3 Reasons why Online Coding courses like udemy won't turn you into a software startup founder.

Hi, I'm Lukas.

I'm in the business of helping entrepreneurs with no technical background to start their own software business in 3 months.

As one of those 'No Techincal Background' entrepreneurs, I went through a lot of trial and error when building my first service, and today I'd like to talk about why udemy and similar coding education websites are not the right fit for startup entrepreneurs.

1. Udemy's courses are not product-oriented.

If you were learning to code yourself in online coding course, first contents you'd see would look like this

- What is an integer?

- What is a function?

- What is a parameter?

But it's very confusing for aspiring entrepreneurs to take a course with contents like this. They have no idea how these things are used in the real service. So I believe that programming education for entrepreneurs should be “product-oriented”.

Here's what I think a product-oriented programming education should look like. Every chapter of course should be a specific product.

For example,

Chapter 1) How to create a landing page

To create a landing page, you need to understand a number of concepts

- HTML, CSS

- Form

- URL routing

- MVC Pattern

Product oriented coding education teaches Products first, concepts later. Currently, most coding education isn't product-oriented at all, and instead teaches all of concepts one by one. This is why most online courses, including udemy, have a 30% completion rate.

2. Skipping is good thing

This idea is probably going to be attacked by many developers, but I'll share my thoughts nonetheless.

When I was learning development from scratch, I had two problems.

1. Do I need to understand everything the course teaches?

2. Should I develop my own service after I understand it perfectly?

I couldn't answer those questions then, but I can answer them now.

No

There's a popular meme among web developers. Every website you see has an element called a div.?It's a unit that we use to group images, text, etc.

And everybody, whether you're a first-year junior developer or a 10-year developer, has a hard time centering divs on the screen. They all search google how to center a div,”?

You don't need to understand everything, you just need to be able to search and find it when you don't know something.

3. Our goal is not to get a job at Google. It's to build a service that makes money.

Udemy and most online coding courses are designed to train good developers. As such, they teach the essentials of being a good developer.

- How to design a clean architecture

- How to avoid duplicating code

etc.

These are things you'll need to learn at some point.

But not right now.

There's a project I launched 10 years ago, when I didn't know how to code at all. It was a platform that connected parents with brick-and-mortar educational institutions(Youtube Link). The internal code was literally a mess, which is to be expected for a service built by a college student with no development experience. But the revenue was great.

I have a founder who I taught to code three years ago. Like me, he had no experience in software development. He was also an inexperienced founder, so his code was a mess. But his service is making $800K per month.

On the flip side, I once taught a computer science major who had coding experience. His code was so clean and perfect,?but his revenue was zero.

If you define yourself as an entrepreneur and not a developer, Launching a service quickly and validating it quickly is more important than clean code and architecture.

A project with dirty code that generates revenue is better than a project with clean code that generates no revenue. (From my perspective)

This is my conclusion after teaching myself and other entrepreneurs over the last decade,

I think it really matters how you define yourself. Don't define yourself as a developer, define yourself as an “entrepreneur” or “indie hacker”. You will launch your service much faster.