Python for Entrepreneurs

What’s this course about and how is it different?

Many courses will teach you about the technology involved in building a web application. Fewer courses will teach you what it actually takes to launch that product as an operating online business. Python for Entrepreneurs is here to teach you both how to build your website and everything needed to make it a functioning online business.

The overriding goal of this course is to dramatically shorten your time from idea to minimum viable product (MVP) to running in production and accepting online payments from months to weeks or even a couple weeks in some cases.

When building an online product or web app, it’s easy to focus deeply on the product, the market fit, design, and these types of things. When you finally have it finished enough to launch your first version, you’ll find yourself hit with a wave of many unfamiliar technical tasks before you can actually go live:

• Accepting credit cards in a compliant manner
• Storing user accounts in a ‘hacker-safe’ format to keep your product out of the headlines
• Sending outbound email (e.g. as a user makes a purchase or resets their password)
• Collecting users’ email for outbound email marketing (mailing lists)
• Domain registration and configuration
• SSL certificates and configuration
• Error logging and monitoring in production
• Deploying to cloud servers
• Configuring your cloud servers for scale
• Testing your website performance and making it faster
• Getting help via part time contractors so you can focus on product and growth
• And so much more

You will learn all of these in this course: How to build a data-driven web app and launch it successfully.

Once you launch, you’ll need to turn your focus to areas that, as a technical person, you probably have little experience with. So we will also cover

• Design
• Capturing and engaging users
• SEO basics
• Growth hacking basics
• Showcasing your products

You will learn to build and design your web app

This course will teach you how to build a data-driven web application in Python. We will:

• Build our web app with the Pyramid web framework, “the Python web framework that supports your decisions, by artisans for artisans.”
• Create and connect to our database using SQLAlchemy, the most popular data access layer in Python
• Learn the core elements of web design including CSS and front-end frameworks such as Bootstrap.