Ryan Kulp is a serial entrepreneur, online course creator and musician. He has previously taught courses on marketing, acquiring small companies and coding. Now he's back to make non-technical employees into owners with 24 Hour MVP.
This course promises to teach students to make their own SaaS prototype in less than 24 hours. There's a reason for this emphasis on speed: Ryan wants you to create a Minimum Viable Product (emphasis on minimum) and figure out the Truth as quickly as possible.
Whenever I start a new project, this sequence ensures I waste as little time as possible on my hunt for The Truth. What’s “The Truth?” Finding out if people care about what you built, or not.
The only prerequisite to this course is Ryan's (free) Fundamentals course, a Ruby course for beginners.
That's a lofty promise: to teach a non-technical novice the skills to create a viable product within 24 hours. Wireframing, data modelling, frontend, backend, preventing technical debt, setting up billing — Ryan claims to teach you it all in a short course.
What I liked
I have to admit: Ryan hit it out of the park with this one. By the end of the course, I can say I feel confident enough to build pretty much any product I can think of.
Powerpoint presentations and theoretical lectures are for losers. At Founder/Hacker we learn by doing.
Ryan's approach is to teach by doing: he'll guide you through building 3 projects, each of which ends up being a viable SaaS product. Each project is more complicated than the previous one, which allows you to gradually expand your skillset. Ryan provides you with challenges along the way, which allow you to practice what you're learning and add your own touch to the product.
Ryan uses Ruby on Rails for this course, and you quickly understand why: this framework allows you to build your product in an unbelievably short amount of time. Using Ryan's Speedrail app template, you learn to quickly create the necessary data models, set up a beautiful frontend using Tailwind UI and design the minimum backend logic to make everything work. You'll then set up billing via Stripe and deploy your app to Heroku.
Along the way, you'll inevitably pick up other great skills. Thanks to this course, now I'm comfortable with Javascript, I'm a better Git user and even know the basics of cybersecurity.
You also pick up on subtle ideas that show you how a successful entrepreneur like Ryan thinks about customer experience, billing strategies and branding.
What could have been better
Considering the sheer volume of information Ryan's course promises to teach you in such a short time, I have very few (if any) criticisms of his course.
At the end of the course, I didn't feel completely comfortable with certain Rails conventions. As Rails has an approach of Convention over Configuration, I wasn't happy with a handwavy understanding of certain details of the Rails paradigm. I wanted a more traditional lesson on the framework just to supplement what I had already learned.
One of the early productivity mottos of Rails went: “You’re not a beautiful and unique snowflake”. It postulated that by giving up vain individuality, you can leapfrog the toils of mundane decisions, and make faster progress in areas that really matter.
— David Heinemeier Hansson, The Rails Doctrine
Working through Launch School's Demystifying Rails textbook (which I discovered thanks to Ryan) provided the necessary clarifications. Since I had so much experience with Rails from the 24 Hour MVP, I was able to breeze through the textbook in an afternoon.
Given Ryan’s hands-on approach to teaching, it made sense that I hadn’t fully committed certain Rails “theory” to memory. I would recommend that other course participants check out that (free) textbook upon finishing the course.
Conclusion
In short, I would recommend 24 Hour MVP a thousand times over.
Founder/Hacker is a launchpad for “non-technical” employees who want to become owners. The goal of this course is to make you unemployable.
You could probably learn everything this course teaches you elsewhere for free online (albeit with much more effort). Ryan has done a great job in providing you with exactly the skills you need to build products, which he's picked up as a successful entrepreneur. That’s what initially captured me about this course: Ryan’s emphasis on teaching you just enough to be dangerous. 24 Hour MVP is invaluable to me was for the sense of agency it provided, the knowledge that building things isn't hard.
Now that I’ve completed the course, I genuinely can’t wait to see what I can build. The real review of this course lies ahead of me: what I’ll build in the future. Thanks to 24 Hour MVP, the only limit is my ambition.
Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you and you can change it, you can influence it, you can build your own things that other people can use.
— Steve Jobs
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