Ask HN: Non-technical founders, would you buy a course on building a SaaS MVP?

1 points by poushkar 3 years ago | 2 comments

Hello,

Recently I've been thinking about writing a book or recording a video course on building an MVP with Ruby on Rails framework. It would be specifically targeted at non-technical founders with no prior programming experience.

Ruby on Rails happens to be among the most popular programming frameworks for building web apps in startups because of its extensive ecosystem and the tooling out of the box.

Typical beginner books on programming — and programming with Ruby and Ruby on Rails specifically — are oriented at a general audience. But building an MVP or a PoC is a completely different story: you've got to be extremely pragmatic in your choice of tools, libraries and their use. You must know the easiest, scalable way of running your SaaS on the Internet. You don't have to know or understand a lot of things which are only useful to a general programmer: like performance or writing "beautiful" code. All you need is to know just enough and in just the right combination to be able to deliver the first versions of the product. If it shows a promise - you can find a technical co-founder, or hire a freelancer to develop it further properly.

A little bit about me: I have 12+ years of working as a software engineer in startups of various sizes, most of which were built using Ruby on Rails.

I was part of small teams getting an MVP ready, mid-sized teams within successful startups with multiple rounds of investments behind, as well as a company of 1000+ engineers running some of the biggest Ruby on Rails apps out there.

Recently, I've also guided a (non-technical) friend in building an MVP, and it was quite illuminating for both of us. That's how I got the idea to scale it out in form of a course, or a book.

That said, I am not sure if there would be a demand for such a course. Maybe I am overestimating the need for it, and non-technical founders prefer spending their time somewhere else, instead.

What are your thoughts?

Thank you.

dieselgate 3 years ago |

Thanks for the very thoughtful and well written post. I’m not exclusively a Ruby/Rails developer but currently use it daily for work. My opinion is you _may_ be slightly overestimating the “need” for this because there are a lot of resources already in getting started with Rails. However you have a specific angle with whom you want to introduce Rails to - I think if a non-technical founder is savvy/dedicated enough to create/deploy a Rails app they will likely be able to do so with the existing knowledge out there. Not saying you should shy away from this idea, though. Maybe you could focus on a specific “barebones” process for getting an MVP online (heroku, SSR from rails and not a view library(?), maybe a payment integration?) - not totally sure. On the global stage there is likely a larger demand for this but targeting non technical founders seems like a difficult niche to focus on. I honestly have no idea how your target demographic would theoretically choose to allocate their time but I assume the majority of them plan to have a designated tech team/lead at some point.

It seems you are very experienced with Rails and development so is there a reason you are focusing on non-devs opposed to a specific “technical for devs” topic?

Best of luck however you choose to go.

poushkar 3 years ago | |

Thank you for such a detailed, honest feedback! I really appreciate it! There are a lot of books on Rails and I don't think I can add much value there. But approaching at it from a different, more pragmatic "what needs to be done to have it running" angle feels fresh to me. I know of one success story where non-technical founders learned just enough of RoR to build an MVP, but AFAIR it took them several months only to learn to use Ruby/RoR. And it would be exactly this problem that I am trying to solve: bringing it from several months down to several weeks.