Critique - Hold nothing back - Meetup Group
Long time lurker, new poster. Very excited to see some other top marketers.
What do you guys think about the "About Us" section of my meetup group?
FREE 1hr Course - Beginners Guide to Professional Web Dev - Beginners Guide to Professional App Development (Greater London, England) - Meetup
I thank you to hold nothing back. Tear it apart. I love all feedback.
Will
The content is copied to below:
Newer versions further in the thread...
----------------------
Designed for science & humanities graduates, consultants, entrepreneurs, small business owners.
A from-scratch, non-technical, easy, step-by-step guide to how to build websites and apps.
In an intimate evening with ask-anything questions with someone who has lived and run tech startups for the past 2 years. I'm going to teach you everything I can in a short, evening session, dense with information, and jargon-free - broken down into a way that makes sense for absolutely anyone, including complete beginners.
If you're interested, I'm going to reveal below exactly how websites work.
First, here's what the FREE evening will cover:
How to build the app or site, like Kickstarter, Twitter, Facebook and thousands more.
How and why startups are so VALUABLE
Why you should and shouldn't learn this skills
Where to learn it for FREE
Why your talent is in demand - the jobs available & exactly how to get them, down to the exact emails I have used. Essentially, I want you to be able to design...
from scratch...
...the website or app to solve real-world problems. You can connect people, you can educate people, and at the same time when you're solving painful problems for thousands of people at a time, and people will pay a small amount to have that painful problem solved, your company can generate thousands of pounds of profit.
What else I want to share:
The 5 (out of THOUSANDS) of programming languages that are worth mastering, that you can use to build a killer portfolio of functioning, profit-generating websites.
The exact tools I use.
Where I go for information
How I can solve any programming problem with 3 approaches.
Exactly what to read and watch to teach yourself - at your own speed - everything.
How easy is it to get jobs in this field? Let me share my story.
“You said work wouldn’t get in the way of Us”
My partner looked icily at me.
It was the first day of her moving in with me, and I was already breaking a promise I’d made to her. I had just told her I would have to work late tonight.
It was July 2014, I was working 10 hours a day creating 60 Second Laundry, a website that allowed busy people to reach their local dry cleaners and hire them to pick up, clean, and deliver back their laundry.
I wasn’t working 10 hours a day because I loved it.
If the business didn’t start making real money soon, I was going to be completely, ‘end-of-the-overdraft’-style broke.
The kind of ‘broke’ where you get kicked out of your flat and move back in with your parents. My rent was due soon and I didn’t have the money to pay it.
I had been getting by very close to the line, working the minimum amount needed to fund my start-up, when suddenly two invoices for work I’d done didn’t get paid.
My girlfriend had just moved in with me, but she didn’t have the rent either and was looking for a job in the area.
You can imagine the feeling of suddenly potentially losing my life and friends in London.
And I’d made promises that work wouldn’t get in the way of my relationship.
The next day, I started looking for a job, sending the following email. Not showing off my “skills” and “work ethic”, but my portfolio of actual websites that the employer could browse themselves - just like you will be able to.
In TWO days this landed me two ‘40k starting-salary’ projects, the first of which started the following Monday. And yes, that rent got paid.
Friends of mine in this space, under the age of 30, with around 4+ years of experience, are earning £70k and £80 as senior developers. The reason I was able to get the jobs so fast is that £40k is child’s money in this space compared to what employers normally pay.
I’ve seen an advert on Work In Startups (a job board) for a Senior JavaScript developer at a bank that paid £800 per day - that’s £200,000 per year.
For some people, these skills mean the ticket to being paid well in a cool startup in London. For others, it’s the ability to make something exceptional themselves. For me, it’s a little of that, but it’s also the freedom to pursue my own ambitions and a founder, or a writer, or anything I like, knowing that whatever happens I will be able to find a well-paid job on demand if I need it.
How a website works is like this. Your computer sends a message to the website, saying “I want the homepage”. This website is your personal butler. You send it a request, and it goes off, gets the information you ask for, and brings it back to you.
You might request the homepage from your site. Your butler goes off, gets the homepage, and brings it back to your screen so that you can see it. When you click on a link or button, that sends off another request. It says to the butler “go get this second page”… and your butler goes off, gets it, and brings it back.
But what if we could make our butler smart?
Need a haircut? Ask Google Map’s butler, he’ll find you the nearest 10 on a map, with directions.
Need insurance to go abroad? Insurance engines contact hundreds of companies, find the best quote, and with the confirmation to buy, will then agree the deal for you with that company for them to underwrite you for millions of pounds of damages.
AirBnB’s butler finds you the people (and only the people!) who have a spare room to rent… any place in the world. Can you imagine doing that yourself?
Uber’s butler finds you a cab, agrees on the rate.
eBay’s butler gives you a list of every person selling a particular type of beanie baby, and gives your details to ever person looking to buy exactly the things you don’t want.
You build the butler. The butler performs impossible tasks, faster than any human ever could, for millions of people.
The beauty of it is that you train your butler once. And your butler can serve a million people. It can serve thousands of people simultaneously.
Well, what programming is about is about teaching your butler how to do these things.
You may well be thinking - that sounds bloody complicated! There’s no way I’m smart enough to do that. Thankfully, there are two magic bullets:
1.) You can send your butler on a pre-made training course. For example, you don’t have to work out how to do “logging in” or “photo upload”, or even understand it. You can just copy existing code in. You can use this code, free, and legally. Modern coding is mostly assembly of the required pre-made parts.
2.) There are step-by-step guides for everything you might want to teach your butler to do for people. If you can follow a recipe to bake a cake, you can definitely follow the steps to teaching your butler to perform any task.
Is this a shock? Building smart, incredible websites isn’t watching lines of code pouring down the screen like in the matrix - it’s just putting building blocks together, like Lego. Anyone can do it.
And I don’t think we’ve even touched what these things are capable of. The next 20 years could hold anything.
The value of these butlers is incredible. Forget billionaires like Mark Zuccerberg (Facebook’s CEO), Larry Page and Sergey Brin (Google) or Elon Musk (Paypal) - The internet has created more new millionaires in the last 20 years than there were millionaires in all the years before then. It has simply never been easier to create massive value for the world and, in turn, become a millionaire.
Even if you’re not of the entrepreneurial bent, hundreds of people who are ARE going for it. And this has created an oil-derrick explosion of investment, development jobs, and money to pay for the development of these butlers.
To give an idea of the scale, it’s typical of a startup to raise £300k of investment to spend before even starting to build the product, raise £1,000,000 - £10,000,000 a year or so in, which are mostly spent on marketing and… the butler. This is why developers are paid £40k - £80k. Their talent is gold dust!
The web is changing the world. From Just Eat to Amazon to Google. At the heart of it are developers that create these systems to service millions of people around the world.
Being able to create these sites, from nothing, doesn’t require a team or thousands of pounds. One person can do it on a budget of zero. And your website can change people’s lives.
Building these is fun - even addictive.
I invite you to attend the free evening events or get in touch.
What do you guys think about the "About Us" section of my meetup group?
FREE 1hr Course - Beginners Guide to Professional Web Dev - Beginners Guide to Professional App Development (Greater London, England) - Meetup
I thank you to hold nothing back. Tear it apart. I love all feedback.
Will
The content is copied to below:
Newer versions further in the thread...
----------------------
Designed for science & humanities graduates, consultants, entrepreneurs, small business owners.
A from-scratch, non-technical, easy, step-by-step guide to how to build websites and apps.
In an intimate evening with ask-anything questions with someone who has lived and run tech startups for the past 2 years. I'm going to teach you everything I can in a short, evening session, dense with information, and jargon-free - broken down into a way that makes sense for absolutely anyone, including complete beginners.
If you're interested, I'm going to reveal below exactly how websites work.
First, here's what the FREE evening will cover:
How to build the app or site, like Kickstarter, Twitter, Facebook and thousands more.
How and why startups are so VALUABLE
Why you should and shouldn't learn this skills
Where to learn it for FREE
Why your talent is in demand - the jobs available & exactly how to get them, down to the exact emails I have used. Essentially, I want you to be able to design...
from scratch...
...the website or app to solve real-world problems. You can connect people, you can educate people, and at the same time when you're solving painful problems for thousands of people at a time, and people will pay a small amount to have that painful problem solved, your company can generate thousands of pounds of profit.
What else I want to share:
The 5 (out of THOUSANDS) of programming languages that are worth mastering, that you can use to build a killer portfolio of functioning, profit-generating websites.
The exact tools I use.
Where I go for information
How I can solve any programming problem with 3 approaches.
Exactly what to read and watch to teach yourself - at your own speed - everything.
How easy is it to get jobs in this field? Let me share my story.
“You said work wouldn’t get in the way of Us”
My partner looked icily at me.
It was the first day of her moving in with me, and I was already breaking a promise I’d made to her. I had just told her I would have to work late tonight.
It was July 2014, I was working 10 hours a day creating 60 Second Laundry, a website that allowed busy people to reach their local dry cleaners and hire them to pick up, clean, and deliver back their laundry.
I wasn’t working 10 hours a day because I loved it.
If the business didn’t start making real money soon, I was going to be completely, ‘end-of-the-overdraft’-style broke.
The kind of ‘broke’ where you get kicked out of your flat and move back in with your parents. My rent was due soon and I didn’t have the money to pay it.
I had been getting by very close to the line, working the minimum amount needed to fund my start-up, when suddenly two invoices for work I’d done didn’t get paid.
My girlfriend had just moved in with me, but she didn’t have the rent either and was looking for a job in the area.
You can imagine the feeling of suddenly potentially losing my life and friends in London.
And I’d made promises that work wouldn’t get in the way of my relationship.
The next day, I started looking for a job, sending the following email. Not showing off my “skills” and “work ethic”, but my portfolio of actual websites that the employer could browse themselves - just like you will be able to.
In TWO days this landed me two ‘40k starting-salary’ projects, the first of which started the following Monday. And yes, that rent got paid.
Friends of mine in this space, under the age of 30, with around 4+ years of experience, are earning £70k and £80 as senior developers. The reason I was able to get the jobs so fast is that £40k is child’s money in this space compared to what employers normally pay.
I’ve seen an advert on Work In Startups (a job board) for a Senior JavaScript developer at a bank that paid £800 per day - that’s £200,000 per year.
For some people, these skills mean the ticket to being paid well in a cool startup in London. For others, it’s the ability to make something exceptional themselves. For me, it’s a little of that, but it’s also the freedom to pursue my own ambitions and a founder, or a writer, or anything I like, knowing that whatever happens I will be able to find a well-paid job on demand if I need it.
How a website works is like this. Your computer sends a message to the website, saying “I want the homepage”. This website is your personal butler. You send it a request, and it goes off, gets the information you ask for, and brings it back to you.
You might request the homepage from your site. Your butler goes off, gets the homepage, and brings it back to your screen so that you can see it. When you click on a link or button, that sends off another request. It says to the butler “go get this second page”… and your butler goes off, gets it, and brings it back.
But what if we could make our butler smart?
Need a haircut? Ask Google Map’s butler, he’ll find you the nearest 10 on a map, with directions.
Need insurance to go abroad? Insurance engines contact hundreds of companies, find the best quote, and with the confirmation to buy, will then agree the deal for you with that company for them to underwrite you for millions of pounds of damages.
AirBnB’s butler finds you the people (and only the people!) who have a spare room to rent… any place in the world. Can you imagine doing that yourself?
Uber’s butler finds you a cab, agrees on the rate.
eBay’s butler gives you a list of every person selling a particular type of beanie baby, and gives your details to ever person looking to buy exactly the things you don’t want.
You build the butler. The butler performs impossible tasks, faster than any human ever could, for millions of people.
The beauty of it is that you train your butler once. And your butler can serve a million people. It can serve thousands of people simultaneously.
Well, what programming is about is about teaching your butler how to do these things.
You may well be thinking - that sounds bloody complicated! There’s no way I’m smart enough to do that. Thankfully, there are two magic bullets:
1.) You can send your butler on a pre-made training course. For example, you don’t have to work out how to do “logging in” or “photo upload”, or even understand it. You can just copy existing code in. You can use this code, free, and legally. Modern coding is mostly assembly of the required pre-made parts.
2.) There are step-by-step guides for everything you might want to teach your butler to do for people. If you can follow a recipe to bake a cake, you can definitely follow the steps to teaching your butler to perform any task.
Is this a shock? Building smart, incredible websites isn’t watching lines of code pouring down the screen like in the matrix - it’s just putting building blocks together, like Lego. Anyone can do it.
And I don’t think we’ve even touched what these things are capable of. The next 20 years could hold anything.
The value of these butlers is incredible. Forget billionaires like Mark Zuccerberg (Facebook’s CEO), Larry Page and Sergey Brin (Google) or Elon Musk (Paypal) - The internet has created more new millionaires in the last 20 years than there were millionaires in all the years before then. It has simply never been easier to create massive value for the world and, in turn, become a millionaire.
Even if you’re not of the entrepreneurial bent, hundreds of people who are ARE going for it. And this has created an oil-derrick explosion of investment, development jobs, and money to pay for the development of these butlers.
To give an idea of the scale, it’s typical of a startup to raise £300k of investment to spend before even starting to build the product, raise £1,000,000 - £10,000,000 a year or so in, which are mostly spent on marketing and… the butler. This is why developers are paid £40k - £80k. Their talent is gold dust!
The web is changing the world. From Just Eat to Amazon to Google. At the heart of it are developers that create these systems to service millions of people around the world.
Being able to create these sites, from nothing, doesn’t require a team or thousands of pounds. One person can do it on a budget of zero. And your website can change people’s lives.
Building these is fun - even addictive.
I invite you to attend the free evening events or get in touch.
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