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Comment by nickjj | Hacker News Reader

There are comparable things with other frameworks too.

For example I wrote a course on building a SAAS app with Flask. It's available at: https://buildasaasappwithflask.com/

It covers everything about user registration, profiles, subscription billing, 1 time billing, invoicing, and about 50 other things you would likely want to do in a SAAS app or any application really.

The course comes with the source code along with 15+ hours of video explaining every line of code in stages, life time free updates and life time support for close to half the price of what Spark charges just for the source code for 1 site license (with the Flask course you can use the code in however many projects you want).

Spark's business model seems interesting though. I don't use it personally but do you just get the source code and nothing else? How do they limit you to 1 site if you end up with a local copy of the scaffolding / code base?

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Nice! It looks very nice and complete. I've found this other one in Go lang https://buildsaasappingo.com (I'm not affiliated nor tested it) I think it is a good idea to turn something that you need for yourself into a side income, I've though about doing this same thing myself in a different language.

What can you tell about your experience building this course, is it worth it ? rewarding ? Did you find difficult to promote it ? what are the main channels to adquiere customers ?

And if you don't mind sharing some numbers, how many people purchased it so far?

I'd like to get an idea on how profitable (or not) and personally rewarding are type of courses, to motivate myself and write one of these one day.

thank you!

edit: I'm thinking maybe that was too many questions, sorry if so, you could create a "meta-course" on explaining all these things and I'd buy it! :)))

That's how the course came into existence.

I built a number of SAAS apps (and apps that had similar functionality) for a few freelance clients. Then I eventually thought "hmm, lots of repeated patterns here, maybe I can make this into a course", so then I made the course.

As for the process. Funny you mention it. The changelog just had me on as a guest for their "backstage" podcast last week where we talked about content creation and the process of recording courses. That's at: http://changelog.com/backstage/4

It covers most of your questions but it doesn't cover nitty gritty details on sales figures and revenue. Thousands of people have signed up for the course but I still do quite a bit of freelancing. Freelancing and course creation is my full time job.

I find it really rewarding at a personal level. I just like creating things, but it is a lot of work. It's not just hitting record and being done in 2 days. Expect it to take 3-6 months of full time work to make a course. Then there's having to keep it updated (because tech changes so fast) and ongoing 24/7 support.

Couple people have asked me to make a course on making courses. Maybe one day but at the moment there's still a bunch of technical courses I still want to make, a million blog posts to write (I have 85 draft posts that are unpublished) and some side projects in the works.

wow, serendipity I guess :)

Definitively I'll check the podcast, thanks a lot!

No problem. If you still have questions after the podcast shoot me an email and I'll do my best to answer everything.

Hey thanks for mentioning my book. Like nickjj after building 2 SaaS in Go, I noticed that there were lots of pieces that could be extracted into a library.

I'm currently building another with that library.

Every time I try out Flask, Aiohttp or even Express.js I appreciate more the stuff Django normally does for me.

Django abstracts away a bit too much, if you ask me. For a simple REST API it's complete overkill. I prefer Flask or Falcon[0], in which you don't just get better performance[1] but also a lower level of control.

[0] https://falconframework.org/

[1] https://klen.github.io/py-frameworks-bench/ or https://github.com/the-benchmarker/web-frameworks

I agree with your parent. When I started with (Python) webdev some years ago I picked Flask, but nowadays I use Django, as it has superb documentation and useful things built-in. In particular I miss the user-management, authentication and authorization in Flask.

Personally I consider Django without any additional apps less complex than Flask with apps (or "plugins" in Flask jargon) to handle basic stuff like auth.

If performance is a concern, both of them are insufficient and I would rather pick another language like Rust, Go or even Java.

I started with Flask, moved to Django, and now at work am back on Flask. It all depends on what you are building; if you are going to need some ORM, standard auth, etc, Django is a no brainer. However if you are going to be building out much of your own idiosyncratic architecture, Flask gets out of your way and avoids including lots of things you don't need.

For performance, we are building some parts of our system with Clojure. It feels extremely well suited, albeit with some initial learning curve.

How are you implementing REST using Faclon if I might ask ? fully custom ? or is there anything like DRF hanging around ?

Why exactly do you want a lower level of control?

You want the complete opposite; have as many problems solved for you already with battle-tested ways to break out of the happy path when you need to.

Every sufficiently large Flask app becomes a half-assed reinvention of half of Django, except without the hundreds of thousands of eyeballs and man-centuries of bug fixing.

Dito.

Really well done site for the course. The flow of the single page to the sign up is compelling.

Seem's like it'd have to be the "honor system". They could certainly add somethings to detect the software being used on multiple domain, but you could ultimately remove that if you were motivated to.

Tokens are issued from within the Spark customer dashboard and the token is required in order to pull the repo during install. It’s basically the honor system.

Thanks.

I noticed they have a public repo with a tool that manages a way to download the spark code base.

I'm guessing without a token you can't access whatever code that public tool pulls down, meaning you need an active token to get future updates of the code base? Pretty cool system if that's the case (there's motivation to keep your purchase to receive updates).

I'm not asking to try and rip him off. I was just curious about the mechanism of protecting the download. Sounds like the only real difference here is the download is done over a command line tool instead of a web interface. Other than that, it's no different than serving a protected file?

I believe so. Updates are handled through composer package manager and the process is no different than updating a normal Laravel installation. I've never seen any info about how Spark is protected, so I'm just going off of my personal experience using it.

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