From Designer to Django’er in Six Weeks

Presented by Tracy Osborn

1. Start out on the right foot:

   • If you can, spend 100% of your time on your project.
   • Have a large savings account, low debt.
   • Make sure you’re having fun.
   • Success can be just launching the app.
   • Be focused and optimistic before you start.

Cofounders are awesome, but no cofounder is better than the wrong cofounder.

2. Launch as fast as possible:

   • What can you take out?
   • Launch tiny bits to keep motivated.
   • Work on the hard stuff first.
   • Spent as little time as possible on learning, as much on building.
   • Launch with bad code (really, it’s okay).

3. Have a plan for monetization

4. Don’t be forever alone:

   • Talk to friends.
   • Don’t be prideful; accept help.
   • NDAs suck.
   • Surround yourself with good people & resources.

5: Take shortcuts:

• Django is plug & play
• South, django-registration, django-profiles, sorl-thumbnail, django-debug-toolbar, djangopackages
• dotCloud
• virtualenv, pip

5.5 Design shortcuts:

• themeforest
• 99designs (quick logos only)
• “The Non-designer’s Design Book”
• Create a coming-soon page.

Q&A

1. Django/Python rough edges?

   • Review logic first (when learning).
   • Had lots of people to ask questions to. Removed most (all?) speed bumps.

2. Why choose Django and stay with it?

   • Chose Python, really, not just Django.
   • Django provides for lazy developing :)

3. How did you find customers?

   • Cold emailing for the vendors.
   • Blogs and promotion help a lot.

4. How to rein in a designer that likes to design hard-to-build items?

   • Make him build it!
   • Pluggables never exactly match.

5. How far did your roadmap go?

   • Not far at all.