Beautiful Stocks

For all you out there that have never built a SaaS app before. Building the app is one thing, figuring out how you're going to deploy and maintain it on a server is a whole other animal.

Ideally, you want some kind of system where you can deploy updates with a click of a button or in my case, a command on the terminal. Here, I'll share my journey getting to that point.

Up to now, I had a super basic version of my app running. Still lots of bugs and missing features but enough to validate the idea.

For myself, I decided to go with this course - http://dockerfordevops.com

This is taught by the same guy that taught the http://buildasaasappwithflask.com that I mentioned in the first update. (I'm not sponsored by him or anything, I'm just a fan of his teaching.)

Both courses do flow together reasonably well but there was still some stuff I had to mess around with which I explain later.

In it, Nick goes over how to deploy a Flask (what my app is) or Ruby app with Docker with everything from setting up the app, setting up nginx (web server), setting up a server on Digital Ocean, setting up a domain, and the workflow to deploy updates quickly and easily.

I've never done anything remotely like this before so there was a slight learning curve. If you're also in this camp, you're definitely not alone. It is overwhelming but completely doable.

After a lot of tweaking, I got the example app working from the course. But there was still a problem, the course was a few years old and there were a lot of updates since the making of the course.

Nick does have bonus lectures helping you upgrade everything but there was still one big update I had to figure out on my own - getting the app to work with docker-compose instead of just Docker, if you're familiar. Now that was scary trying to figure it out on my own. Thankfully, Nick is highly responsive to questions in the Q&A section so I wasn't completely alone.

When I got it up and running, it was definitely a giant weight off of my shoulders. Now I have the app visible on the web for people to check out.

The next step would be to actually validate the idea, get beta testers, and actually market the app to get that first paying user.

I guess the point of this post was to share with everyone looking to start a SaaS app that it is totally possible without much experience.

Prior to any of this, I had basic to intermediate programming experience. I was new to web dev, servers, devops, all of it pretty much. But persistence pays and I hope that you take the leap.

Cheers!

On March 15th, 2018, I bought this amazing course (http://buildasaasappwithflask.com) and started on this journey with my first ever SaaS app.

Before I've had a few other ventures but this is the first one where I've really focused on learning about business and entrepreneurship.

Like my product page states - after growing fatigued of the first-world-problem of having to constantly check my stock charts every single day for trading opportunities, I set out to develop THE technical analysis alert app to solve this problem.

From this problem, Beautiful Stocks was born. A simple story with hopefully a simple progression.

Prior to Beautiful Stocks, I had freelanced in graphic design, grew a Taekwondo YouTube channel (https://www.youtube.com/ironwoodproductions) to 4,500 subs, and a few other minor things. Again, I had no idea what I was doing business wise so there was no strategy, no detailed need aimed to be filled, etc.

I think these are the kinds of "beginner" business ventures are things that all entrepreneurs have to go through in the beginning.

Anyways, if you're interested in following me on this journey, follow the product page and join me on social accounts.

Cheers!

I trade stocks.

Specifically, I'm what's called a technical swing trader.

Technical meaning that I analyze stock charts for patterns to indicate possible buying and selling points.

Swing trading as in I buy and sell stocks within a few days to a few weeks. It's basically the middle ground between day trading and long-term investing.

To do this, I have to check the charts for the stocks in my watchlist every single day. With a good amount of stocks in my watchlist, this can take up a considerable amount of time and is tedious as hell.

I figured with my beginner/intermediate programming skills, I could create some kind of script to do this analysis for me.

As I was messing around with creating a script, a thought popped up into my head - there are a lot of other traders out there with this exact same (or at least similar) problem. So why not create some kind of user-friendly interface so that others could profit from this tool.

And that's how Beautiful Stocks came into fruition.

I created it to scratch my own itch and scratch it has.

So if trading or building a SaaS app from scratch with absolutely no prior experience resonates with you, join me on this journey as I share all the triumphs and defeats that I'll experience on the way.

Cheers!