Have you ever had a great idea for a website or a product, but were put off by not being sure it would work or not having the technical chops to make it a reality?

A couple of weeks ago I did an experiment into how much website I could build on how little infrastructure. Out of that was born: postedNot.es

I’m going to run a workshop on the 23rd and 24th of August. It will take you from knowing nothing about product discovery or web design/development to having a working webpage. It’ll be able to take money and analyse customers’ journeys.

The idea of this workshop is that at the end of it you’ll have something similar. Probably not as polished, but certainly along these lines and ready to put your ideas to the test on real, paying customers.

There are 6 places available, so get in quick! If you want to do it, let me know in the comments below. Same if you have any questions.

Content

We’ll cover some of the basics of internet entrepreneurship. We’ll start with product discovery, where we work out the feasibility of an idea. Then we’ll go through a very accelerated web development course where we actually build it. Then look at how to add analytics so that you can measure what is happening.

This is the foundation of the build - measure - learn cycle. By the end of the weekend you should be happy to start measuring, ready to throw it all away and start again having learned more about what direction is most valuable.

Because we’ll be going through the whole process in a really short time we will be leaving a lot out. The idea is to cover a lot of ground superficially so that you can see how it all goes together, and then you can go back at your leisure and explore a subject in greater depth. As it is going to move fast there is some prep work to do. It is all easy and should only add up to about 2 hours of prep between now and the workshop (it will be installing software and following a couple of in-browser tutorials).

Once you are through it’ll launch you into the world of internet millionaires! This is a bit of an experiment for me so I’m looking for brave people. Technical skill isn’t required, but your own laptop and lots of motivation is.

Segments

These are the broad-brush bits of the weekend. The links in brackets are to books and other resources that are handy if you want to go into any of those ideas in more depth.

Prep work

You can do these in any order. You don’t need to become a total master, but the more familiar you are with these things the easier things will become.

  1. Get an ABN, and then sign up for a Paypal business account. This is so that you can take payments through your site. If you do everything for free you are going to need a different business model to get to your first million.
  2. Do a course on the very basics of HTML and CSS. This one from code academy is free, really good, and pretty quick. (They say 7 hours, but that includes _a load_ of project work that is just for fun. If you want to just get a feel for it you can skip it and it'll be more like 2 hours.)
  3. Download and install Sublime Text. Sure you _can_ do this all in a basic text editor, but it makes it really hard! Sublime is light, powerful, and easy to use. If you like it you can buy it, but you can also keep using it for free for ever.
  4. Go through the try git tutorial. We'll be using git for version control and github to short-cut a lot of the coding. We'll also be using github pages to get our projects onto the real internet right from the outset!

Just to be completely clear, you’ll need to bring a laptop with you that you can install software on.

If you need any help with the prep work just let me know.