The JustDjango Podcast - S01 E02 - Justin Mitchel of CodingForEntrepreneurs

you're listening to the just django podcast my name is matthew freyr i'm the host of the show and creator of just django in this first season i'm having conversations with individual creators founders and entrepreneurs that are using django to run profitable online businesses and side projects this episode's guest is justin mitchell justin is an entrepreneur coder avid tech enthusiast and creator of codingforentrepreneurs.com which offers project-based courses on django python javascript machine learning and many other technologies anyways matt thanks for having me appreciate it now thanks for being here um it's gonna be good so so let's start with how you got started with django sure yeah so uh how much time do you got because it's gonna take a while um so i wanna start before that because django itself was just really a solution to a problem that i was having and the problem was actually building web applications and and writing code so back in high school this was 2003 2004. i really wanted to start a clothing company and the reason for that is because i um i wanted to really control my own freedom and i thought that starting a business would be a big part of that both of my parents had their own small business it just really fit in with i wanted this freedom aspect of things right like and i i still believe that um owning your schedule is like the ultimate freedom that doesn't mean that you can't work for somebody of course but having control over your schedule is something that is just really clamored for and ideally making a good amount of money while doing it so certain a company is a good way to do that so a friend of mine and i we started a clothing company and that probably sounds very silly to a lot of people around the world um because it is like it's a clothing company like who who are these two kids in high school trying to make a clothing company well big part of it um in southern california where i'm from is it's sort of part of the culture especially at that time to start a t-shirt brand right like to print something screen print something on a t-shirt and start that brand but like if you know me my fashion sense is simple let's put it that way i just wear t-shirts and jeans so it's not like i'm i'm uh a fashionista at any means but we were trying to do that we were trying to make a really cool popular like hip if you will la southern california newport beach kind of brand and i'm pretty sure one of the big surf brands i always forget which one it was i think it was quicksilver or maybe as billabong or maybe it was another one there's been several brands that started in in southern california so i was very much around that culture luckily that being the case uh with southern california specifically is my uncle knew another guy that was starting a brand called the hundreds uh the hundreds is really really popular even to to today right and i was telling him about my brand he's like oh that's cool and stuff like that and i'm like yeah i really want to build a website but i don't know how and even back then websites i mean they were definitely not even close to what we have today but they were still still gaining a lot of popularity i didn't want to just have a myspace that is certainly aging me but i didn't want to have just a myspace for it i want to have a full-on web page and so he's like i was asking them questions like how much does it cost how do you find somebody to do it for you and all that and he's like are you kidding me like you just need to do it yourself like go buy a 20 book at barnes noble um and go through that book and make it happen yourself and yeah it didn't take much convincing i was hungry i'm like okay cool i wanted that business i wanted that freedom like that was the main thing for me right so i got that book and i learned basic html and css this of course is not programming at all i mean some people argue that it is i do not think so whatsoever because once you actually can build an actual full-on software you realize how simple html and css really is right yeah like it's it's like it's funny but but the key thing here was i i i had this underlying thing that i wanted this freedom i think a lot of young men around 15 16 feel that way anyway right like they're like tired of listening to their parents essentially telling them what to do it's like really that time where you are clamoring for even more independence especially in the us we could we could start driving around that age and so a bunch of my friends were driving you know that freedom was really the underlying thing here but luckily i had influences from bobby hundreds um that's what he calls himself now he um he introduced me to this concept of just learn it yourself what are you thinking about i didn't take a class i just bought that book and i went through that book step by step there's a project based class which if if you know me that's what i do i love doing project-based things it comes back to that it's like hey i just wanted to build this simple project i made it happen i don't even remember how long it took but i remember going wow this is a lot easier than i thought until i actually tried to get it into production into an actual domain name luckily another family friend introduced me to a network engineer that knew how to get web pages going using ftp and you know get if git was around i didn't know about it but ftp file transfer protocol i just literally dragged the files that i built with html and css onto the server much like you would drag it onto a hard drive for those of you who don't use or know what ftp is i i'm i i'm trying to remember the last time i actually needed to use ftp which is which is yeah long ago yeah long matt i told you this is gonna get off the rails i i it's really hard for me to when i'm talking about myself to not get uh derail so if we ever need to bring it back by all means please do that um that's fine keep going so so anyways this family friend introduced me to this network engineer and this guy like he had a command deck in this loft in his house and it was like he had like five monitors he had a server rack in there he had all these books everywhere to me at the time i i was like super into sports i played video games but i definitely did not consider myself nerdy like i was like very much sports are first i played basketball all the time but then me my friends we would always play other sports too we would play video games for sure but that was always in the mix of playing sports and trying to be as athletic as possible so so me walking into this like this command deck of this guy i'm like really taken back like what the heck is all this it didn't really spark like oh i should definitely do this but i did ask him i'm like hey how did you learn all this stuff and he's like oh man it took like it took a long time a lot of college a lot of things i really you probably wouldn't be interested in that i'm like oh okay i didn't think much of it at the time and but anyway so he helped me get my website on which was amazing because then i actually had a full-on web domain with a real website and if you've ever struggled with that specifically you will know how good of a feeling that is once you have your domain name with something you built on there like it's it's hard for me to fully relate to it now because i've been doing it for years but i remember back then it was just like mind-blowing and it actually helped me get a job uh freelancing for an seo company i would help them with their their search engine optimization way back in you know 2004 2005 when it was really popular to do that but i had the unique skill of actually being able to change the html and css which a lot of people at the time didn't know how to do so it also helped me elevate my skills a lot so that clothing company project ended up falling apart but it taught me html and css i also flash are you are you familiar with flash yep yep never worked with it but yeah yeah so so flash flash was like um flash was very popular at the time as you might imagine because it was a lot it's like modern day javascript javascript's incredibly popular for the user interface side of things um and making games and all that stuff flash was that back in the day but then apple decided to kill it but anyway so flash was another thing i wanted i wanted my website to look really cool i wanted to actually function um more than just html and css right so because once you do html and css you're like oh can i do more can i make it you know fade in and and do all these cool animations like how do i do all those things um so really html and css was like my gateway drug if you will to going deeper and that was learning flash and again at the same time i was doing seo stuff so i was able to learn flash enough to offer that to our seo clients so i was doing some programming with actionscript even though i didn't realize there's programming at the time it took me a long time to realize i was actually programming then um but again i didn't treat it that way i thought of it more of like i was editing an animation for video much like you would do today and something like after effects um so this is a very long-winded way to get to how i started django so i'm going to skip a bunch of things in college i took those html and css skills to do all sorts of projects on wordpress right so wordpress became a very popular blogging platform i'm pretty sure i heard about wordpress from tim ferriss and the four hour work week all those things were very influential to me a big part of the reason was that underlying freedom concept that's what the four-hour workweek the book itself is all about and if you haven't read it i i recommend it it's still relevant mostly relevant today there's parts that aren't but a lot of the underlying concepts are um so let me uh let me just grab some water real quick so um i started dabbling in wordpress and i had this idea for a project a specific project in mind and i knew i needed programming right so uh the four hour work week highlighted the the the uh freedom thing that i wanted but i also wanted to be able to work anywhere in the world and again a big part of that was the four-hour work week but um the other part was like who doesn't right like like if you if you want to work on the internet a really good chance is like you want to be able to just pick up and move anywhere in the world and hopefully what we get out of 2020 is a lot more people that aren't programmers being able to do that uh by default i mean that that might be the silver lining we get in in 2020 um because that freedom to move around the world is just fantastic right so to be able to pick up and move to south africa i mean i have to take my whole family but be able to do that would be amazing you know like and it is amazing i mean like i have that ability to do that and it's not really a money thing it's a it's like a mindset thing too certainly money does play a factor but if you can work anywhere then you know you got that so anyways that was that was very core to me in college i didn't study computer science i studied business entrepreneurship specifically at the university of southern california and or usc and in entrepreneurship being around all those people so many people were actively out there and getting it and much like bobby hundreds told me he's like hey you should just go and do this so i had this idea for a project i wanted to help people get jobs in restaurants and so i put together a very basic landing page using html and css and a tool called wufoo which is still a tool today is a way to collect data from users or potential users into a form into a database but really really easy you just add a copy and embed code to do that you didn't have to actually design the database or anything related to the programming and i was able to attract a business partner and he was the technical one so i had enough momentum with that idea again i could still do html and css i could still do ftp i could do all of those same skills back then and that was a what allowed me to create my first mvp landing page or minimum viable product landing page for this service idea i got a bunch of people interested that landed me a technical co-founder he and i worked together for a little over a year on this project we would launch iterations of it but the whole time i was incredibly frustrated because i wasn't actually helping with the software but he was really good so he actually did things really fast but i felt pretty useless as the quote unquote business side of things um because i just wanted to change things constantly and i couldn't do it so you know naturally the frustration um but he was not from the u.s and he needed visa sponsorship so he had to go get a job and with that getting a job he had to leave the business or leave it as much as we were working on him which which is totally okay i call it a business but i really should just call it a project because i think we made 25 us dollars the entire year and a half we worked on it you know it was it was definitely not a business um but anyway so he had to leave which is completely understandable we were making nothing we couldn't do visa sponsorship we didn't have enough traction to get investors and also i'm of the mind of how long can you bootstrap it yourself and how can you make or enable your customers to pay for what you're building right that that to me is way more important than than how to raise money um in in so many so many projects but we can get into that some other time um so anyway so i got i got this project going he leaves and i'm like hey i need to i still want to make this thing happen how do i make this happen so i try to do it in php which is what he originally built it in and it was just incredibly confusing for me because it's like hey like why can't i just write html and you know use html and stuff like that so i did php didn't click with me and i just like really skipped it really quickly and even my my buddy at the time was like php is not great wordpress is also in php so i did know how to manipulate things a little bit because it's it's kind of written in line with html um or can be and so i did the php thing skipped that i did ruby on rails because um uh david hannemeyer hanson or dhh from uh base camp he he created ruby on rails you know and i was a big fan of his way back then because they they wrote all this stuff um under the the business name 37 signals at the time so him and jason free brought all these things that were really really interesting to an entrepreneur who wanted to build a web application um so i i wanted to give ruby on rails a proper shot and i i tried it but it just really was not clicking for me at all so then my buddy um his name is nitish he actually introduced me to one of his friends who knew django and python wasn't very popular then so this is what like 2000 and 2008 2009 something like that um okay python python was was getting more popular but it wasn't nearly as popular as as it is today um even though it had been around for a long time so once i was introduced to django it just like it just took off like it totally made sense to me um something i didn't mention is i did do some shopify things and in shopify the templating in shopify is very similar to the templating and django so liquid so shopify's liquid thing is very much like django templating um and that i really understood well with shopify because because they make it really easy to do and that was the same case in django so not only was i writing basically html with some pretty simple syntax for rendering content in in django um it was very much like like um like uh what's called um shopify but then also the python side of things like actually the views and all that it was just so easy for me it started to click and i was able to rebuild the project that we took a year on i was able to rebuild in about a month it was not a good product not a good version of it my friend's version was certainly more stable and less bugs and all that but i was able to do it all my on my own from learning just basic django to full-on web application ready to be deployed in a month and i was just like i was just like thrilled you know i'm like other people absolutely need to know this and that's how i started teaching so okay there's my incredibly long story on how i got into django yeah well it sounds like you were more entrepreneurial and you would you were kind of just looking for tools to make the business idea work so django just landed up being the end result of that but you were really trying out all these different things to make the business take off yeah absolutely i mean it's it's just one of those many tools to you know make a project happen and it doesn't have to be for your own business it's just because you know we can all have all sorts of projects um and and to me it's like you find the best tool you can to make that project happen in my case at that time it was january because it had everything that i needed it was almost like wordpress but it gave me a lot more granular control the control i wanted that wordpress didn't have you know so you ended up building the coding for entrepreneur side with django yes yes i did and it still runs on django it has since 2013. okay since the first iteration so just on the side of now kind of skipping ahead to to coding for entrepreneurs sure this is now 2013 that you launched that you actually launched at mri yes yeah 2013 that's um like about april april 2013 april may something like that so you've been like being essentially being a freelance developer or just working with the tools for about four or five years so you've got some you've gotten the hang of it by that point yeah well um it was mostly like i definitely did do some freelancing which um you know when you have stakes to actually deliver something and you want to stand by your word which is what i do try to do my best of um freelancing is great for that it really will elevate your skills because then your clients will be like this this or this i'm like oh i don't know how to do that but i can i can make it happen so yeah that's freelancing i can't remember if it was four or five or more like it might have been more like a year and a half honestly maybe maybe even less than that uh by the time like the timeline's hazy for me because i i like wasn't writing this stuff down you know i probably should um it was probably about a year before i started teaching um but but a big part of the reason to actually start teaching is especially django at the time there was like maybe five other people teaching in the world um and and they had some great content absolutely but you know they it just wasn't it wasn't exactly what i was looking for so that was that was another reason to start teaching um and that's that was that was why i started coding for entrepreneurs was i technically qualified for it i don't i don't know i don't know what what the grounds for qualification of teaching a newer language is yeah so yeah yeah i mean i can only imagine how kind of scarce the resources were at that time because when i started picking up in like 2016 even at that point i mean your channel was was probably the most recognizable and higher up on the search results if you searched anything django related on youtube but other than that there wasn't any really kind of consistent uh well-known brand or just person who was actually making django related tutorials yeah and i mean my consistency especially then was was not great i'd say especially on youtube right on my on my website and and some and some of my other places where i sell courses it was a lot more consistent but but i totally agree with you it's crazy that even only four years ago with how popular django is it's it's literally the number two most popular framework on github as far as stars are concerned in the world like right behind a php one um which has been around longer i believe it's been around longer at least but it's crazy it's it's interesting to hear your take on it from from just 2016. that's that's cool uh yeah i mean it's really exploded because now when i look at it in in 2020 compared to 2016 it's i mean it's ridiculous how many more people are now putting tutorials on not only django but i mean i'm i'm more involved in that space so when i look at django it's actually incredible how much it's escalated exponentially since your time so but it's great yeah i mean and i i attribute all of that to the hard work of all the django developers um yeah my job wouldn't exist without them right like if if um especially the core developers if they weren't actively maintaining that project excuse me and making it happen um i i honestly don't know where where we would be today you know like because django django also sets the standard for other kinds of languages that want to quote unquote beat django you know um yeah because like like i found a really cool one called i believe it's called adonis js which is like maybe the first javascript django like competitor uh and if you're in javascript you're like whoa there's a lot of web frameworks in javascript that is true but there's not nearly as many full featured batteries included frameworks like django in javascript i actually have a hard time finding them and luckily uh a student of mine recommended i believe is adonis js i might be saying it incorrectly um but recommended that and it looks really cool i want to play around with it more sorry i think one one i also came across was called redwood.js something along those lines interesting there was some post someone also talked about their move from django to redwood and kind of similar uh like batteries included sort of experience to working in django where it generates migration files and kind of just handles the majority of the work for you but yeah i definitely i haven't seen anything else besides redwood the one you mentioned is also new to me yeah oh that this looks cool yeah i uh i want to check it out um because you know we said it's like you pick the best tool you can for what you do um but but going back to like the django core developers and stuff like that like i i i couldn't appreciate them more and i like i some some of these django developers in general not necessarily just the core developers but other ones too that i admire it's like i i do wonder how do they fully get all of these skills because django is so in my opinion elegantly designed like the api itself is really easy to use that even if you looked at django code from like 2010 it's still django code it's not drastically different i mean there's obviously improvements but but that was that was well thought out prior to you or i ever ever getting into this and it's just it's it's amazing that that that's the case given that django like was such a niche project at the time too you know so yeah it is i mean that's something i definitely want to touch on later as well which is like the idea that you can start in 1.11 i'm kind of putting myself out on a limb but if you started at 1.11 most of the concepts and just general code that you write is really the same compared to two compared to 2.2 and three so it i mean that's and i didn't go before that i mean i'm sure before that it was pretty much the same as well matt i'm so glad you said that um it's like it's i can't echo that more right and uh the the biggest changes that happened since i've been using django is migrations that's like the fundamental like ground shaking changes for django prior to the built-in database migrations there was something called south and you had to install that third-party package to do the migrations but the way it actually worked was roughly the same um okay but other than that like yes there's features that are better and newer and all these bug fixes and all this really good stuff but if you're learning i honestly think you can still learn from django 1.8 you can still learn from django 1.6 uh because there are some brilliant people that made these amazing projects way back then and yeah you can learn from them even if they're not the most active you know what i mean so yeah yeah no i mean that's that's something again i really want to touch on that again because i constantly get people who say uh you know why are the courses that you make still using version 2.2 and i'm like what do you mean 2.2 is it's still lts like that's not even that bad um but you could go so much further back like you're saying all the way back to 1.11 or like you're saying 1.8 and it's really exactly the same the concepts are literally the same um you you just learning the minor changes when the new release comes out i'm sure the core developers if they hear this would probably think we're nuts and there are so many big changes but i guess the general way that the average person uses it really remains the same yeah yeah i i think so well actually um there's a really good talk from andrew goodwin that came out early september so about a month ago uh for a the python internet conference for australia it's usually in australia you know pycon au i think it is um and he was talking about this too is they want they're talking about asynchronous stuff in django right so asynchronous django is gonna potentially shake up everything with django but they're talking about keeping the core django api as is so they don't want to just make everything in the past of django irrelevant right they still want all those things because asynchronous is not the best solution for everything right um but but that talk really highlights the fact that i actually think a lot of django core developers would agree with us that the core part of django has mostly remained unchanged for years um the the cutting edge features are really nice and if you're going into production yes use at least the latest supported lts yeah right like that's that's a given but it's like it's frustrating to hear students say that to you as well they say to me all the time of like oh this is not in django whatever's listed on djangoproject.com you know um and and and i think what it actually comes down to is the cool thing about where we are in software today right like so many people are pushing for the newest version of software as a consumer right so you so whether it's your your phone or your laptop or something like that you want that latest version most of the time right sometimes you don't download it right away you want to make sure those bugs are out and all that but but a lot of times you want that latest version this is actually really good for us as software developers because that means that people are just really ready to take on all of those new features you've been working on and and that's thanks to google apple uh microsoft facebook like uh twitter like all of these all of these companies that are constantly pushing out these new versions to consumers really does trick trickle down to students and people that are learning so so that's like that's like the amazing thing i'm really glad for that because it would be really frustrating if if the opposite was happening right you're teaching something in the latest version of django and somebody's like well why isn't this in django 1.5 like everyone uses django 1.5 nobody uses django 3.1 i know you're laughing but it actually happened for a really long time and myself included with python so python 2.7 and python 3 that transition was a nightmare python developers say it that's why python 3 to 4 is not going to be that big of a deal python 4-5 is not going to be that big of a deal but that huge change in python people are still using python 2.7 and i mean i was part of that problem for sure because i'm like in my mind so this is going back a few years now but in my mind my apple was was shipping production you know computers with python 2.7 built into it by default right so i was like hey if it's good enough for apple should be good enough for all of us um but but you know obviously i don't fully agree with that anymore you should be using python 3.5 and above probably more likely python 3.6 and above but for a long time i was adamantly fighting that so we're lucky that we do have those students that are pushing for that latest version and i just have to reiterate just what you said whatever course you're taking that version of django just use what's in the version of the course i would also say that for javascript and and any other programming language use the language that's in the course because there are certainly changes but usually once you understand the concepts those changes mean nothing to you they're just really easy to switch over so yeah yeah i don't know i think it's definitely um probably again thanks to the the django core team for just making it that easy for us because i'm sure they're probably i mean i'm not a big angular developer but i've heard that that's been a nightmare as well just the versions there jumping between the different versions and then this was bad then now everyone's saying i'll go back to six or go back to five or whatever it is um so i'm glad we don't have that problem yeah and the angular things are good good another good example that's very similar to python 2 to python 3. angularjs or angular 1 to angular 2 i lived through that and also teaching it as well it was it was very very frustrating but angular 2 is way better so so a lot of times it is for the better but yeah like i think this is why people love django too right so if you're working with it long enough you're like oh my gosh django has all these cool new features asynchronous django how cool is that that it's now part of django 3.1 um or maybe even 3.0 i can't remember when it was introduced but um like that's amazing but also how cool is it that my code from django 1.8 i probably have to change it a little bit but my code from then still works today like like it's it's it's so fun so thank you django developers [Laughter] so okay so on coding for entrepreneurs you you started making courses to teach django and a whole bunch of other technologies but the part that i find interesting is that you've got quite a few courses on machine learning so i've seen like this keras and tensorflow opencv you've done quite a few courses on those technologies what made you interested in that side of of technologies particularly ai yeah um well i think if you work in software uh at any level and if you read any technology news you know that ai is gonna be the future of everything um and the reason for this is because it's data driven okay so at least now so that that really sparked my interest i mean i get students asking me things all the time so my students definitely challenge what i should know they ask me things on the left field sometimes that i don't know the answer to um because i can't you know i can't know everything machine learning was a combination of that i had my own interest in it i can't wait for self-driving cars it's going to fundamentally change everything i think self-driving cars are driven through ai um i when i was before i had a family and i was married i really wanted to have a tiny house so there's this like popular trend in the u.s where people kind of build their own house on on a equivalent of the the semi-truck containers you know those big shipping containers um you build a house roughly that size it's called a tiny house um and i was i was like oh i really want a tiny house and i wanted to drive itself like that that would be amazing anyway so that's a diversion um so machine learning and ai is incredibly popular because of all of the potentials for it because it's also driven through data so to me programming is we assume how the data should be used right we make a lot of assumptions on how we should control that data in many cases it's it's correct right these aren't bad assumptions but we assume that like people are gonna want a hundred what was 140 characters how did twitter know that yeah you know that was an arbitrary constraint at the time because facebook i think around the same time facebook was out and you could write long posts you didn't have to do that wordpress was definitely out you could write long posts like why is it that twitter decided that well it was an arbitrary constraint that they did to control the flow of that data now that was through testing and all this stuff um but what if you were able to take a step back and just take a bunch of data and then make a prediction on what that arbitrary constraint should be and to me that's what ai is there's this intuition that a lot of developers get and entrepreneurs get that comes to build things like facebook and twitter which i still want to cultivate that intuition myself but what ai does is just take it doesn't even have to be a necessarily a massive amount of data today but some amount of data to make a prediction of what should happen and to me that's incredibly interesting because if you start building django applications or any web application and it gets any traction whatsoever you start to get all of this data like how do you decide what course to teach next well if all you know is django really well it's probably going to be another django course right or if you look at patterns on stack overflow for example a place where a lot of developers come to ask questions you can start to see additional patterns on there right i was lucky to identify that python was starting to game steam django was starting to gain steam people buying courses were also starting to gain steam all of those things are happening at the same time for me but what if i had a algorithm that was constantly looking for those trends that i decided what i thought was important or where to look and then it could actually give me actual proper recommendations with some sort of probability that those things are going to happen you know right i i can't give you that answer right now but i do know that ai or machine learning specifically is a critical piece of doing that um so so naturally i had to get into it you know okay so so when it comes to the algorithms like you're saying how much of what you need to know is mathematically focused so like how how much math do you need to understand to actually get benefit from learning you know keras or tensorflow or are we basically just learning how to use the apis that are created by other developers this is a really good question and i think it's about depth of knowledge right so i actually would equate it to how much of database technology do you need to know to use django um do you know sql how well do you know sql to run django um i i i don't know sql that well i mean i know it but if i was up against a sql developer they would they would beat me hands down no no no doubt in my mind about it um i think machine learning and math is very similar to that you can use the built-in apis keras makes it easy fast ai makes it easy or easier i should say to just spin up a convolutional neural network or some sort of neural network to do some machine learning um scikit-learn is another one that makes it easy that isn't a neural network but it's other kinds of machine learning they have a bunch of examples on there as well so yeah you don't necessarily have to use or know a lot of math to actually use neural networks or machine learning um you you might have to know just generally what's going on uh but you know the media loved calling it a black box if you want to uncover what that black box is and how that actually works you absolutely 100 need to know the math to do it the math is not incredibly complicated uh but once you start abstracting it and making it into a neural network it starts to get a lot more complicated because there's so many tiny little calculations that are happening that it's almost impossible for a single human to do those same calculations in a reasonable amount of time because we're talking about thousands or millions or potentially hundreds of millions of calculations that are happening uh and which is why we need to use gpus which we could talk about if you want but yeah yeah i think you you tweeted something along the lines of like you were relearning calculus i don't know how long ago that was but was that because you were going down this path of machine learning or what was that for yes absolutely so um in college i took calculus and linear algebra i think linear average one of mine had been in high school i don't remember the the the trajectory for me uh exactly calculus 2 a little bit of high school um but yeah i bought i bought two textbooks that are used in universities one of them i think i i actually used the same textbook in my university it was like eight bucks on on amazon which was great but then the linear algebra one i couldn't find one that was was um cheap enough to to use so i bought one that was like 90 bucks by gilbert strand i think his name is um he has he has a youtube he has all of his stuff on youtube as well uh but something i learned from three blue one brown uh the youtube channel fantastic youtube channel that that teaches math um he actually mentioned if you want to actually learn and understand these concepts really well don't watch my videos like he says that he has three million subscribers he said don't watch my videos buy a textbook and do the problem set in the back if you can do those problem set then you come back to my videos and it it might clarify some unknowns that you have on there and i'm like oh my gosh that is brilliant that is absolutely how i learned as well you would sit in in university and in classes and the teacher would lecture and they would go incredibly fast or at least it felt that way um so you're like frantically writing notes and all this stuff my real learning for calculus especially was not in the classroom it was sitting with the book and trying to do my homework and struggling through that process you know doing the questions that are in the back of a chapter and really solving it and even if i had to look up the answers which i believe our books had the answers in there too because checking your work was critical with that that's why i bought those textbooks is to to really re-hone my skills in those areas because i definitely learned them but you know unfortunately when i was younger my learning was a lot more like okay i need to pass this class it wasn't truly understanding it was like i learned enough to pass the class um and it's part of the reason i don't have any i don't actually have quizzes or tests anywhere for for django or any of the things i teach is because i don't think you should be learning to the test not to say that tests are bad but you shouldn't be learning to to the test itself so i had that problem that's why i bought those textbooks and that's that's definitely why i'm going deeper into machine learning uh andrew andrew uh andre excuse me carpathi the guy who runs tesla's ai um like like talk about talking about somebody who i would love to just take his knowledge and put in my head uh not not to like take on tesla or anything like that because i have a lot of interesting ideas myself that i want to see through um he's he's like one of those guys that it would be amazing to take that same with andrew trask andrew trask wrote in my opinion the the best way to get the nuts and bolts of machine or neural networks from a math perspective using numpy in a very approachable manner uh but but to be fair it's really the only one i gave a lot of time to uh but but it's um it's called grocking deep learning uh it's it's a really really good book if you want to know the math side of things if you don't want to know the math side of things fastai uh and jeremy howard's um youtube videos and courses on fast.ai those are amazing he he goes into that depth to some degree as well but he he also admits that he's not super proficient in math but he does have um like like uh literally cutting edge results with a lot of uh the projects he works on and here's a guy who's openly saying that he's not necessarily that good in math so hopefully that answers your question no it does it does i mean yeah there's so much there um i i mean the book i'll put that in the show notes so people can get hold of that but yeah i agree uh probably the majority of people myself included learned from struggling through something i'm sure that applied not only to your calculus learning but through programming as well i mean it's only going to really sink in once you start building your own project yeah absolutely so so then going forward you're quite set on ai are there any other technologies that you are kind of looking uh to learn now like blockchain or no code uh other kind of groups or just programming languages yeah good question um that there's a lot of answers to that um but i think after what my long-term trajectory i don't have a timeline for this i probably should add one but my long-term goal is to really look at any problem and be like can i solve this with ai and actually be able to do it right the answer is probably going to be yes uh to can you solve this with ai this problem the other the the biggest unknown for me is like if i can actually do it so so i don't know that answer but i definitely want to play around with it more so the next part of that would be robotics robotics and electronics how do you actually combine um hardware that can move with intelligent movement or intelligent decision making um like i have a roomba we we don't use it anymore because we have wood floors and doesn't work that well on wood floors but when i had carpet floors roomba was really cool we gave it a nickname and all that we called it jiggly my wife and i and and we're just a joke thing because it jiggles everywhere and it runs into things you know it's jiggly um so there's this weird relationship that i had with my first really intelligent robot even though it's not that intelligent but it's it's an intelligent robot we gave it a name right do you give your alexa or your syria name no they gave one for you which is i think is a travesty we should be able to name these things because then it gives us that much more of an attachment to it and and there's nothing like robots that do that in my opinion um so i i definitely think i i definitely i i'm pretty sure i heard a talk ted talk about that specifically but but if you think about that what we're gonna what we're gonna see once self-driving comes on is yeah these big cars that move humans are gonna be here everywhere but also we'll see a lot smaller form factors that are self-driving perhaps they're self-driving motorcycles as or as how we think of them but they're going to be like our own little buddies that we say hey hey jiggly go to the store and grab me some some uh whatever you know what i mean like and then they come back and bring you some oreos and you're like yes oreos thank you you know what i mean like um that's totally gonna happen and i don't know when it's gonna happen but it's that it's that like next phase in technology that takes the intelligence that a lot of ai researchers are working on and putting it into something that moves on our behalf and i want to be a part of at least controlling or understanding not necessarily building everything myself but understanding what goes into that uh for my own robots um so so that's what i'm really excited about and at some point i'll have to like just like work with somebody who's brilliant in those two areas to really to really download their information like like maybe i can convince andre carpathy or or jeremy howard or andrew trask or or all those guys or andrew ing from another another great machine learning guy uh like maybe someday i'll be able to convince these guys to teach me everything that they know about this stuff but uh for now i'm just gonna keep going through the material that they put out learn as much as i can and then i'll move into the robotics things after that um i'm going blank on his name but but um lex freeman recently interviewed uh one of the under actuated robotics professors um maybe like a month ago a month and a half ago like fascinating fascinating guy with robotics um he's another one i would i would love to learn from at some point but you know there's only so many hours in the day because i still have to do my damage unfortunately yeah yeah but that sounds good thanks yeah um i wanted to answer the the software side of things of to learn um yeah i i recently read a tweet that said i've been using javascript i didn't write this tweet somebody else did i've been using recently using or i've been learning javascript since it was released like literally since the day was released this guy said he's been learning javascript that's like that's got to be like 20 years right maybe more than that um and javascript's one of those things i want to get better at i i think i know it really well and i could probably work only in javascript and do okay um but that's another thing that i just want to fully master uh for sure like i i feel that way a lot of times about python but then sometimes students come in and say hey what about this and i'm like whoa that's a good question um those things are always humbling and great to happen so those those are the obvious ones i want to get better at but then also like go i want to check out that rust julia um give those some some more time uh with javascript i didn't mention node.js and learning more about all of the intricacies with node.js that are beyond web applications um there's just there's just so much stuff you know it's really just javascript and then every back end and every other tool there is yeah like like kubernetes and devops things and and docker like i know those things pretty well i can build production applications with them but somebody that works in kubernetes all day every day would would just floor me with the skills that they have you know um so i want to get better at that and i i've recently purchased all right sorry i didn't actually purchase it the guys at touringpai um turing pi is a compute module for a a board so you can have cluster of raspberry pi's all together really really cool so that's that's another segue into me learning and using kubernetes a lot more as well as the hardware side of things that i mentioned with robotics raspberry pi's are really good for that so luckily i got a turn pi board and all these compute modules that they sent to me so i'm going to be playing around with that a lot more doing some classes on that too so yeah it's just really it's really like a combination of what what i think is popular and worth learning and also where my effort goes right just because i'm interested in it doesn't mean that i'm going to spend very much time in it so i try to do more of the things that i spend time in um yeah so yeah yeah it's no that sounds interesting i i'll wait for when you make the course on robotics and then i'll take it up from there yeah sounds good man i appreciate it i uh that's all that's that's years that's years that's years away though i would say at least years because it's complicated it's not like doing robots well like even with my own experimentation doing it well is hard to do um and even just doing it basically is hard to do um but of course there's robotics roboticists that are like but no that's not true uh but you know to each his own yeah yeah well okay so i just want to go back to the ai part because you're you're wearing a cap right now no one can see but it says tight.ai and so do you want to talk about that project yeah yeah absolutely that sounds great um so i wear this hat as a reminder to myself to continue with machine learning and ai um it is about the project but that project to me is like me publicly putting myself on the line that i'm going to be actively working on machine learning and ai outside of teaching right so tight ai is a good example of that i had gr i i had and have grand visions for tiny eye most of which i spent a ton of time developing out this really complicated system that made it hopefully easier for developers to get into deploying machine learning applications and all this stuff but unfortunately that complicated stuff wasn't easy enough for anyone to just jump into right so i decided to scale back quite a bit and actually make a tool that makes it a lot easier to just make data sets image data sets specifically it's very similar in feel to google photos or apple photos but it's designed specifically to make it easy for anyone to make an image data set and image data sets themselves are how you build computer vision applications or at least the fundamental part of how you build computer vision applications so if you wanted to classify the difference between a hot dog and not a hot dog you need to create the data set that actually does that right i'm kind of trying to make a tongue-in-cheek joke but the point is that you pick things that you care about like whether it's two things or a hundred things and you start to annotate or pick the regions that are interesting to you and you use that to actually make an ai model that can then decipher that for you i think a very practical way to do this is on your own django application or your own web application and you want to actually allow users to upload photos right how are you going to moderate those photos how are you going to make sure that they're photos that you want your users to see now that's up to you you can let you you can make it the wild west and let anyone upload anything right right it does that but perhaps you want to have sensitive filters for whatever it is perhaps it's nudity right so reddit does this it you go on reddit well i don't know this personally hahaha but you go on reddit and uh if you go to something that's not suited for work it will flag that not only is it a subreddit but but also um specifically images if they're not suited for work they'll be blurred out and you'll say are you 18 or over right that that's a way of classifying that image whether or not it is suited for work or it it isn't right um and and the only way you can do this as far as i know is by building your own data set you don't have to use your own data set but that's where a lot of the value comes in is by building your own data set and then training a convolutional neural network that turns into a predictive machine that can guess when your user uploads a an image or a video but but let's just keep it easy an image it will tell you whether or not it's suited for work as denoted by what you said you lay out those parameters based off of your data set and that's where tide ai comes in so it's it's a way to actually make those image data sets um as easy as possible for non-technical people but then also packages it up in a way that's a lot easier for technical people people that actually know how to build machine learning applications from a data set itself so that's where it is right now but like i said i have a lot of ambitions for where can go you mentioned no code earlier there are a lot of tools out there for machine learning and no code um tide ai i think can fit in there somewhere that allows anybody to then designate this uh like you know this image data set whether it's suited for work or not whether it's a hot dog or not you know pick an example um you can get anyone to do it when you say anyone i actually mean the experts in that field um so a better analogy for why you'd use tied ai is actually like a pizza place right so um if you owned a pizza shop and you're like i want to use ai in my workflow somewhere where do i use it so my recommendation would be to take a ton of pictures of the product that you have maybe before and after it goes in the oven after would probably be even better than before but having both sets is probably a good idea let's just let's just stick with after so after it comes out of the oven what you want to have happen is a certain quality so quality from one to five say so one star two star three star four star five star uh papa john did an interview on uh the guy who who made the the business papa john's his uh his name he goes by papa john anyway so he did an interview on the h3 i think it's h3h3 productions podcast um really interesting interview but he talked about this quality score that they gave to all their pieces at papa john's who knows if they still do it i don't think he's there anymore there's been all this drama that's why he's on that podcast but they gave this quality score and i'm like wow why couldn't the local pizza shop do this well a big part of the reason is they don't have the systems in place to do it so a local pizza shop if they take all these pictures and annotate them that's where you start tide ai helps you with annotating that part of things so you can say hey this pizza is a one star thing how do you actually annotate that or who more specifically annotates it that should be the expert that should be the one who cares about it most that should be the owner of that in papa john's case it's papa john he's the one who set that precedent for everybody else he looks at any pizza and he can give it a rating whether it's from papa john's or not he can rate it based on the papa john's scale and he has this like really keen eye for it that even maybe even his next senior person doesn't have that same keen eye so the question is how do you take that expert knowledge and turn it into software the answer is is machine learning and ai so um and in tight ai will take the expert so they don't actually have to learn how to do all the machine learning ai all they have to do is tag a bunch of images much like they would on facebook or or apple photos or whatever they tag all these images themselves now that's a data set that's ready to be trained and you can actually use that in some sort of production environment so going back to like what i recommend to a pizza place or really anyone for that matter uh that that's interested in building data sets is is at the very least regardless of tide ai the very least uh is just to build a bunch of images because images are the easiest one to get into if you're a beginner build a bunch of images and tag them with things that you're interested in about them you can draw boxes around them if you want or you can just separate them into folders and say these are these this folder has a bunch of images of hot dogs this folder has a bunch of images of not hot dogs or this folder is images of one star pizzas this folders images of two star pizzas and replace those things with whatever you care about um that that would be a good way to like start getting into doing the ai thing is at least separating out your images and then working with someone who knows the ai stuff to actually train it and i think we all fit in this category very broadly right there's a lot of things that we are experts in that other people are not um so a good example for web developers i heard about this one from jeremy howard and fast ai the way they did this image classification with um with the web was actually monitoring where clicks were going so doing a heat map of where clips clicks go and then labeling each heat map right so every time a user has a session they can create this heat map of where their mouse goes um so essentially tracking where their mouse goes and then you do that for thousands of users and then you classify each heat map because it's an image right so the heat map itself is an image of what these users have done you classify this heat map each one of them into let's say 10 categories one being a customer that's going to leave right away 10 being the best customer ever and then everyone in between and then on your actual application you can make predictions on what that customer is going to be and perhaps if it's leaning towards the best customer ever if it's like a five or six or seven or eight you might actually have this live chat pop up and say hey this is so and so you're the founder i wanted to chat with you i'm here to answer any questions and you actually physically be there to answer questions or even jump on a phone call to help solve that there's no other better way than than to do it with ai because you want to help parse all those things out so that's another example of of the promise of ai that that like i think about these things quite a bit and um what makes me really really excited and and i i hope that tide ai will will be a part of that but to me it's like a much grander a grander thing that's going on with with ai in general so yeah yeah it did i mean the ui from i haven't played with it but the from the pictures it looks really user friendly thank you so and it does kind of look like a no code tool so it does look like something that someone who just owns a business and wants to like you said bring aspects of of ai into their business could do that really easily using this tool yeah well the the thing is something else i didn't mention is like one of the things about data sets is you can't get data that has already happened if you've never captured it right um that's why big data is like such a big term all the time but the pizza example that's a really good low-hanging fruit for somebody who owns a restaurant they can take a picture of literally every dish that comes out you don't have to label it you don't have to do anything just get a smartphone that's connected to icloud or google cloud or whatever and take pictures of everything that comes out there because you never know what you're going to do with that data of course you could also do it with the things that go into it but but that's like something that everybody can do right now and it's like in five years if you take pictures every day for five years and then in five years this is no code tool that makes it incredibly easy to just train a model from all that data you'll at least have that data um so that's that's one of the key parts that i wanted to emphasize there too is like start getting that data now with whatever tool you're doing if you're interested in bringing ai to your to your system and it'll also help you think about what are the things that i really care about what's the most important aspect that i can add to my business now and i would imagine quality control is one of those one of those like low-hanging fruit things that you could do too so yeah no it's super interesting um thank you so yeah i mean i mean everyone who's listening clearly if you if you're interested in ai at all you know exactly where to go so but um so i wanted to ask you on the python ecosystem side of things uh this is more on the web development front you did a course on masonite which is for people who don't know it's like a much uh i want to say less popular but still very popular python web framework i think it's got about a thousand five hundred stars on github and you actually had the founder or the creator of it uh joseph mancuso who did the the course with you yep so i'm interested that project is is very i'm interested in where what the future of that project is so when you were going through mace night as a project how did you find it in terms of the learning experience and dev experience coming from from django yeah um that's a good question so i haven't given masonite enough time to give you a full honest of review of masonite to be honest with you joseph hit me up and was like hey i'd love to make a course and see if we could do something and i thought that was really interesting i do think it's great when founders of projects want to be actively involved in the learning of that and joseph did that and i think there's so many features that they built that are incredible in the sense that they've really thought through what it's like to build modern web applications and in taking into consideration things like cookie cutter where you just have a few commands and it will add features as you need them um or it'll give you best practices right out of the gates and or it'll give you aws support for for your static files out of the gates um i would love to see that in django at some point maybe um i'll give the reason for maybe in a moment but um masonite is i would actually say that it's it's almost like a nice in between of django and like flask right um potentially it's a it's it's it's going to go up against django um but it there is a learning curve for sure and that learning curve is part of the reason i haven't given it enough time to really say hey this is these are the use cases that you'll definitely use masonite over all of these tools um i i would actually say that in general like you should pick up the tools that really resonate with you and learn them through your full like like give it their proper due if it resonates with you so masonite early on it did i was like wow this is really cool this is a good idea uh but since i know django so well and i know flask so well i often go back to those things but but that's for me not everyone's like that so masonite was one of those things that i'm like oh this is great this is going to be really good for a lot of people that might want to learn something different than just django but also the fact that the founder or one of the developers on the team i'm not sure if he actually created it himself but i do know that he's a big part of the team um and he actually reached out to me and he was like hey i want to do this and we had some back and forth on how to actually do the recording i think you did a great job on it um definitely worth watching um i i hope to have them teach some more as well and and i can i can publish some things on that so um hopefully that answers your question i i think it's a promising project that's gonna going to have some legs over time so yeah no that's that's where i was gonna lead to is i mean there's like you said there's flask but there's also uh fast api which is also grown significantly uh i mean i think it's at like 20 000 stars on github now which is quite a lot and i find the projects that i think will survive are the ones that have the best documentation the ones that teach the beginners the best so i'm interested do you see a future where all these python frameworks can co-exist um yeah yeah i actually think so because um i want the best idea to win um and i think like fast api is a good example of something that's really coming up against flask um and fast api is built on another web framework called starlet right so it's not like it's fast api by itself uh where flask is a lot more by itself so to me the best api the best ideas should always win um and perhaps masonite is the best idea it's just still really early perhaps fast api is the best idea it's still really early um to me django is still the best idea but that's relevant to the project that's happening right so the vast majority of the projects i want to build need users so django's the easiest way to do that for me right um i can do it with flask i can do it with fast api it just takes me a little bit longer to do it because i know django almost like it's the back of my hand um but whatever it ends up being i shouldn't say that i don't know it nearly as well some people some people just know it like in their blood you know um but uh fest api flask aio http um masonite um i mean there's probably something i'm forgetting starlight like this or not starlight um starlet excuse me i've been watching the boys way too much um all of these things are really cool because what they're actually doing in my opinion is they're pushing what python web development should be right so i hope that django takes ideas from flask fast api aio hdp and masonite and all the other ones and maybe even python requests and django rest framework like they should all be sort of sharing the best things that are happening all the best ideas and if at some point they all start to look a lot alike um that's okay because they're always gonna probably have their own place of what they excel at and some of it might be just dealing with legacy code right so in django's case maybe that's the case maybe it's always going to be all of these older applications they're just helping them stay up to date whereas masonite or fast api maybe those are more of the cutting edge ones or maybe those are just for micro services for for uh machine learning applications or you know data like um but to me the battle is to push forward the best idea for applications while also having an opinion about what that best idea is right so django has an opinion on how you should build web applications um whether that they stated directly this is our opinion it is like all of their api choices were opinions that they made and i and i it's my opinion that they are amazing choices um but what things like that aren't full feature that aren't batteries included like django they allow for other developers to come in early on and say this is our opinion about how models should be handled or really database transactions should be handled or this is how we think uh templates should be rendered or we should have actually an api by default with fast api that's that's kind of their thing it's like it's it's an api by default it's not rendering html templates by default um so so those opinions i think help shift all of us with our web development and all that and also with with django django itself pushes javascript developers hopefully to push more for you know things like you said redwood js or adonis js it pushes more for the batteries included things on javascript side as well but then vice versa the the unpacking of objects in javascript hopefully that comes to how you unpack it in python i don't know how to execute that because i'm not that good of a developer but i will say that these ideas should be pushed forward um but if you're learning you go with what resonates with you i would love for you to take all of my courses on django and just tell me in a couple years like oh my gosh django's the best and i i did all these cool things with it that i love hearing those things right but but it's not for everyone right if somebody else says like hey i listened to your podcast with matt on just django and i went and started doing fast api and i never touched django but thanks for saying that i should just stick with what i did like that is also a win because it's pushing our developer community forward because we need more developers that's that's what it comes back down to we need more people thinking about how to solve software that have their own opinions about it too so hopefully it answers your question no it does i mean well said i agree i would like them all to win uh probably all that lands happening is like you said their design choices will target certain groups of developers and that's why flask and django coexist right now they're both on 60 000 stars clearly well valued projects in the community and they're both here to stay at least for right now so yeah and and i would also say that stars aren't a great indicator of how much they're used sure but i'll tell you the correlation hopefully but i will tell you that i recently starred django i didn't start seven eight years ago when i should have i just recently did it so um but i've downloaded it myself probably tens of thousands of times right for all my different projects when i deploy it all like so i think i think if we can get the download metrics as well um yeah but stars are a good indicator of something that's doing well but you know there there are also like fraudulent projects on github that have a lot of stars um because unfortunately there's teachers that are out there when i say fraudulent i mean they literally copy somebody else completely copy somebody else without attribution um and then put it on github and they get a lot of stars so it's sort of tricky to say what stars are if they're valuable or not but certainly at the 50 60 70 000 level it's it's probably a very valuable thing you know what i mean yeah yeah um yeah so okay so there's some things on coding for entrepreneurs from the entrepreneurial side that i think would be interesting to talk about so the the first thing is in terms of how you marketed coding for entrepreneurs um i remember you talked about using reddit and obviously you've got the youtube channel uh particularly on the youtube side of things i think what's tricky maybe you can you can disagree is when for people like us who we make courses that are available for free on youtube and then we make courses that are premium and available in some sort of other service of our own and it's kind of this balance of when you post a course on youtube you want it to have value you want it to you know have an outcome and you want the end the person to get actual value when they finish this video but at the same time you also don't want to make it that they get all the information and they never consider your premium courses you still want to use it as a funnel at the end of the day so i'm curious how you've uh what you could you've taken away from that if you've thought about it at all what are your thoughts on on that kind of balance of posting to youtube and funneling sure um so it actually goes to something more fundamental about what i strive to do is i want to be i want to have at least a thousand true fans so whatever i can do to cultivate those thousand true fans um if you're not familiar with this tim ferriss talks about a lot uh it's an article written by kevin kelly it's definitely worth a read it's like maybe 10 paragraphs but the gist is if you can convince a thousand people in the world to be your true fan as in they show up to as many if not all of the live events as you possibly have uh they watch every course you release they read every book that you release they buy every course you release all of those things um your true fans are gonna be the ones that do that and they're also gonna be the ones that tell their friends hey you really gotta check this out hey when are you gonna actually invest the time to learn this right learn django or whatever um so to me it's about cultivating those fans right um so that is the goal number one and how do you actually do that uh for me early on to get some traction coding for entrepreneurs the name itself resonated with a lot of people for several reasons one there were the non-technical people the entrepreneurial people who knew they should learn how to code like they felt it in their bones that they should take that time um and then there's the other people that the somewhat technical that knew they wanted to be more entrepreneurial um and also elevate their skills that's where i was right that was that was exactly where i was so i fit in that audience really really well um and so i'm a part of the cfe audience right i'm a i'm just probably the most active member of it uh hopefully i am at least um so you've got you've got this this this thing that you're like hey i want to cultivate this thousand true fans so how do you do that well i think one way matt is what you're doing here is is doing podcasts i i'm honored to be your second guest um but the more you do these things you hopefully are gonna be parsing and helping the people who watch just django justjango and watch this podcast to really get into what you do matt like your event view of things your opinion um and the things that you're willing to put out there for the people you're you're trying to help right and hopefully it's those thousand true fans because if a thousand people are paying you a hundred dollars a year that's a hundred thousand dollars a year that you're making that is a great living in 99 of the world right that's an amazing living in 99 of the world that's probably a unfathomable unfathomable living in 90 percent of the world if not 95 percent of the world right um it but but even if you think about it convincing a thousand people to spend a hundred dollars a year um isn't that many people it's not 10 million people it's not a hundred thousand uh it's certainly more than a hundred but you could probably think of at least 50 people right off the bat that you might be able to help with um with with whatever they're doing even if they're not taking your product or service or whatever but you might be able to help them so if you're learning how to do django for example you might be able to help your friend that is a dentist that needs a scheduling application or something like that right um so to me youtube was about cultivating that uh reddit when i first posted on reddit i haven't posted much since because i didn't want to spam people i didn't want to make it about me because reddit's not like that um but i resonated with people early on that fit that the group that audience that i was going after and the service that i provided with that reddit i mean i gave away free coupons i just made it really easy for people to join me um in this in this mission of like continuously getting better at software and helping our own projects move forward by challenging what we know um so a lot of people joined me on that mission and that i think was what i focused on and the reason i even launched a youtube channel wasn't actually meant for a marketing funnel it was meant as a single place for everyone wherever i put the course to get the absolute basics that was how to install things and also how to build an mvp landing page how to actually use models and views and all the things that build up on django that's what it initially started out as and then i started getting a little bit more traction there more subscribers happening and people asking for other kinds of things so that i'm like hey what if i actually released a full course there that was even more full featured and and what if i did that uh and then it sort of snowballed uh into into what it is today where i have a lot more content on there and i will i do agree with you it's actually tricky to to move from giving a lot of value on youtube to actually having full courses on your website or wherever you want to sell them it is tricky but if you have those true fans that are like hey you just released a project on x now you're releasing a project on why well ideally your project on why or whatever your next project is is different enough of a project that there's a lot of nuance in there that even if you're teaching roughly the same things the nuance itself is where the value is going to be it's gonna the value is gonna be in like that one or two percent of that course and that's what the people who are really really dedicated to learning this stuff hopefully are fans of yours but at the very least they're very dedicated and they are the ones who jump in and will purchase these courses from you um and you will help them push their skills forward because like courses are an investment in yourself in my opinion um and they're probably the best thing that you can do is invest in yourself um so you can help everyone around you that that's that's kind of how i feel about it um and also when a hundred dollars ten dollars five dollars a thousand dollars if any dollar amount is coming out of your bank that is now a reminder to you that you need to make it worth it right that you need to put in some effort there youtube unfortunately only does the effort part and i want to reward people who will put the effort in that legitimately cannot afford to buy courses when i say legitimately meaning like twenty dollars spending twenty dollars is like what they spend uh a week for something that is critical like like rent for example i don't want you spending that on a course like you shouldn't be spending that in a course you should be spending the time the free time that you have in the library the modern library that is youtube um you should spend it there go and be a freelancer for a little bit make some money then take the courses then come back and actually spend the money that that you've earned from the time that you've put in but unfortunately the time that you put in is going to be a lot whether it's a course or not it's going to be a time investment that you need to put in so i think i think it definitely is tricky and if you're starting out today you it's it's really hard to just come out of the gates and say hey i'm going to start charging for these courses but you absolutely can do that you just need it i think it's just being very very clear to the people you're selling to the value that they get and also the the what you'll do if they don't get that value so you can give it right back to them um because i'm trying to help the people who are really hungry to help and i don't mean by hungry with food i mean they're they're actively wanting to to to get their skills up to that next level whatever that means um if you want so if you want more of my time to help you there that starts to cost me time that i can't just redistribute to everybody else right so matt you and i talking here means that i'm not making any more courses it means that i'm not podcasting on my own it means that i'm not writing blogs it means i'm not doing research it means a lot of things right so i value my time a lot but but part of the reason i'm doing this is because i know that there's a lot of people that both you and i can benefit from hearing this conversation whether it's even even if it's only 10 people and those 10 people take the time to really change their lives i've now exponentially made those lives better hopefully or we both have together um that that would be amazing right uh but what i don't do especially on youtube and even more so recently is i do not start to engage with the the pleas for help um because it takes a lot of time the please for help are great for the questions that i want to answer in future content for sure but as far as like hey i don't know how to do x please tell me how to fix x well if you do the work you will absolutely know how to fix x and i realize you're probably running into some frustrations and to me that's where a lot of the courses come in so if you purchase the course courses on my website especially i'm much more active there on helping you diagnose these problems and solve them because you are putting not only the time in but you're also putting in a financial investment you're you're actually paying for it so i want to give extra value to you by answering those questions so so so i don't actually look at youtube as this funnel i i don't think of things in the content marketing i could probably make a lot more money if i started thinking of things how content marketers do in this term of funneling and having these automated emails and upselling and all doing all this stuff i definitely probably could make a like maybe 10 times as much money maybe maybe maybe even more than that if that was my mindset but that's not been my mindset it was about cultivating um those thousand true fans as one and then two really hopefully helping people who are actively seeking to get better and maybe don't have the funds to actually spend the money for those investments so that's how i think about it um in general yep no i mean i mean there's so much to to go through i think the fact that you mentioned the thousand true fans is really good because i also i i love that concept and i also try to utilize that in what i'm doing um i think like you when you started you don't think too much about it you're just like oh let me just put it out there and just put it somewhere in one place and then over time i think you probably or maybe more myself start to overthink it more than you did when you started uh but what she said in terms of of the thousand true fans is that at least to me it sounds like you're really trying to attach yourself personally your name your face to coding for entrepreneurs because it's a lot it's got to be a lot more personal because at least like you're saying you want them to be fans of you yeah is that exclusive to coding for entrepreneurs are you or do you think you can have a thousand true fans of a brand would you think this really is a more a more personal thing um yeah that's a good question i mean it's actually hard to answer because um coding for entrepreneurs itself is basically justin mitchell's coding class right um it's just it resonates with a particular audience i probably need to have more guest instructors i probably should move it beyond just me from a business perspective right um and also to help my students as well like you think of some of the other platforms that teach software they have a lot of different instructors and that's often what's best for the students so it ends up being a lot more like hey this is my personal class these are the things i'm doing and i do struggle with this as far as is this really just justin mitchell's class now or is this really coding for entrepreneurs um and it comes back to my allocation of time uh do i spend time trying to find and hire other instructors or do i spend time learning and building better content for the students that i have to me it's always been about building for those students maybe at the detriment of my offering of course absolutely right so like i started in 2013 coding from first started in 2013. there i think um there's been a number of projects that started in 2013 that are phenomenally successful today i think uber probably started in 2012 2011. uber's well who knows where the future of uber and they've definitely had their problems but you know what uber is you know what i mean like everyone knows what uber is um and it was and can be still a multi-billion dollar company um and all of that is because they built a team and they built systems and they did all this stuff um that also is really really interesting but to me i i don't really want to manage a team of a thousand people i don't want to have ten thousand lives that i'm responsible for i'm responsible for four lives myself and my wife and my two children that is what i am driven to be responsible for like if i go beyond that um i might lose my hair you know or go great like i look at someone like elon musk and i don't i don't understand how he does it um maybe he has and he probably does he probably has people that love managing other people and perhaps that's the key is to find somebody who actually does like doing all those things to partner with and they just handle that stuff yourself or themselves and you just trust them and just build a business that way um so so from the business side of things there's a lot of things that can be improved um so yeah it's definitely turned into a lot more of like this is just mitchell's thing um and in some cases people just resonate with coding french members and then they get to know me and hopefully they become my fan and then they just want to do everything that i do um with me you know and but i think a lot of it is still about coding for entrepreneurs i have a hundred subscribers on the justin mitchell youtube channel i have a lot more than that on the youtube the coding entrepreneur's youtube channel so yeah it still is about coding entrepreneurs and you know maybe someday i'll have somebody replace me i don't know when that would be because i love learning things and teaching helps me learn things and then on top of that i also love helping other people because i will say that one of the best things to hear from is like man i was really in the dumps i found your courses i learned a lot i have a job my life has changed thank you so much it happens sometimes i'm not i'm not trying to brag about it or anything because it's like i'm sure a lot of teachers get this stuff but when it does happen it's like wow this is this is like this makes it all worth it regardless of how i did that month or how i did that year you know um and especially when i take time off this this is something that i've also learned is um are people actively bugging you for more stuff um as a marketer pushing things down people's throats is never fun but if they're begging you for it that is that is what you want right you want people saying hey why isn't this in the newest version i really want this course but it's not in the newest version why you know you definitely want those things or hey you haven't posted anything on youtube in months where have you been are you okay i hope you're doing well please post more stuff blah blah blah like those things happen and it's it's like like it's it's amazing you know because because for me i mean i get i get lonely i get i get annoyed i get i get depressed or well maybe not depressed is probably not the right word but sad maybe all of that stuff happens to me too with work and when you have those fans even if they're not the true fans in the term or the definition but if you have those fans or you've cultivated some sort of connection with people around the world that that often can bring you out of it you know like i've been doing a lot more live chats lately and i i highly recommend it to anyone who teaches even if you're uncomfortable live because you get that one-to-one connection like what we're doing here uh i mean sure it's just people typing on on the screen but you get a connection with your audience like you've never had before even if it's five people even if it's your mom and your two uncles and your two aunts whatever you know what i mean like you get this connection that you're starting to build with them but realistically um even if you just have a small audience doing that will help propel you and remind you that we're all in this together right we're all trying to actively improve our lives together um and and that goes back to like how do i find the people who are actively trying to improve their lives in a way that i can contribute to like it's super meaningful to me right and i see this directly with my children um i i like they're they're not customers of mine i'm their customer i do everything for them you know what i mean like and i'll continue to do that until the day i die it's like i'm gonna get choked up about it um but this this idea that you should get something out of somebody well that's not why you give that's not why you teach is to get something out of somebody it's much more about you give with no expectation in return and then when you do things that cost money because we all have to pay rent we all have to pay for food and hopefully we can live an amazing life a rich life where um stress goes away so that the work that we do is not stressful anymore it's not a job it's it's a mission it's like a we're all it's our calling we're like like actively pushing and pursuing for those things that that is what i want i don't you know and i want that for for other people too because it's i've been fortunate enough that that happened to me early on in my business but it was this specific business the business prior to it the one that led into coding for entrepreneurs was devastating like we were featured on cnn uh so cnn you know big news channel we got a huge influx of people that signed up for the service but zero customers that was incredibly frustrating and this existential crisis i went to supposedly one of the best business schools in the world for entrepreneurship if not the best entrepreneur program in you know in universities in the world at least top 100 or top 50 or top 10 let's say it's one of those things and here i was failing at this business it was incredibly demotivating it was incredibly challenging time uh but i also didn't have an audience that i can chat with later not no not necessarily about the problems but i didn't have that connection with with people i didn't have that connection with those customers now luckily i do have that connection so um i'm able to have that like meaningful impact even if it's just a small one but a meaningful impact in somebody else's lives and once you can actually do that at all it is it is amazing that's that's one of the things i love about being a parent there's many things i love about being a parent but one of them is being this like progress that you see in your children and that you are part of the influence of that um my wife is a much bigger component to that i do as best i can but the thing is that um we you know when you're when you're teaching people around the world it's like you are sort of being like a mentor to them um if you're doing it right i hope that you're being a mentor to them because i've had mentors before me and it's how i've been able to get where i am now but cultivating that connection and that mentor relationship is i think incredibly important and then charging for courses i think is very logical everyone understands that we all need to eat maybe at some point i'll have a corporate sponsor or a group of corporate sponsors that pays me a a wage that i think i deserve um maybe beyond that even that i could just do this and everyone can do it for free it's just about effort then but unfortunately i can't do that yet i still have to pay rent i still have to pay for food i still have to raise my family i got to do all those things that we all do for work right so yeah anyways um i i have no idea what your question was but but hopefully that there was something in there that that was worth listening to there was a lot i mean it basically took all my questions out i mean i think it was a great note to end things on oh good good good thanks thanks matt i i appreciate that that you gave me the opportunity to answer these questions and you've been you've been listening intensely i i mean it's a lot harder to do uh digitally you know i mean we would probably have to do it digitally anyway because you're you're in uh south africa right so yeah yeah yeah no but i mean it was fine i mean i got the front row seat so like it was great for me no thanks so much for for taking the time and for the i mean thorough thorough answers so i i just hope that everyone who's listening would get i'd say more than a handful of gold nuggets out of the conversation

Channel: JustDjango

Views: 3,221

Rating: 4.8823528 out of 5

Keywords: django, python django, Django Web Framework (Software), django podcast, python django podcast, codingforentrepreneurs interview, justin mitchell interview, justin mitchell python, justdjango podcast

Id: 1L36eL2nl6Q

Length: 95min 6sec (5706 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 12 2020