just decided if I sell it for a lot less I have less commitment and having to train up the next person having to be with the company for another six months to a year or anything like that so I just wanted a clean break away and just to be down with it because at this point I was a little burnt out so that's how we settled on that number just based on the value and how much value I would contribute in that integration process with a new developer so a few things with this product I'm just looking at my notes here I just want us to talk about the technologies itself in what I actually used to build this and to get this thing to work so as you know by now I use Python and Django and JavaScript on the front end originally now one thing that did happen was that when I built this thing out in 2018 es6 was out on the market maybe for a year I think it came out in 2015 but it was kind of just progressing and a lot of browsers weren't compatible with the data itself so I was sitting in a coffee shop in Las Vegas where my wife and I were just visiting family and I get a call from a client I worked a lot just on the road like that so I get a call from a client and the clients telling me hey I can't view my data and I'm trying to debug this thing trying to figure out what's going on and it turns out that I believe it was Internet Explorer at the time didn't couldn't read template literals in JavaScript so none of the data was being displayed so this led to either figuring out how to either make this thing cross compatible or when I did my research I figured out that something like react react j/s can actually solve this and make this compatible for all browsers so that led me into deciding hey lists which this thing to react on the front end and let's learn it so two weeks later I just actually bought this book right here so I read this thing in an evening wasn't fun but I got it done studied it for a little bit and implemented reacts so we had this thing completely switched over to react on the front end and now it was compatible so as far as the database goes we use Postgres for this because Postgres integrates with django very well and it was kind of the first thing that I learned at the time so why more than you need I just figured hey this looks like it'll do the job it's very popular has a lot of documentation so I chose Postgres for that as far as hosting that database I decided to put this up on AWS so I have my Postgres database on AWS and that's also where I had my static files so I put up everything into s3 buckets so that's where we had things like images styling and much more so the website itself I chose Roku for that heroku as my server so we put the website on Heroku and just integrated those two and for the map like I mentioned before this was just a Google Maps API right here so that's how I was able to render that out and the charts this was all Zink charts right here so Zink charts kind of saved the day here it was the easiest charting system that I can find that met all of my needs and was able to help me integrate it and actually implement this interactive feature you see right here where I'm clicking between the two so Zink charts did very well for me there as far as the front end just HTML and CSS for styling but I used a lot of bootstrap just to not have to focus on that if you look at the design it doesn't need that much styling everything's pretty simple so bootstrap took care of everything for me there so now I just want to talk about the experience itself and maybe some recommendations so as far as what I kind of went through here one thing I wanted to advise you is you'll never be fully ready for building something like this or even landing your first job most cases you're probably just trying to get your first job here so my recommendation is just to jump in you're always going to be at a point where you're gonna you're gonna need to know more and that's just always gonna be the case especially in this industry so you're never gonna have all your ducks in a row you're always going to need to study something more so just start building something um anybody who's looking to hire just wants to see somebody that's willing to learn and wants to just pick up new things and can get the job done so I recommend just jumping into it and get started and with this whole process right here this gave me a great great project to put on my resume and a hell of an experience because there's nothing out there that would be able to replicate doing something like this in boot camp or any form of college here so this experience right here really set me up and definitely solidify to my resume and gives me a whole ton of confidence to be able to apply anywhere I really want so if if this story you know if this helps you out in any way definitely leave a comment in the comment section I just wanted to share my experience and hopefully inspire you guys and give me some kind of idea of what I did here I'm also thinking about making a full tutorial on this - bored just with different data obviously so if you're interested in that let me know in the comments section and I'll think about putting something like this together

Channel: Dennis Ivy

Views: 1,366,796

Rating: 4.9348378 out of 5

Keywords: Programming, Software Developer, Dennis Ivy, Dennis Ivanov, Python, Django, Website, Selling a website, Money Online

Id: o8u5qcsZZdA

Length: 13min 29sec (809 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 13 2020