How to Become a Street Smart Developer – From Dropout to Selling his Company w_ Dennis Ivy [#144]

The Origin Story of Dennis Yu: A Journey of Learning and Growth

Dennis Yu's journey to becoming a successful developer is a testament to his hard work, determination, and passion for learning. Growing up in a large family as an immigrant child, Dennis was exposed to the world of technology at a young age. He taught himself how to code at the age of 5 or 6, which was a common experience for many kids growing up in the digital age.

As he grew older, Dennis's love for coding only intensified, and he began to explore various programming languages and technologies. His parents, though not tech-savvy themselves, encouraged his interest in technology and provided him with the necessary resources to learn. This support system played a crucial role in shaping Dennis's career path and helping him stay motivated throughout his journey.

After completing his education, Dennis went on to pursue a career in the tech industry. His wife, who was also interested in technology, shared similar passions and became a front-end developer. The couple decided to start a family, but they also wanted to ensure that their children would have a secure financial future. This led them to explore alternative income streams, including freelancing and consulting.

Dennis's experience as an entrepreneur has taught him the importance of adaptability and resilience in the face of uncertainty. He emphasizes the value of continuous learning and skill-building, highlighting his own journey from being a coding novice to becoming a proficient developer. Dennis's story serves as a powerful reminder that anyone can learn to code with dedication and hard work.

The couple's decision to start a family also led them to re-evaluate their priorities and focus on building a stable financial foundation. They took steps to create a safety net, ensuring that they could provide for their future children even if one of them were no longer able to contribute financially. This mindset has allowed Dennis to enjoy his current success without the pressure of high-stakes responsibilities.

Throughout his career, Dennis has demonstrated a commitment to teaching and mentoring others. He has shared his knowledge with countless individuals, including young learners like Jessica Chan's husband, who are passionate about animation and video production. By paying it forward and contributing to the global developer community, Dennis is helping to create a ripple effect of positive change.

As Dennis looks back on his journey, he reflects on the power of communication and verbal skills in achieving success. Despite feeling like he has lived many lifetimes, he acknowledges that mental maturity and emotional intelligence are essential for navigating life's challenges. By being open to learning from others and embracing new experiences, Dennis is able to stay relevant in an ever-evolving industry.

The podcast conversation with Jessica Chan marked a significant milestone in Dennis's career, as it allowed him to share his story and connect with like-minded individuals who appreciate the value of community and collaboration. The experience was a dream come true for Dennis, who has always felt a sense of purpose in contributing to the developer community.

In conclusion, Dennis Yu's origin story is one of perseverance, determination, and a passion for learning. His journey serves as a testament to the power of community, mentorship, and continuous growth in achieving success. As he continues to expand his skills and ambitions, Dennis remains committed to sharing his knowledge with others and inspiring a new generation of developers.

The conversation also touched on Jessica Chan's husband, who is an animator with a passion for creating engaging videos. The couple's shared interests and values have allowed them to build a strong partnership that transcends their respective careers. Their support system is evident in the way they work together, encouraging each other to pursue their passions and push beyond their comfort zones.

The discussion about Jessica Chan's husband also highlighted the importance of analogies and metaphors in conveying complex ideas. Dennis used the analogy of a spacecraft to describe his own learning experience, which resonated with Jessica's husband. This exchange demonstrates how effective communication can bridge gaps between individuals from different backgrounds and expertise.

As the conversation drew to a close, Dennis expressed his gratitude for being part of the global developer community and for having the opportunity to teach alongside like-minded individuals. He acknowledged that this experience has been a privilege, allowing him to contribute to the growth and development of others.

The article concludes by reminding readers to check out Dennis's course and other resources mentioned in the podcast description. The show notes and video description provide additional information on various topics, from coding tutorials to industry insights. By exploring these resources, developers can gain valuable knowledge and stay up-to-date with the latest trends and best practices in their field.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enso my biggest rule in life and this is from my dad is he says if your family is the first thing like if you don't take care of that there's there's no honor in anything else he says if if your wife has to worry or your kids wherever you're at in life um that to me was what was ingrained in my life and my biggest thing was to never stress uh stress her out it's the reason why I left my first business and if that means putting on a suit and tie and you know a what do you call that that '90s office worker with the fat tie and the mustard color T-shirt button up that goes here I'll do it that's that's my number one priority welcome back to the free Cod Camp podcast I'm Quincy Larson teacher and founder of freecodecamp.org each week we're bringing you into it from developers Founders and ambitious people getting into Tech this week we're talking with Dennis Ivy he's a software engineer and prolific freelancer he dropped out of college at age 18 taught himself how to build websites started his first agency built and sold products and eventually started teaching his skills on YouTube Dennis it's a pleasure to have you here man excited to be here Quincy yeah and I've been a longtime fan like of your tutorials and of course free Cod campus published some of your courses over the years and like I've just learned a tremendous amount uh about you know teaching and about YouTube from you and of course learned a lot about Jango and Python and stuff from watching your tutorials as well so yeah thanks for coming on man yeah definitely an honor I saw your lineup and and who you've had here before so the fact that I'm even considered in that is exciting I wouldn't have expected something like this for years ago and originally seen free code cam content so it's pretty cool yeah look I'm on TV well I will tell you man like uh you have a very unique uh Scrappy story if I had to describe like your your uh ENT entree into the field of software development and working as a uh developer you know consultant essentially building projects for clients um it's been like incredibly organic the way that you entered the field and it is a very non-traditional path and I think that it will resonate with a ton of people who are listening to this the the freeo camp audience uh certainly for this podcast is about one-third developers onethird students onethird people working in other fields who are trying to transition into Tech so it you know at least uh two-thirds of it will benefit a great deal from listening to your Insight and the more experienced developers might learn a little bit about like SEO marketing things like that from talking with you as well because you have a deep expertise in those in addition to software development yeah absolutely and and when you talk about untraditional I definitely think it's one of the like if there was a spectrum of how people get into Tech I think mine was pretty far in that way and just by accidental uh entrance into the industry and then how it's developed it's been a little bit different for sure yeah well let's go ahead and dive in and I am just curious about how you got started because you did not have a traditional like American upbringing in the sense that like you grew up maybe you grew up in the BBS like I did but I I'm like a fourth generation American and I had the benefit of having you know grandparents great- grandparents here in the United States who were kind of gradually saving up and sending their kids to college and and like like you know I'm like a third generation college graduate and stuff like that right like so we all I already benefit from kind of that inner generational momentum but your childhood was not quite like that maybe you can talk about your early years and and your family yeah sure so um I'll just uh give some context to how I grew up and then also where where I originally came from so I'm actually um a son of an immigrant uh immigrant family and my family came here back in into to the US in 91 and we immigrated from keev Ukraine so I'm Russian Ukrainian father's Russian mother's Ukrainian and kind of a mix of that so um I'm not bilingual multilingual I speak three different languages and uh growing up we came here with a pretty large family and I'm one of 13 so eight boys and five girls in the family and uh with that my father really had to work his way up in the US came with nothing we originally came to Dallas Texas and then with a within a few months moved up to the Northwest here so my father was very Scrappy he was putting himself through school working jobs anything he can get at the time and that led to us um really not having much growing up that meant everybody was working all the boys were earning their own money from a very young age I think I had my first paper route at 6 years old with my brothers and uh ever since I can remember I was always uh making my own money if I needed to uh buy anything on my own other than just food and clothes which my Mom would for the family just cook a massive pot of borish and that was our meal uh we basically had to you know raise ourselves in that sense it was kind of a a fun but challenging upbringing and with that that kind of developed my personality of being very independent being very Scrappy which led into my career you know in later on in life so with that I wasn't really fortunate enough to be able to like specialize in a specific field it was just always looking for ideas always looking for opportunities and uh when it came time to leave high school which I actually went through a program that basically allowed me to uh go to college while I was in high school into a community college so I started in the 10th grade so when I graduated I actually also dropped out of college and from there that's where things kind of picked up but that's like the origin story we can dive into different parts of that but I can kick things off that way yeah man well I mean maybe you can give us some context to the decision not to go to college like was it a purely economic one were you just not interested in college like like what was uh what were you thinking at age 18 I think when you made that big I mean that's a big decision yeah yeah so it was it was two things one um I I already went through two years and it was a lot of the prerequisites that I took a lot of uh um did some political science uh just the basic English math those type of things and I for myself I'm I'm a very untraditional learner and I couldn't really see the value in it for the first part of things and it's not like I didn't see the value in college at all it was more of the mix of that but at the same time I didn't have any money to continue and the US College is very expensive uh there was no way my father was going to pay for my college tuition you know big family nor he wasn't going to do it nor could he do it and I didn't want to work four jobs just to put myself through school so I decided to as my friends were taken off to uh well they're getting ready for college in that summer I decided to just take some time and I said I'm going to figure myself out I'm very entrepreneurial I'm always looking for some kind of idea I had my own like clientele mowing lawns at that point I I knew that that's not what I wanted to do with my life but I knew I can figure my way out and uh eventually come up with something so as I was making that decision it was more of like confidence in myself knowing that I'm capable of anything I had a lot of people in my my family line that really put themselves uh through life in a very Scrappy way so I was very encouraged by that my grandfather from uh fighting in World War II to being in a concentration camp to making something with his life to my dad you know immigrating with nine kids and then having more in the US but always figuring something out he ended up being pretty successful in life but that really gave me a lot of courage to say anything I do in life I'm going to figure it out and I'm going to be the best at what I can do didn't it mean I always had that natural confidence in that I lot I had a lot of Doubt but I knew I can figure something out yeah yeah Faith In Yourself faith in uh your own like whatever resources you have on hand that you can figure out how to uh make it work um so it sounds like that was the big thing that that uh there were practical economic realities and there was also just like a mismatch between like okay I'm learning all this General Ed stuff and a lot of people who go through University in the US are frustrated that the first first two years is just learning more stuff than they learned in high school right more English more history you know more like General Ed and they're like when do I get to the actual you know software engineering or when do I get to the actual accounting or whatever it is that they actually wanted to study when they enrolled in University so um yeah but it I mean you hit the ground running and uh it sounds like you made very good use of your time and uh maybe you can talk about like how you started learning software and like SEO of course you know great deal about that marketing uh and and most importantly probably being the proverbial client Whisperer and being able to figure out how to talk to a stakeholder and convince them to give you the budget you need to be able to get things done and uh achieve whatever you know business goals that that person has uh yeah yeah absolutely so um let let's go back to that that point in time so it was a 2012 actually that's when I graduated so um at that point I'm kind of figuring out my life right I I end up taking jobs I work construction I even worked as a janitor in a church at some point uh like working in the maintenance department like just doing a lot of like work with my hands but I was um I started reading like a lot of business books I would just research online just looking for opportunities and I was trying to like find something that would fit to my lifestyle and back then the online world like the whole make money remote or from home wasn't really a thing like nowadays kids just grow up in it like that's just a norm well in that point in time it wasn't the case but I did stumble upon maybe people that were scammy at the time but they were showing this lifestyle of like living remote and making money and I thought that was the coolest thing in the world but I didn't know how to enter that world and I kind of got used to certain lingo that they would use talking about buying uh Facebook or Google ads they talked about landing pages and websites and I had no knowledge of that world so at that point I was like I already had the ideas was rolling I always had like a list of of notes always handwritten of things that I could do in life and I was basically working out my options and my entrance into web development actually started by accident through a different industry so I had a buddy who worked this job as a locksmith technician and he explained the business model to me and who he worked for and it was really interesting because he was a contractor but he worked for uh companies or one company I don't remember what it was but they essentially learned how to like rank on Google they bought Google ads and the broker leads out to different technicians and he would go out and service them and they would make a cut from that so with that I actually got this idea like hey man like what if I can what if I can learn how to rank sites build websites and broker leads like I'm just printing money and sitting at home like that sounded like the coolest thing in the world yeah as a young 18-year-old kid I'm like this this can be awesome pass V so yeah yeah exactly so so at that point like I I um I just go to Google and I just type in how to websites and like the first results come up and they're like you have to learn how to code like this is how you do it right HTML CSS all that good stuff and I'm like that's that's way over my head there's no way I can do that I'm not really that smart I not I'm not going to college I just assumed there was all this like pre you know knowledge base that you needed to have to do that so I kind of skim over that and luckily before I stopped looking I found these like low code website Builders there was like WordPress there was Weebly Squarespace at the time and I tried those but those were a little bit too difficult and I ended up actually settling on one called wix.com like the easiest one I can find and it was like a drag and drop Builder and basically I just like found a template like going through the default steps and what Wix had to offer like they kind of navigate you through building a website and this is like 2012 so Wix is way oversimplified back then like it's apparently way more advanced than what it is now and I was able to scrap together a side just by like adding copy I made it Like A A Locksmith looking website so I made ourselves look like a legitimate business and like I had the site going and then I started learning about SEO because I couldn't get traffic to it you know the phone calls weren't coming in and I wasn't being able to I wasn't able to broker out those leads so I learned about SEO that took a long time I learned about Google AdWords like as part of this book there was something called The Art of SEO I was reading like one of the earlier editions of it and eventually I bought Google AdWords and I actually landed like my first client by accident through a phone call that found our website so really quickly we scrapped together a business got license I ended up broker and out leads to my friend and we ended up like at our Peak within a few months we were doing about 6 to 10 maybe 12 phone calls like servicing anybody that had their house uh like door locked and they couldn't get in or a car and we were making like between 60 to $100 $120 a phone call so we started making some money out of this right W okay so so back up so so you're just like chilling and you get a phone call out out of the blue and it's somebody who found your website yeah so what happens is I I run my first Google ad on the the search ad those are the ones that pop up like when you look up like I'm stuck locksmith my city name right and it took about two days for Google to approve my ad so at that point I'm like check it in Daily and it's still like pending in review and I get a call and this guy's frantic and he's locked out of his car and he's like hey I'm locked out like do you guys you know service this area and I'm like I didn't really know what the phone call was about it just wasn't on my mind so I'm like oh we're busy right now but you should call these guys like this other locksmith in the city so I basically forward it out to another company and then I call my buddy up and I'm like we have customers like we need to get going so we kind of worked up our deal but yeah it happened like suddenly because of those Google ads so a huge portion of the amount of money that is going to a lock smith like let's like I haven't been locked out of my house in a long time but I have called Smith before like maybe 10 years ago and it was a lot of money uh it's very expensive the technician came by they unlocked the door uh and you know or you lock your keys in your car or something like that and um they came over they fixed it and it cost a couple hundred bucks and I'm like ouch and a lot of that money went to the the lead gen essentially the lead generation person who actually like kind of like the the finders fee for finding this client for them uh can you talk about most of it it's over like 50% what over 50% yeah so you got to remember that you're paying between uh three3 to like $8 a click so the problem is there's a very shady tactic in that business where they advertise like $15 car unlock or service charge well that's like a service charge that they throw on with everything else and that was one of my things when I entered that field was like when we get in we're not going to advertise the price we're just going to say it up front and if anyone's like oh okay I'll call someone else we would just warn them like hey if it says $15 on the website on someone else's it's going to be more this is how the industry works because there's just no way they can charge that little between the technician fee between the Google ads it it would cost like 20 bucks to get a single client because people click on those ads and you're getting charged every time yeah so maybe you can talk a little bit about the SEO angle because SEO is like earned traffic uh essentially search engine optimization that's what SEO stands for and free cam knows a lot about this because we're you know like I made a point to learn about it at some point I was like oh I'm not going to such that it's like a kind of like a scammy thing for a long time I was just like uh but uh then I think in like maybe 2018 2019 so several years into free cooking I'm like well my friends keep telling me that we can get a lot of traffic this way and we don't have an advertising budget because we're a tiny charity and like how can we get people to hear about us well we're already writing all these tutorials and creating all these courses we just need to like figure out how to like you know use HTML the right way and and like maybe slightly change how we make the um the headings uh the the the titles and things like that and like figure out uh so so I did kind of like a deep dive around SEO and then and then we learned how to get a whole lot of people coming to freeo Camp's publication and reading our tutorials through Google and now and you know the same sort of stuff works on on YouTube of course but you have learned probably way more than I have about SEO so maybe you can talk about like first of all it sounds like ads were a huge source of early um I guess r because you are there's a cost associated with that you're you're paying like 8 20 bucks to get a client but then you are able to charge the Locksmith Company like $60 or something like that so you're netting like $40 or something like that so so your your margin might be like 60% or something like that after you've handed over the client but if you can get people to just go directly to the website without having to click on an ad through like location you know specific keywords or um other techniques you can use uh using social media using all these other things then essentially that's like organic traffic that you don't actually have to pay Google ad for Google adward you don't have to pay Facebook Google and Facebook are the big ones there might be some other ones yeah yeah so AdWords was actually like really the key to SEO for me because for me it was a lot of uh reverse engineering with Google the funny thing is is I was literally reading the book and updating like meta tags on Wix and rewriting my content based on what the book said and it was just like following steps but it got to a point where I kind of figured out like just trying to think like Google I was like okay what does why does Google reward a specific site and I pinned it down to click-through rate and time on the website like there's different factors Google's always changing it but I think if you stick to that like you mentioned with uh with free code camp we had all this content it was about fixing things up so outside of the basics I pinned it down to if we get clicks on Google ads like first of all time on site was very important to us uh I realized that that was a key factor like Google can track how long someone's on your site but if no one's coming to my site how do I how do I get that time on site so I realized if I get the click from the ad then I can get time on site which in return lifts up SEO and it's like this cycle so there was a lot of push in the beginning but yes when Once the organic SEO kicked in that's when we really started making a lot more money as far as the profit margins because I would always run the ads and luckily for me I was able to get the ads down to like 80 cents a click I was able to really optimize those because Google rewards good ads as well they're willing to sell you a click for $1 as opposed to your competitor for $8 if your click is more valuable that's a very key thing because Google doesn't want to just maximize profits they're more interested in long-term profits so understanding stuff like that really helped and and we can talk about that click in in the the bidding ratio later if we if you'd like yeah absolutely so uh I'm trying trying to think of a good analogy for this I mean there's this old saying that like you have to spend money to make money um and uh there's like this type of spacecraft this is maybe really weird but it's basically it's like theorized it doesn't exist yet but it could in theory work you got all this intercellular hydrogen out there in space and uh the idea is like if you have enough Hydro like you can burn the hydrogen and then you can create more thrust so if you just get the spacecraft going through space it can just grab enough of these like atoms if it's traveling fast enough that it can actually burn and keep itself going right but how do you get the Thruster going in the first in the first you know Place well you have to actually burn some other kind of fuel to get it up there and get it in space and pointed where you want it to go and then you start going and then eventually enough hydrogen is going in the intake at the front that they it just becomes self-perpetuating right um maybe that's like not the simplest analogy funny actually a really good analogy it's a it's a nerdy analogy but it's really good like I don't know if everybody will get that like that's like the you you made it the most technical as like you made it as technical as possible but that's actually like perfect so so a lot of companies like and and if you are listening to this and you're like a a small business owner or something like that and you're worried about Google ads Facebook ads first of all they're kind of like a unnecessary evil because there's like an ad duopoly on inline online marketing uh between Facebook and Google the ads work I've heard so many people everybody says the ads do work as long as you spend the time to like come up good ad copy and it's relevant and people click through your website's not like some sort of scam it's actually like hey this is the service we provide or there's some useful information uh that that is generally helpful like here like five tricks to not get yourself locked out next time you know stuff like that maybe like people actually read that and that is time on site and then Google sees that people are clicking through and they're actually spending time on your site and then you start climbing the ranks and most people will just click the wor thing on Google but but if they're doing like Google is very context sensitive as well like so if they're on a phone if if they're in a certain place uh there like all these different contexts and and of course their previous search history things like that all factor into like what they're likely to see at the top so um it is possible that you can be like the top ranked um you know locksmith in Brooklyn or something like that and you'll just get like this huge amount of calls naturally without having to spend money on ads by virtue of getting up to that position right uh I mean that is theoretically possible but in reality it's incredibly competitive I would imagine yeah very competitive especially when somebody if you think about the customer type when you're locked out you're not going to be scanning through Google you're not doing your research you need the service right away unless you're like trying to get like a car Reed or something like that and you're at home and you're planning this weeks in advance so those top three spots get like 90% of the traffic maybe top four um but with that as you mentioned the the ads if if Google doesn't have data on your site they can't really rank you like if they don't know anything about you they have no context to who you are so the ad is a way to to get that like that in my case it was time on site read time yeah and maybe you can give me an update uh an idea of how you approached okay once you get people to the site was there like conversion rate optimization was there just like a big phone number like call here how did you track people like did you have a special phone number that people would like how did you actually like attribute yeah so our our uh our customers are on their phone so phone number click call button right away down below you know you get some Imaging in there that looks like a service company uh like I mentioned earlier they're usually not doing too much research so a couple reviews in there a little bit of context some FAQ and that's it like the more we simplified it in fact I I realized when I would try to make the site my way like when I try to make it pretty and make it work the traffic or the time on site would go down that would actually hurt my myself which was really weird because the site that worked the best was the one that I would on my own rank as the worst like I If if you if you put a layout of all the sites and you put five of the versions that I built the one that I think was the best like sucked and the one that I would have hated and said I don't want that as my website that's the one that worked it's weird because you see these sales Pages sometimes like with just a bunch of copy and like really ugly text everything centered and a buy now button and yet that's the one that that seems to work yeah yeah I mean if you are tunnel vision like the smartest person in the world they get locked out and they're like late for a meeting or something they're they just want the number to call and they'll pay whatever price there's a high in elasticity of demand they just need to get into the door so that they can get on their meeting or something like that or you know uh get into their car so they can get on to the next thing with their day and they don't want to be waiting around you know time is money right and uh so I I I could definitely imagine like even very intelligent people just like having tunnel vision and not being that different from the average person on the street in terms of how they would interact with the web page if they just need something real quick right yeah yeah it was an easy industry to convert let's just put it that way like people just call five numbers that they find and they just find the one that can get there the fastest as you said yeah yeah so maybe you can talk about like what happened from that point in your life like so you you said you're you're the janitor at a church you you had like a lawnmowing business you're doing these other things uh and you're making money and surviving but you just hit on something that you can it will actually be a skill where you can scale and this is like a key thing that I think a lot of uh people want to go into business they want to like create a restaurant or they want to create like a medical like a dental practice or something like that right like it's difficult to scale your own personal effort when you have to physically be there doing something right I mean you might be able to hire people you still have to like there's only so much scale you can get with certain types of business but with certain like web scale they call it uh businesses like the the sky's the limit right like the more you can do what you do in theory the more the bigger your business can become and the more um you know different geographies you can enter and all this stuff and it's it's software that's taking the proverbial orders right it's not you having to check every single patient's you know teeth um in order to you know and also the cost obviously it costs a lot of money to buy Google ads but you don't have to have like you know a store front per se like a physical storefront you don't have to have like a back office anything like that you can be just working on your laptop on your couch and in the background a whole bunch of people you you know like free Cod Camp is a charity we're not a business but uh there are currently as we speak probably about 10,000 people using free Cod Camp right and I'm here talking with you I'm not thinking about like oh no I need to you know uh this person just requested this I need to get this for them no the software that we wrote is doing that right the software that the community maintains through the open source project and the 100 plus servers around the world are all like handling those requests and everything's working deterministically to the point that we have n we have 49 up time we had 99.9 I saw that congrats by the way that's that's impressive yeah uh and and again we can work on new stuff like creating new courses doing podcast interviews things like that that aren't um and then that software just gets there gradually gets improved and stuff like so systems over you know like yeah yeah yeah if you're trying to keep I like that kind of business model that was my vision at that point already it was something that scales something I don't have to physically be there at and and can you know not not turn off without me there that's a big deal for me yeah so take me back to that that moment when you're like hey we can go into business we've we've got we've got clients right uh for locksmith and like where did you go from there like just walk me through as much detail cuz I I love these kind of stories of like the Revelation like wow this actually works Eureka I had two I had two options at this point so first was to scale up the locksmith business because if I can broker out leads why couldn't I do this in other cities that was the first thought but the second thought was I in a weird way it's funny because you have to look at things that matter to you in life and one of the things that I don't like to admit but some sort of prestige did matter to me like as far as like if I'm meeting people at a cocktail party or something I I want to be able to be proud of who I am and what I do and I the the the locksmith thing didn't sound like a buzz word that I liked so I decided to go option number two which was utilize this skill that I just learned and start selling web services I mean I wasn't even coding at this point it was just Wix but what happened is I had the success story and instead of scaling up the locksmith business I just went and started connecting with every business owner in the community that meant going to Chamber of Commerce meetings anywhere where there were people doing something from your dentist to your construction uh business owner uh plumber anybody that would talk to me lawyers anybody and I would tell them what I did with my locksmith business I would share stats with them and I would eventually get them on board as clients whether they had a website and they weren't ranking at the moment like I would do a lot of research so I knew who I was talking to or if they didn't have anything at all I would uh just pitch them on these ideas so I went the route of first freelancing actually and I ended up like pulling in clients to the point where really quickly like within like 3 months I think I was at the point where I couldn't keep up as far as clientele go because people like that success story and when you can when you can pull up on your phone and type in you know on their phone usually that's what I would do I would say pull out your phone and type in locksmith and then the city name my site would show up and they're like can you do that for me like it was like it was like selling you know giving candy to a baby I guess so everybody wanted it and my pricing was pretty cheap in the beginning but pretty soon I was selling web development services SEO then eventually some digital marketing but really quickly I was 19 at this point so like some time went by because my birthday's in November so like after the Summer I Turned 19 pretty quick um I hired my brother who's 17 he's still in high school and I'm like hey like Eric I can teach you how to build some websites you want to come work for me and we just kind of scaled up from there and basically had our entire city you know buying web development services from me so that's kind of how it scaled up and at that point there was like this Natural Evolution from uh customers wanting you know basic sites to requesting features because I did scale up in the customer model so it was like the local coffee shop to then somebody trying to sell some kind of e-commerce product and Wix didn't have all those tools so it led me to this Natural Evolution of looking for better website Builders so I went to Wix sorry not Wix WordPress uh WordPress had like plugins woocommerce plugins to be able to customize a site very robust ecosystem tools for businesses yeah yep so I ended up learning WordPress like at this point I had confidence now because I did something like when you get a little bit of confidence it it beg gots more confidence so I taught myself WordPress taught my brother WordPress and then I taught my my buddies whoever I hired how to also build in the same text tag and then there was a Natural Evolution to more custom features can we have this drop- down menu with these icons and so on and if I couldn't find a plugin for it I was I had to make the decision of okay I need to build that out myself so so I started learning HTML and CSS I bought the book by John Ducket and I just like read through the book started building sites from scratch just to understand the concept and then eventually went to modifying my WordPress themes and during the day we would build and at night I would have sessions we had a whiteboard in the office and I would sit down and I would code and we put a projector in the office and I would basically have sessions with everybody that worked with me uh and I would teach them everything as we went along and at that point we were having so much fun with it that no one doubted themselves in their ability to learn because it was beers and and code at that point it was just having fun and doing stuff like that so we just saw it more as camaraderie and and hanging out and it was weird how I was able to bring people into Tech without really like them having the vision of tech they just wanted to hang out like we would have fun in the office you know with our uh we had a we had golf in the office I bought a little uh green so we kind of putt with that and just kind of hang out buy pizza and everyone was more there for that environment beer pizza and golf very very American kind of startup uh experience yep and uh I just want to say that like what you what you said about like there wasn't this culture of like oh this is scary this is technical or oh this is nerdy like you know I'm a business person why why am I admiring myself in these technical details like the the way you describe it there was no fear there was no judgment it was just kind of like hey let's let's learn this stuff let's take this off the shelf and it's this incredibly pragmatic approach to uh software development that like I think isn't as common in the United States that like I I definitely uh I've spent a lot of time like trying to encourage people to learn to code and and talk to people uh and and just going to different uh you know universities and talking to students and trying to get get them into it and uh a there's a lot of reluctance because it's like oh isn't it like don't you have to have a really good math or something like that yeah it's always math I don't get that I thought the same thing I was like I'm not smart and I don't know math that I just counted myself out because of that yeah it's always funny how that works yeah and uh it sounds like you were able to cultivate a culture in your in your peer group and your your Lo your friends uh and just get people to like share information freely and man that's that's a great uh kind of tribe to find so to speak um and yeah I like I encounter this all the time when like I spend a lot of time overseas uh and and uh you know especially in China there's like no Stigma of coding being nerdy or anything like that or coding being hard it's just it's what you do like and so I'll go to like a startup in China and I'll talk to people and they're they're all just like totally down to earth like it's it's not like a geek culture thing or anything like that it's just like this is what you do it it would be like you you know you've worked construction I worked construction for like a week it was the hardest job in my life doing de demolition yeah it is rough on your body and it's dangerous and uh you're out in the sun all day sweating like certainly down here in the Southwest Texas Oklahoma area like it was absolutely miserable and yet like nobody like kind of like questioned like oh you know you're it was just like people just went there and they did their job you know and uh they didn't think too much about it they didn't overthink it but I I feel like we coding a lot of people overthink it and they're like yeah but it's just a bunch of skills it's just a bunch of tools you just like you would learn how to do carpentry or something like that and and use those tools you learn how to wield like you know uh bash scripting for example or um you know operating a web server to be able to take requests and respond to them and stuff like that right um it's just tools and so it's incredibly refreshing to me hearing kind of like the Casual way that you all approached learning this stuff that so many people would probably find very daunting uh and and think like oh I'm not smart enough for that like you said yeah it was always more about the end result for us uh for me like the fact that I got into it because I wanted to make money not because I wanted to build websites like that was the end an end conclusion for everybody that worked for us it was like do you want to do these cool things and we always talk lifestyle we would always dream because everybody that worked with me we were all like very similar upbringings we're very broke and not broke that's not the right term because we always had cash on hand because we worked but we were used to you know having broken fingernails and bruised fingernails from construction and dirt under our nails like it was this image that we had but we didn't like it like in my culture it was you either did construction or you sold cars and I really hated that and I would always talk to um all of my buddies and we would try to break that stigma for ourselves we're like that's not what we want to be we were uh we had a you know people draw conclusions to who we were based on you know our race and such and that that really bothered us so we just really wanted to break out of that so it was like hey we can we can go to work and not you know be sweaty and and smell you know like the environment we're in we can actually wear you know a buttonup shirt and be clean by the end of the day and uh and not be exhausted you know so when we sold that you know when I I guess I kind of sold that Vision you know we can travel we can go out and get an Airbnb somewhere back then I don't even think Airbnb was a thing we would just rent on craigslist uh we would go out and just get a caught and hang out and work and I would always draw that image like work doesn't have to be you know this thing that you try to get away from it was fun when we would all sit on our laptops and work on a project you know at a beach house somewhere so it was really that lifestyle that helped us yeah awesome man well um you have gone on to do so many things and I do want to uh touch on some of those things but one of the things you were able to successfully do with as you gain these skills and built up a cohort of other people who could help you with various you know tasks and stuff you you kind of built like consultancies right like like you were working you were going out and getting clients and then you and your your peer group would like build projects and and you would manage these relationships with clients uh and so it's it's it's basically like building your own agency model like like a freelancer is kind of like a an agency of one but you went bigger than that can you talk about that yeah so that was simply just uh just scaling up like we like I said I went from a freelancer by myself to a full agency you know created a company name around it had everything structured company website and so on so we just we went up from there um the the funny thing is that that only lasted for about 2 two and a half years before I actually shut it down for a very specific reason and it wasn't because of a failure that was the interesting thing because uh when I did close it down I actually ended up having to offboard a lot of clientele that were disappointed that they couldn't work with us anymore um so there was like this weird abrupt ending that happened because of just life circumstances and for me that was uh just the age I was at and the fact that I got married very young as well that kind of interrupted that and then a certain business partner which I don't like to get into too much detail yeah um that was a critical part I had somebody who was much older than me so um I think he was like 32 at that point and I was maybe like 20 within this time maybe 21 and we had a situation where it just became very uh how do I put this they they weren't very ethical with the business in what they were doing and they really deviated our Direction which created like animosity between a lot of the core group and and this specific person and at that point uh just the direction in life kind of shifted from okay I'm running this agency it's very stressful while it was fun it was very stressful at that point and I had developed also a interest in coding like coding itself like at that point I was very happy to be that nerdy person into the tech that actually became very intriguing to me because I at some point got kind of got bored of building the same old website every you know over and over again yeah um so I had to make this decision do I pursue my education or cap it out right here here and just focus on the money or do I make this shift and kind of split up the company and go a different direction so there was like a interesting Evolution there yeah I mean you don't have to say this person's name or anything but like I I've talked to a lot of people like this is textbook like founder issues uh you know there's there's an entire book called like the founder the founder dilemma I think and I think I've heard of that yeah I think it's all about like founder issues essentially like they both share equity at the start and one of them just stops getting things done and like kind of like on the other person's Laurels right and then you have the super motivated person who will stop at nothing and then they look over and they realize that they're doing they're working like 10 times harder and this other person has the same say the same Equity all this stuff they realize they've made a big mistake and that blows up so many companies I mean you hear about these stories and and the founders are always portrayed as like super Cutthroat they had to like you they had to concentrate power themselves just like you know like a Roman Emperor or something right but but the reality is uh and I always tell people this don't have a co-founder if you can avoid it and uh try to to be like the boss of the organization just so you have the ability if if there is somebody like on your team who is dragging things down or like you need to have the ability to like get rid of that person like what was the situation here were you able to just push them out if they were doing unethical stuff well it got to the Point yeah so like there was definitely legal stuff that they would do like I'm talking money missing from the account and it became a regular thing it's like okay what's going on here essentially yeah yeah and I don't I I like I never took legal action because to me it was I'm very much like if if you if you uh if you pull one over on me uh I I'm I'm pretty easy to forgive and I'll just look I'll make sure to keep my distance from you but then we're just done and that's kind of it like I like to kind of disable like I'm calling the cops basically right yeah yeah and this person was a friend from the past as well somebody I knew through through family history so long story short I basically um the irony was they were never in the office and I called them up one day because they're always into some other Venture and I called them in one day and I said I need you to sign this document that says you are relieving all control of the company and they were shocked and um it was very it was kind of like a very manipulative tactic that they would use because they were always bring in the next thing this person's job was basically to pull in clients for the company yeah I was the one pulling in all the clients and when I brought that paper to them it was like well I see why you're doing this but I'm about to land the big client that's going to change everything and I'm like no no no we've we've played this game long enough it's like the abusive relationship where it's like now I'm going to change now I'm GNA like yeah we're not doing that you know I I'm I'm very aware of this and um I was able to figure that out early and notice that characteristic to where I said no once you pull that on me a couple times I'm I'm cautious of that so yeah I signed that over but it led to like one of the hardest decisions which was uh after I got married I had to like disperse the company at that point I was I was just so exhausted burnt out like it started taking a toll on my marriage in my first year just because I was working ridiculous hours like going to sleep at 2:00 in the morning waking up at 6:00 and going back at it like really low on sleep and the hardest decision was to take care of my employees at that point because I didn't want to just end the company because they were all relying on me for a paycheck so it actually took me about a year to dissolve the entire company it was calling up clients it was telling my brother hey if you want to like if you want to keep some of these clients for yourself go ahead and do it some of these clients are really like high value like we had clients that would just basically pay us $4,000 a month on autopay just because of ads that we're running so we kind of divvied up clients I made sure that some of my employees whoever I could help out I got them jobs before before I cancel or Clos the company and then dissolved it from there but that actually led into the next venture which was me taking a step back and I actually ended up keeping a few clients as a freelancer and I actually got hired by one of my clients as a full-time employee he didn't want me to dissolve the business but he said if you want to come work for me uh let's just bring you on board you'll just be my head of marketing run our website and run our Google ads for us and that was like a transition and I ended up doing that for basically like a year and a half before I picked up my next coding Venture because I'm always kind of I can't sit still so I always had to jump into something and that's where I saw another opportunity and that led into my uh my website sale that that we mentioned uh pre- interiew here yeah let's definitely talk about that but first I want to make the observation that you went from freelance uh and to running your own consultancy to becoming an employee at one of your clients and a lot of people think isn't that kind of like backward don't you work at a company then you leave and you you Branch out the other way um but I mean it sounds like this worked out pretty well for you and I mean it was certainly appealing enough at the time for you to to take that offer can we just uh maybe talk about that Dynamic a little bit and like misperceptions people may have about how freelancing works and like uh the appeal of working for somebody having a stable income having a single employer that you're helping yeah so first of all it was an ego blow for sure like it it was humbling coming in and and answering to somebody because from 18 to 21 till the time I got married I was the one calling all the shots like it it no one really told me what to do as a kid you know since 11 years old like my mom just made sure we were there in the morning like she didn't have time to yeah look after us so I had no one to answer to for for such a long time and now I'm I'm in this position which I I didn't like but I was humbled enough to to to just do it and I did it because when I got married I needed stability and there was times when I would pay my employees and keep nothing for myself just to you know get by just to make sure that everyone else was taken care of I took a lot of pride in making sure that um no one was left out so I did that for stability but at this point uh when I'm while I'm running this company I did really good with Google Adwords by the way like we went on a national level this is a a fuel testing laboratory and we're competing with multi-million companies and at the time that I came in there the company was doing about 750 in Revenue basically selling like uh laboratory services so like you know how you can get your blood tested they draw blood you send it to a lab they tell you what's going on yeah um fuel has the same thing diesel fuel like a lot of uh companies like uh AWS for example has a lot of servers or Amazon does and they have to test thousands of generators in these remote areas and by law they have to test them like I think every year every gas station has to te do quality checks on their fuel so the laboratory's business model was simply testing that fuel and between my uh with what I was able to do in my web development services in Google AdWords I put us on the map to where I think we brought the company to about 3 million within a 2-year time span uh from 750 like it was not big numbers but uh we definitely got out there because of what I was able to do between like the agency and and my what I personally did but as I was working at the company I uh so I was already interested in coding and I really missed it actually I really missed building sites because now I wasn't doing it as often I was managing one website and then just a few clients but I noticed that the company was uh we had some I guess uh issues internally with with the products that we were using the software and how we managed our our lab samples and at the time my boss was actually looking for a a developer or some kind of agency to build out a new system for the company this is just lab management software it takes in data and spits it out to the client so I noticed a lot of inefficiency in this and I had this idea like hey if I learn how to code and really get into development maybe I can build it and like come on board as a software engineer and not just a web developer so that's when I kind of had this brilliant idea I didn't tell anyone and I just started learning how to code like with python at first and then using Jango as a framework and I built out a prototype for my boss to pitch in a meeting so so I ended up like drawing out this whole vision of it I put in all of our issues what I think I can solve I went to Microsoft Paint and like you know created a dashboard and I said hey this is what we have this is what I can do and uh he loved the idea because he was getting it free because I said I'll do this on my own time and uh basically said go for it if you can build it we'll hold off we won't pay for the system at the time we were getting bids between like 70 to I think like 120 grand for it so I ended up basically learning how to code built it and uh started servicing the company with that piece of software wow that's awesome so just to reflect on what you said you're already working you know as head of marketing I think is the title you mentioned but B basically doing all the SEO doing all the adby uh doing you know website optimization and and doing web development in the sense that you're updating you know web pages but not doing like uh proper coding as pantic call uh you know but but you're like learning python you're you're building an actual system that a lab laboratory can use to uh essentially like handle samples and so so kind of like back office logistical software yeah almost right and so you voluntarily just dropped everything and you probably didn't completely drop stuff you probably had to keep your old responsibilities going but you just like just started learning and you had the gumption uh the confidence to to go ahead and build the skill set a lot of people rest on their Laurels uh uh I always tell people like um the what what separates somebody who's merely successful with somebody who goes on to become prolific is uh they don't just stop once they get to the top of the hill they look around they find other Hills that are even taller they go down the hill and they go up the taller Hill and then they repeat you know until they're on like the highest point they can get to right uh and uh it you definitely strike me as is the kind of person who is like that who is doing the hill climbing algorithm and looking around trying to get a better vantage point and so uh maybe you subconsciously maybe you very consciously knew that like learning Python and learning these different skills would uh put you in a position where you could build even more sophisticated systems uh but kudos to you for doing it so what did you do once you built this system so the there there's a really key thing that occurred at this point because mentioned my boss didn't pay me for it it was all on my own time and I was very adamant about it and I kind of foresaw this from my first uh founder issue so I was very cautious in the beginning to keep all legal documents all receipts to like you know my Heroku bills AWS and so on so I buil this system out and I actually ended up working my my my boss into a deal where I said hey let's run this separately and in order for me to be able to build it and work these ridiculous hours you just paid me like a service fee so we'll just slap on like 30 cents per sample that goes through the system so he actually ended up paying me not directly but for the service of the system and I created an a separate entity for it that he was actually a part of so we actually created a company around this software and this thing was such a big hit because in the industry it was revolutionary like if you sent in a sample to the lab uh historically we would send you a PDF back and that was really redundant and then if like for example like we would have clients that had data centers with thousands of generators they would call up and say okay we're we need to check this diesel sample from 2013 and we want to see like a trend line of what what's going on with this sample like is the fuel getting worse is it better what's going on so in the office we would have to have people go in and look for these PDFs trying to search their emails just to find this data the system I created had really good search functionality and it also Trend lined your data so that meant that every s every generator had some kind of ID on on it so it was really easy to find all your data for the clients and I also created a client portter portal I said you don't have to call us anymore just log in and go find your sample like punch in your location and you'll see the data so because of this uh sales our company sales went up like crazy because we were now the one of the only Laboratories that provided anything even similar to this so it was kind of a big deal so I basically serviced this for the next two years and uh with the model of him paying a commission per per sample so I was making money on the side with that it was kind of interesting and there was a time where we basically had some disagreements in where where we're going with the direction of the company and we had to reach a conclusion of hey what do we do with the system because I decided it's my time to leave I think at this point I'm like four years into working for this lab yeah two as just a web developer and then two as a web developer marketing and you know maintainer of this software and we get into this like legal battle where he's saying hey that's my system you know I'm just going to take it and uh I had all the records that said no like all the bills are under my name I did it in off hours I was able to prove to a lawyer that uh there was no cross contamination I guess in hours which is very tricky um like I used my own laptop everything I was very adamant about that from the first experience and uh basically we got into the legal battle and I decided to just do a clean exit I gave him a fair price it was actually in toal $61,000 but I had taken an investment from someone else to help me fund that system so my profit from that was 41,000 as I as I sold it to the lab which made the lab a lot of money like over that time frame we used it in marketing materials at conferences we would have a a big TV and a dashboard and clients would you know people would walk up and they would see how we trended the data they would see how beautiful the interface looked which I actually have uh pictures of it and it's in a video that I did where I dis where I showed it yeah you can find that I would love to link that in the show notes so people can check that out um yeah yeah I'll do that yeah just but I I want to um first of all compliment you on being so um Forward Thinking in terms of uh you know keeping all these records so that you could like kind of paper it as they say and like have you know all the documentation so that that they wouldn't be able to because a lot of employers uh I mean like a lot of judges might decide with Employers in this case because usually that is probably the case usually the employee is not keeping sufficiently comprehensive records but by um completely I guess uh quarantining all all the work you're doing uh and keeping it separate I'm I'm trying to think of a better word than that but basically uh you were able to uh just track all that stuff and and have everything you needed to be able to to force them to the negotiation table so that you could actually properly sell the software that you developed because I mean by default it's going to be a work for a hire they're they're going to say well you're using company resources so it's actually pretty remarkable that you had this much leverage at this point uh well it's funny because him not wanting to pay me up front for the services was actually the thing that backfired on him and him paying me per sample is where I had the legal power because there was a record that showed he was paying me for for the system through a different entity so the second that first payment was made showed that it was separate from the company that was kind of like the the um the thing that really pushed him out was was or basically uh lost the court case for him we didn't officially go to court we were able to do that through litigation on the side but I had the upper hand because of that the lawyer basically said yeah it's not worth pursuing this cuz he's going to win it or even if if my boss were to win that case uh there was leverage that I had that could have really damaged the business because of the the keys that I held yeah well I mean it sounds like it all worked out great for him anyway because he's got this industry-leading software that you developed he can bring it bring bring in another python developer to potentially maintain and extend the functionality but he if they're already using this as like a centerpiece of conference uh you know booths and all this other stuff like hey use our tool use our tools because look we've got all this stuff everybody else is just sending you PDFs right like I mean that's it's really compelling and here is one of the reasons why I'm so enthusiastic about the future of software development people often like you know I I've talked with so many experienced software Engineers on this channel um and it's extremely rare that I meet somebody who thinks that the number of developers is actually going to go down in the near term like over the next 20 or 30 years because there are so many Industries and so many different com companies within each of those industries that are doing things by like paper oh my like I I tell people don't don't try like if you want steady income and you're looking for opportunity and you don't care about like you don't care about the industry being sexy or anything like that there is so much opportunity it is ridiculous any company you go to you will find such inefficiencies like people sending out PDFs and like by the hundreds of thousands and this is all across the board there are so many companies 10 20 years behind that if you learn how to solve one of those issues you're golden it's it's about creating tools for that it's not about creating the next Facebook or or you know social app like that's where everyone tends to want to go because that's what has all the buzz but staying in the boring Industries it's ridiculous like we're we're so behind in those areas and there's so much opportunity yeah and I mean in the fuel testing industry uh which I didn't even know was an industry but it makes sense there there I didn't know either like it's not like you brought some revolutionary like like people weren't caring about like uptime probably they weren't caring about performance and how much you know uh Ram the Chrome tab was using or whatever people probably weren't caring even like necessarily about like accessibility and like a lot of other considerations uh like a lot of the the newer kind of like state-of-the-art you might very well have just been able to take Tech from like 10 years before and still build this system that worked well enough like that's exactly what I did yeah that's that's exactly what it was the funny thing is this system was no different than just a CMS that plugged into their lab yeah that's all it is like very very simple and it's not revolutionary at all it was just revolutionary to that and the the funny thing is about the end users is my my biggest issue actually came in from Internet Explorer users because the type of user of our system was usually uh a little bit older and they were working in some kind of basement in a warehouse somewhere or like uh in some kind of uh Data Center and they were not very tech savvy it was more of your blue collar type of worker that got some kind of call from some legal agent agcy that says hey are you are you up to your requirements and they don't know what to do so they don't really understand this stuff and they just need to tap in and see this portal and they really didn't care about speed or anything like that they didn't understand that part and my Internet Explorer users were the ones that really bothered me because anytime I tried to use more up-to-date Tech they would not see their interface and that's actually my story into react because at that point uh react had all the things built in already where I was just using jQuery and JavaScript built things out from scratch on the front end uh certain things like template literals meant that an Internet Explorer user couldn't render out data because Internet Explorer didn't know what that was yeah like there was browser compatibility issues so when Internet Explorer died I was very happy yeah I mean like like to to to kind of summarize your pragmatism toward like okay let's just get these tools that work well enough I mean even the most primordial of software development tools are going to be you know Generations ahead of you know phone call between different people in different offices with file cabinets and stuff like that right um at the end of the day like I think a lot of people make technology for technology sake but technology is not the thing it's the thing that gets you to the thing and that thing is usually you know some sort of human conversation or or like some compliance with some law or some you know whatever the Practical thing that you're trying to accomplish is and I think people often get like lost in uh you know a whole bunch of like latest and greatest technology and they discount their ability to affect change with just some you know cursory python skills and like a relational database yeah I mean Peter levels uh using raw PHP not even larl and jQuery I mean it's funny you can people I the reaction on Twitter was crazy about that but I I admire it because he's just getting an end result and he doesn't care how he gets there and and there's certain time where you have to optimize for 200 milliseconds and there's times where it doesn't matter and in his case if that doesn't affect his clientele it works there might be some security flaws in it but I think that's always going to be an issue yeah absolutely I mean that you could probably like he's a solo Dev who's like maintaining all these different he runs like Nomads list and remote okay like a lot of these popular tools that are designed built run by a single you know Creator um Peter levels uh also by the way he was on a recent podcast uh The Lex Freeman podcast and uh he recommended free code Camp oh really learning the code yeah I only got like I I saw the the the clip that went viral on Twitter and then I I think I'm like an hour into it maybe a little bit less I I listen in the gym so when I'm running or working out that's when I get my podcast time in so I need to catch up on that that's really cool exciting same here it was just like a quick comment like recommend like free cooking is good but it's cool to know that like somebody that practical still finds any uh's a littleit uh practical lessons I've got a ton of questions for you but I just want to like fully ride through your story up to here you're only 30 years old I mean it's amazing how much you've accomplished in this amount of time I didn't even start learning to code until I was 30 I think it was like 31 or something when I got my first developer job so um so you've already ridden this very crazy curve also getting married very young 20 21 I got married when I was 25 I think so I was also I was still young too yeah yeah but but like it it changes your priorities right like do you have any kids uh first on the way actually we're expecting in in two months so end of October pretty excited congratulations and uh Hing everything goes smoothly uh for you and Mom yeah so so you you get out of this situation you got you know $41,000 in addition to like all the other money you probably saved up from just being yeah some savings him ful entrepreneur right um uh cash is your lifeblood right like I I think most entrepreneurs have this reflex to just save as much as possible because they can roll that into their next venture right but what was the next venture so you you you finish this where do you go from there so this is right before Co it's 2019 when when I make this exit and I had a few decisions to make and uh I talked to my wife so my biggest rule in life and this is from my dad is he says if your family is the first thing like if you don't take care of that there's there's no honor in anything else he says if if your wife has to worry or your kids wherever you're at in life um that to me was what was ingrained in my life and my biggest thing was to never stress uh stress her out it's the reason why I left my first business and if that means putting on a suit and tie and you know a what do you call that that 90s office worker with the fat tie and the mustard color T-shirt button up that goes here I'll do it that's that's my number one priority so I I consult with her and I said hey I could go take another developer job like I have this resume now built up that people will you know will hire me for this um I don't really want to go back to freelancing I'm a little bit traumatized by that and I'm exhausted and I I want to continue with my education but I don't want to just go take the the traditional path so I tell her okay we have this money saved up and I estimated it out to where we were able to basically survive about a year and a half based on what I had saved up and and the money I just took from the sale and I told her if uh if you're okay with this I'm going to go all in and I want to teach which seemed ridiculous because I I literally had no YouTube channel no subscribers or anything like that but I said I learned from Justin Mitchell I learned from Brad traversy I learned from Bucky from the New Boston and from free code Camp I watched these videos and I was as I was learning I always wanted to do something like that uh me being a nonnative English speaker as well I always try to uh really better my English and get more fluent in talking I I get Tongue Tied a lot uh that goes to the fact that I didn't speak English till I was five and growing up in a large family uh you kind of get your voice gets really bullied down in a way by your brothers like when I try to speak up it's like if you don't catch someone's attention right away your brothers will just over talk you know and basically overshadow you and I wanted to do something that challenged this fear of mine of speaking but I also wanted to learn technology more and I wanted to get out there so I basically said if we get to $5,000 and I and I'm not making money with this I'm going back to work I'll go put on a a button-up shirt and go do the the nerdy thing and I started teaching so uh petrified like my first videos like an hour long video took me probably 15 hours to film and I would just go through this and I would just sit in in my room for hours and hours and I I'm no uh hard work is something I'm very familiar with so I would just power through that and eventually I got decent at these basic tutorials so I started my first course and I'm very awkward but I also have a lot of empathy for self-taught developers I know there's sometimes controversy over the term self-taught but in my opinion selftaught is somebody that didn't go through a traditional route yeah and a lot of people really uh resonated with that go ahead I was just going to say like you could argue that people are not self-taught if they didn't like I don't know like what is selftaught just a arent is you didn't just learn it on your own without you know reading or you know like no one can really teach themselves right but my argument is you had to if you sat down and bought books and courses and like pushed yourself through it yeah that's self taught you can get into the technical of it I defree with that sentiment and I would say if you're going through free C Camp uh if you're just checking out books from the library if you're listening to podcast if you're watching Youtube I would consider you self-taught and I would say anybody who is pedantic and says well technically people taught you because they wrote the books or whatever like there's nobody who's truly self-taught in anything other you could look at like uh okay so libowitz and uh Newton right they created calculus both at the same time right they figured it out they discovered calculus unless you discovered an entire new field of study you're not self-taught in that by the most strict definition so I just throw that definition out the window and I say you know if if most of your skills were acquired through learning on your own uh and using learning resources and you didn't formally attend like an academy or a university or something to learn those skills then yes you are self-taught uh I just I just want to go ahead and say that like I strongly believe that uh people who hair split and criticize over self like they don't know what they're talking about 100% agree yeah yeah so with anybody like that though I had a lot of empathy for that because I I know what it's like to to feel like an idiot when you turn on a a a YouTube video and someone's saying these these these uh acronyms they're talking about all these things that you're just like you just kind of your eyes glaze over and I know what it was like to find a video like that and then to find someone like Bucky Roberts that like tells jokes as he's teaching he tells you these Side Stories he keeps things very short and he assumes you know nothing and like yeah literally points the cursor to everything he's doing this is why this is happening and it seems silly to some people because it's like talking down but someone like me needed that yeah so when I started making videos like that a lot of people resonated with it uh because I just assumed you knew absolutely nothing and I wanted anybody to watch a video and be able to do something with it so that kind of took off until um I think I got like 2,000 subscribers within like a a 3month period so from like September to December I got like 2,000 subscribers and then in February I released the video where I tell the story of the lab system and that video goes viral I think within a week it had like 880,000 views right now it's at 1.5 million and what happened was and I actually strategically placed this because I was very aware of marketing and SEO and how that game worked so that was a huge Advantage for me in YouTube I didn't just come into this completely from scratch like my video skills were bad and my teaching skills weren't that good but I was aware of keywords to use I was aware of how to title certain things and I wanted to make that video in September right after I left my job and sold that software but I realized okay if I teach some D Jango content I can build up a base I can build up some students because if I release this video later I know it's going to get a lot of views I want to be able to pull people in to watch that watch this video and then go check out my other content because if it's my first video they're not going to subscribe to my channel they'll just see a video they'll say this is cool they'll comment and then they're gone and I wanted to pull in that that viewer so with that video going viral it Skyrock is my channel to where I think within the first year I hit 100,000 maybe it was like a year and a month or two but it was very strategically placed and I just ended up uh getting to the point where I think we were at $6,000 in in the bank account before I hit a specific number that was like okay we can live on this it was a YouTube paycheck I um I had partnered up with the with Brad traversy actually on a course uh Brad became my friend throughout this time period I tried to help him in any way I could because that's a good contact to have and I felt like I owed him so much and I ended up uh basically turning that into full-time income and as the the the ship was sinking I'm trying to make sure it's in frame I make money and then we just like Jack Sparrow before the the ship goes under the dock walk off like that's how it felt I was already job searching I was interviewing and ready to to get back into the market and that's when like just the YouTube checks started coming in they weren't big but they were hitting the $1,500 mark my course was making like 4,000 to to 5,000 a month from that couple where did you publish your course on like un to me or so yeah that was udem me um that uh the first one was udem me then I I did one before that but it was like a free video on YouTube but I sold a course guide so you can watch the videos for free but I have a written guide that takes you step by step and it's like the written explanation with code examples a very bad site actually I don't like it today I'm actually embarrassed to even talk about it or share it but it worked and that also was able to bring in you a couple thousand a month from that and you were able to you able to thread the need you were able to pull together enough uh income streams that you could continue to pay for your family and yeah and survive that's great man uh and since then of course you've developed a lot of courses uh you developed some courses that that we published on the free Cod cam channel uh you're you're working with aight uh which has created some grants to develop courses on the free Cod Camp Channel as well um very cool uh low code uh no code slash low code no code I don't know whatever I would say low code maybe I I just use I always pitch Firebase as the example actually I'm like we're like Firebase but we're open source so yeah you know a lot of people know what Firebase is we're not shy to to bring that up we're punching up so it's okay for us to do that yeah so so basically the way I maybe you could just take a moment to describe like as somebody who has been on both sides of this both using ecos systems like Wix like WordPress and now can basically just build like you know nose Jango and Python and can build web servers and has even taught other people how to do all that stuff like maybe we could just talk for a minute about low code and why why low code like why why it went back there or why you should use it in yeah why why should you use it and um because I know a lot of you know experienced devs who use low Cod tools it's just yeah there a time save but maybe you efficiency that that's what I would say it's all about efficiency it's about getting a product to Market uh personally for me I like building back ends actually so it's kind of funny that I went to aight and there was a reason why I did that but for me is if you're a solo developer let's say you you're really good with nextjs and react and that's your stack and uh you have some templates that you work with maybe you have a UI library that you like when it comes to building a full product you usually need you know parts of the full stack and if you're building this by yourself you have a few options you can either learn how to uh work with some kind of backend whether that's with larel Jango whatever your uh preference in technology is or you can hire somebody to do that or you can go to a low code tool and a backend as a service so you don't have to learn all these things so for me it's simply efficiency it's about getting it done uh scalability uh these these things when you get into them take a lot of time and resources and if you're trying to get a product to Market uh you're removing that overhead there's this argument where well I can build it cheaper by myself and do it from scratch Peter leveles actually talks about that in his interview on Lex Freedman and it works for him uh but I would rather pay $15 here $20 there from for some kind of server maybe a little bit more for a database if that can you know save me thousands in the long run if I have to hire a developer that I have to pay thousands to but only pay a couple dollars per service here and there uh it's much more worth it for me therefore I have more capabilities to be flexible when I need to because I can control all aspects of it and I I can make pivots much faster so it's all about making my MVPs or simply scaling I'm very okay with relying on these resources I'm not um like there's a azero for example as a service I've heard people make the arguments well you don't own all your own user data well you can own it in other ways but I'm I don't know I'm not really concerned about that I to me that saves headache yeah and I I would much rather trust them in certain areas than to get a phone call known we had a breach in some area and then all of a sudden I'm liable z uh we use it um and I think like don't roll your own authentication yes there's some great nodejs authentication libraries if you misconfigured them it's your butt right like off zero like one of the reasons people pay them is don't get hacked have have world class security and never let anybody hack you uh and that that's one of the reasons they're like this big company uh and that everybody uses them right um yeah um go uh I was going to say very quickly about Peter levels he does use uh lowco tools like like I think he he's used um like uh Loco tools in the past as well and I think he talks about that a little bit on that podcast which I will link to it's a 4H hour long if you thought my interviews were long wait till you L Lex freedman's interviews well it's it's funny because everybody has a l a line they draw I I've heard people make the argument no I like to build my own I'm going to roll my own off um and I like to understand all the code but yet they're using a framework and then I'll ask them well where do you deploy oh I use Heroku and vers versel or something like that yeah I'm like well so you're using a tool like that you're not building a server out in your garage uh Peter levels uses stripe that's a low code tool that's he's not building all his own payments out he's not writing or getting checks mailed to him or uh connecting to banks by himself he's using a tool that's there so we all already do it at some level uh in one way or another I don't I've never met a developer that writes everything from scratch without a framework and doesn't use some kind of provider in one way file storage I've never met a developer who doesn't use those tools who gets a lot done because yeah that fundamental constraints to what you can actually accomplish as a single person and you know like there might be Fortune 500 companies like I I would I would venture that even a lot of Fortune 500 companies use stripe you know uh like even if you're Amazon do you really want to be creating like Pro you know credit card processing software and like dealing with all that you know overhead and all the security considerations the privacy considerations uh I don't think most companies do want to do that so so yes I I I think it's you really hit the nail on the head when you said that it's there's a line that every developer like every developer has a line somewhere but yeah there's always a line somewhere where you're just like okay I'm not going to you know write my own payment infrastructure or I'm not going to write my own cloud I'm I'm to build my own cloud right uh you can absolutely do that you can absolutely do that but that's generally the the domain for people that have massive teams at their disposal massive budgets uh who who could potentially like actually get like infrastructure in a data center somewhere yeah and and then you're kind of like off off offloading the data data center management like do you build your own data centers right like there there becomes like a practical kind of barrier that I think um the world is incredibly complex there so many things to consider and uh yeah so so loow CCO tools like we use them all the time at fre CCO Camp uh we use tons of uh different Services as a charity by the way we get access to a lot of these tools for free like like I think we get Cloud flare for free we get off zero for free um we get some small amount of Amazon credits it's not as generous as I would like if anybody from Amazon's listen to this and want to give us a bunch of credits it certainly help uh digital lotion is pretty pretty good about giving credits things like that but but yeah like these developer tools are out there for a reason use them it would be my advice and don't don't be like thinking that you're not a real developer because you didn't roll your own XYZ that's funny cuz sometimes that's the case like for me I remember uh first of all I like building back ends but I remember people recommending Firebase to me and at that point I'm like well I came from the low code world and I put all this time into learning what I want to know now why do I want to take a step back like it almost felt like I was going back into that world where I'm proud to be able to write my own code so there was kind of like that barrier for me and uh really quickly I learned to to you know put that ego aside because there's plenty of areas where I can write my own code now and just those tools allow me to focus on my specialties as opposed to that but that I've seen as I've seen that as a barrier for some people where they just simply don't like to admit that these tools can help them yeah well I want to fire a whole bunch of Rapid Fire questions that I've got like this list of like 20 questions um first of all early in your career I I love this uh when I learned this about you people would call you Google boy yeah what's the story behind that so uh there was this one client that I had it was actually a friend he uh he was one of the original Founders I think in WebMD and he was an older gentleman who was very successful and he would um I met him in my city and he would just like to hang out in our office because he loved the energy of being around around a bunch of young kids doing something and he always had these ideas that he was bringing to me and he' always asked me for advice and he just referred to me as Google boy because he loved the energy and I feel like sometimes uh there's people that will hang out just because of that as I mentioned we had a lot of fun in our office so he simply had a lot of questions around that and and I guess like the idea so that kind of took off and and he would mention that to people so he would bring me into a meeting and there' be like you know four older gentlemen for me it was much older than me but in their like 50s 60s and and he would just introduce me this is you know my my Google boy whiz kid and he actually end ended up investing in one of my Ventures but uh he would always just introduce me that way and it was it was pretty cool I was proud of that because I went from my history to now having any form of ref reference to Google which was a cool thing yeah and um I'm curious how you go about like doing SEO research like let's say hypothetically you got a new project and I'm not asking you to disclose proprietary information you're not even really doing SEO that much these days it seems like you're mostly developing courses but um let's say hypothetically you you had a client um we we'll call it um Ben's plasma donation center or something like that blood donation center can we use something more practical okay I'm kidding I'm kidding I'm kidding yeah coffee shop yeah okay coffee shop all right very very simple okay everybody know I know how to Doo for plasma donations okay so uh I think most people actually don't donate plasma because they have to like pull the blood out of your arm and run it through all these machines then put it back into you uh I think people get paid for that and I don't think it's like uh something you do unless you really need the money but blood donation uh maybe a blood donation center is is more what I thinking yeah so let's do that instead of the coffee shop because I think the coffee shop is kind of a generic example uh so I want to get people to come and donate their blood uh especially people that have like o uh positive or yeah o oh is it o oh negative that can be the universal I'm not sure actually okay um sorry this isn't going to we're not going to attempt to recount like science class from like high school here uh but basically you want to get uh people in some geographic area to come and donate blood so like let's say hypothetically I was hanging out with my brother and my brother donates a lot of blood he's donated like literal gallons of blood over the past I think he's done like 60 blood donations he does it every month and like man I want to do that I haven't donated blood in years right just cu I'm busy and so I started searching around trying to find a blood donation center nearby me and that was reputable and was not not going to like gouge hospitals on it and where the blood was actually going to get used and stuff like that and they weren't going to give me like infections from drawing my blood and stuff like that so like let's say hypothetically you had a client that was a blood bank like how would you go about like doing that we're going to do a quick Clinic um sure yeah so the first thing I'm doing is I'm I'm looking up the keywords that I would look up to find it I try not to let the market influence me right away I just try to punch in those key words and I I like to see what the competition is like what's going on out there and I scour their sites um I've used tools like Moz and Sam rush and I also look for variants and keywords that that are being used for this so what are all the ways that people are looking into this or how do people find it in search results there's various combinations of those keywords once I figure that out uh then it's all about just going through the basics making sure the site is there meta tags are there the content is is up and going and from there I usually look for opportunities to convert traffic that aren't direct clients just to kind of get that site trusted by Google so whether that's through articles I'm looking for longtail keywords that's a big one for me uh for example if you're competing for the search term bloodbank San Francisco CA right that's usually how people search something like that um that's a very difficult keyword to get what I like to do is I like to find some keywords like uh best BL Blood Bank in San Francisco or uh top rated or maybe um let's see there's there's different keywords they're called lawn tail because their volume and traffic like if you were to look at a chart let's do this right here like let's say it goes this way your top keywords up here everyone competes for this when you go for those sub keywords there's less competition so there's less traffic down at that point I wish I can like draw on the screen there's less competition but that means those are easy to get so I usually trying to find ways to find those keywords and then create articles around them so if those keywords only get me uh 10 250 site visitors a month and don't convert into actual like users that maybe go to the blood bank themselves uh they're at least using my site and collecting data and can get there from One path to another so I'm usually doing that then I'm looking for social strategies if I can do Google AdWords I'll see what the competition is like there then I'm really big on the social strategy because I believe in SEO today outside of having a basic site uh it's about getting other social presence involved there it's something that uh Google does like to see so I'm seeing if I can uh find a strategy online see what competitors are doing and just trying to get any engagement there uh YouTube videos that's always a good one so I'm always just looking for those type of keys those are there's a lot we can do here but right off the top of my head it's that kind of analysis I just I like to know the industry and that's one of the things that I sold to my clients by the way was I would come into meetings and I would know a lot about what they're doing so like if it was a a dentist or if it was a lawyer I would like learn their lingo and scour through and actually read their competitor's websites and what they're doing and I'll try to understand that and they're always so impressed like if there was a coffee shop owner I would say okay you're this area is getting searched you know you have a thousand searches a month and your competitors are pulling these and this is your rank and you're only pulling you know x% and looking at your your coffee shop you have like 20% off occupancy there's a lot of Empty Tables uh we need to increase that number so I would always use data like that to also sell that I know that's a side tangent but um it helps no no that's absolutely helpful because my next question was like you have gotten a lot of clients over uh the years and one of the ways you've done this is by putting yourself out there and in places where you're likely to encounter clients you mentioned the American Chamber of Commerce right uh amcham I think uh but there's there's like other variants like there might be like local Rotary Club there's plenty of local ones yeah yeah it's every city seems to have those they have like a lot of these organizations that meet up business owner groups and such let's say hypothetically you're starting over you got a new body of completely new life the only thing is your brain is the same and you still know everything you used to have and we drop you into a new city like s Cincinnati and now you have to go and make a living and let's say like hypothetically we took away your developer skills so you've only got um I know I said your phrase the same but you don't have the ability to like build web apps uh or or sophisticated you know systems like the one that you build for fuel testing but you you do have your marketing skills um we're dropping you into a new city and you need to get clients like how where would you go and when you go to those places what would you do in preparation and what would you do once you get there so first of all uh with with nowadays tools um I would if I don't have those skills I would probably find someone that would be willing to do those if I needed money I would find a a web developer a freelancer that I would partner up with and say hey I can pull you leads give me a cut of these jobs then I'm probably going to meetup.com I'm I'm researching the city and I want to know where the business owners hang out so if it's Chambers of Commerce meetings or or meetings like that that's where I'm going if there's any local talks I can attend or any kind of trade show that's anything relevant to those clientele I'm going there uh if it's high class bars or restaurants where there's a way to Network I'm simply just talking to people that's that's something that I wasn't good at but I developed that skill where I can sit down at a bar and strike up a conversation and find your interest and I'm usually using what they're doing as the starter of my conversation it's not a pitch into hey this is what I do here's my business card I I I never Ed that tactic it was talking about their industry so if I went to a Meetup and I was talking to a plumber um usually I would like to have my research already prepped before then but if not I'm usually asking them about the industry I'm asking them who they're competing what what competing with uh what's going on what are challenges they're facing and if I'm starting from scratch that's what I'm doing I'm going to be a a u what's the what's the I'm like a I'm like a puppy at a dog park in that sense I'm just getting as loud as I can and talk to Talking to as many people as possible and the issue sometimes with this is that it doesn't you you don't see the results right away so it's about building those relationships and network so through time as you're doing that you might pull one or two uh leads from that but people end up getting to know you and people talk so it's about like getting that momentum as we talked about with uh you use that space analogy what was with the hydrogen things kind of take off yeah yeah uh momentum takes off so when you're chasing clients in the beginning it takes some time but once they get going you're pushing clients away like people will end up talking so I'm simply just networking like crazy and probably just showing up in those areas like right now in Tech when I wanted to break in it was it wasn't just the Brad traverses of the world because he's he's high-profiled compared to where I was at the moment so I knew that that was a far reach even though I reached out to him and I actually sent him a couple emails it wasn't an ask it was more of hey you did this for me you know is there anywhere I can help you then I would offer certain services or not services but like i' would offer to help support his comment section for example so I'd provide something there but it was networking with anybody in the local Tech Community I would go to meetups here whenever I could even though I should have done that more often but it's putting your ear to the ground and knowing the industry as well kind of a longwinded answer no that's super helpful and and the the main thing I want to draw out here is the long game is it's about ensconcing yourself within this community and gradually getting to know people uh as to directly quote what you said because I've been taking notes furiously as you've been talking uh you know uh people get to know you and people talk people will eventually word will eventually get around as you build your reputation and uh who knows maybe that plumber you're talking to has a friend who's a carpenter and that person needs help that's that's exactly what would happen uh when people are having beers at a you know over a football game or a cocktail party they're they're usually talking about work that's the irony right we all try to get away from it at times but yet that's what like when when I get together with my friends it's always business talk just you know where are you investing what are you doing and it's always those kind of conversations so if you're part of that and you can have an impact your name will come up and they'll ask you and then I you get phone calls hey so and so recommended to you let's can we meet for coffee so you you said that sometimes you do hire developers to work with you uh maybe like on a job job basis or do you have like people wh with whom you have like an ongoing you know payroll type relationship like when you bring on devs what do you look for in devs because you're you probably have all kinds of different work that you're going to be throwing at them they're not going to be just building and maintaining a single system or a single tool they're probably going to be jumping from one project to another how do you hire devs so the the first one is more of the obvious one that's just can they do it that's that's the first issue uh or the first thing that I'm looking for but I I need to I need to like who I'm working with I I will never work with somebody like there's sometimes where it's transactional but uh anybody that I'm spending time with if I'm working with you there's a there's it's assumed that I'm going to be spending you know x amount of hours in a year with you and I want to enjoy that time I want to I want to really care about you I want to know who you are I want to know your family like one of my developers that I contract a lot of work to uh he's getting married and you know he's inviting me to his wedding like this is somebody across the world from me and I genuinely care about him and that to me is is a key part of that because that builds trust I I would trust him with my life actually in this specific person but yeah I I like to make sure that there's a good not just a gut feeling because that can be misguided sometimes um but there's some kind of Rapport there outside of work as well so I'm looking for the ability the report but then I'm you know looking for their work ethic and what they're doing and I think if I can hash those out that's about it if if they can do the job and I and I like them and I trust him we're we're set awesome and I want to talk about like learning to code a little bit because you're somebody who taught themselves to learn the code and uh you did this uh what what years were you like actively like learning not like obviously there were two stages there was like learning web development in general and then there was like learning properly building software systems it was 2016 or 17 I believe September like I can actually go back to my notes I um I'm I was a very Avid uh not notetaker but I was very Avid about documenting my my time mhm and like like to the hour so I can go back to my notes I think it was August of 20 2017 is when I started learning Visual Basic like that sounds hilarious but I thought like I didn't know what language to start learning and I just went with Visual Basic because I I like Excel started that and then right around September is when I started learning python I think it was 2017 actually yeah so about how much money do you think you spent in total on like books and courses and things like that in total since then uh maybe 15 2,000 or $1,500 to $2,000 yeah I'm it's a rough estimate I think I'm going a little bit higher but uh the books I bought were always expensive like like these uh we have Javas eloquent JavaScript like this is a $60 book and you know systems design interview here that I'm I'm reading as well pitching these books um I don't know maybe like I've boughten maybe 50 of them over the years like around that rate maybe a little bit less maybe two grand I'm trying to do the math yeah but I mean two grand I I would venture to say that like a lot of people listening to this who want to learn to code like they might be able to couble together you know $1,500 $2,000 to learn the code and that's for like physical books and things like that like in theory like knowing what you know today like if you had to go back do you think you could learn a code for free yeah so let me let me correct that answer by the way not corrected let me uh update a few things um in the beginning by the like in order for me to build that system and learn how to code I paid about $50 for HTML and CSS by John Ducket and then I bought python crash course which was also about 50 bucks I think in order to actually learn the base knowledge base is probably under $300 like the books I'm buying now is simply me furthering my learning so if you're talking about someone starting from scratch you need to scrap a lot less together than I did um I didn't buy a UD me coures still way later in my career that was just simply to pick up another technology to do it faster cuz maybe the content is better but it was very little on actual education in terms of learning to code like you said something that I thought was really profound in one of the interviews I listened to you said never blame the code forgot where I said that one but I do remember saying that yeah what does that mean uh I get a lot of emails and comments uh people get very frustrated in their process and they will lash out out at at what's going on at the you know from the instructor's perspective you didn't explain this right or I'm stuck here what's going on and anytime I am able to jump in and help and and I don't always do that because that's not my obligation after I put together a 10-hour video it's usually a mistake on their end it's usually some kind of configuration setting and I remember writing code and I'm like there's a bug in Python there's something wrong with this system and I would I would get very frustrated where it was always an issue on my end and I have to assume that if I'm in the early stage ages the issue is not on on the framework's end or the language itself and I would uh once I accepted that it meant that I can start seeking the solution as opposed to blaming I would often blame the book maybe myself even if I was reading something they didn't explain something well enough well maybe I didn't read it and I need to go back to some documentation and read more thoroughly and once it's kind of like uh you can't you know in order to um what's the term in order to recover from being an alcoholic you need to admit you're an alcoholic type of thing it's simply admitting that the mistakes probably on your end and and look deeper inside then you can begin to to solve the issue that's how I've seen it because I know what it's like I've I've gotten angry at instructors on YouTube like I like they're putting stuff out for free yet I'm upset with them because I can't figure this out and it's and I'm really stressed out and I have this deadline and I need to deliver this product and I don't I don't have the solution and I just wish they they explained it better and I don't kind of blame them in a way yeah so kind of like personal accountability and just like okay let's say this problem is outside of me and there's no way I can influence it what do I do about it I can't do anything so it's almost always better to assume that there's something wrong that's happening where you can control it because then at least you can eventually figure out a way to fix it so I I I just find it a more constructive uh perspective to always try to frame things where like okay maybe I screwed up here you know um and and then work from there to figure out so but but I love that that like just never blame the code um I had that with Visual Basic by the way I started Visual Basic because I was using Excel and that frustration if I just thought well it's the code I wouldn't have come up with the solution as opposed to did I pick the wrong the wrong tool for the job I wasn't familiar with it that led to me researching more and finding a problem but the blame just leads to a roadblock yeah I I mean like precisely what you said like if you're using the wrong tool for the job let's say you're using uh you know a regular hammer and you're trying to take down a wall instead of a sledgehammer oh Sledgehammer is actually designed for knocking down walls I'm using the wrong tool for the job so of course it's frustrating when I'm bang the wall with his tiny H not doing it right or or like let's bust out the actual Jackhammer you know uh so I want to close by talking a little bit about your lifestyle because I think this is really interesting like uh you have optimized in your life for having this level of Independence like from a very early age you had like a landscaping company uh you of course have had consultancies where you've brought together friends and I I love that the people that you work with you insist on working with people that you like that you respect that you trust um that's such a cool story about one of your um team members who is having a wedding and invited you where which country are they in Bangladesh wow so yeah his name is a sharir shuo I just call him shivo because it's easier for me to say but I'll give him a shout out when he watches this I'll make sure he sees it uh just just a good friend just just down to earth and and I love that he calls my wife sister I just think I think that's such a cool thing in that culture where it feels so cool like he when he when I got him his I got him a job actually at my last company and we're congratulating him and he calls my wife you know sister solam and I'm like man that is so cool like I know that that's more of just how they talk in that culture and it's also in my culture that way but it just felt so personal but I'm like yeah that kind of summarizes you know that relationship though like like we call each other all the time just to check in you know what's going on and outside of work yeah that's really cool and and I I must add that there are so many great software engineers in Bangladesh and Bangladesh is going through like a pretty tumultuous period right now uh but there's just like a ton of amazing talent on the market uh people that you know their local industry has been going through crazy roller coaster with like all the political drama and everything going on and uh yeah but some of the best developers in the world are in Bangladesh uh just like extremely like hardworking kind of like hardcore engineering culture over there um that's really cool so I know that because you've structured your life to be so um I guess independent where where you have control youve prioritized having Independence over going and getting like a Fang job or something and trying to bring in tons of money and and just saving it and stuff like you'd rather not have to wear the suit and tie and you'd rather be able to work from your home uh or or work are you able to travel a lot I I travel a lot um I I wake up often and I don't know where I'm at we travel that often um like we'll be out like this last uh in a or in uh in June no May wow I don't even know what month we're I have a house in Florida so we just go there and we spend a month and my wife loves a beach there then we went down to San Diego in June um I'll travel out of the country and we'll just work remote so for us it's like we take little vacations while we're on vacation and uh that's one of my favorite things is is working Barefoot with sand still on my feet you know in some at a kitchen table and I try to you know always make sure that my setup is kind of built for that but it's very rare when when we're at home like between our family like I think I spend maybe seven months of the year in my actual like in my own bed it feels like sometimes maybe a little bit more but I love it that way uh I know when once we're having our our our first child we're it's going to be a little bit different but I do fully plan to get a acclimated to it and then go take off and live in in Airbnb for a couple months and we'll just have somebody house it we have a a bunny so somebody has to stay with us what's your buddy's name Napoleon uh he's a Netherland Dwarf so he's named after Napoleon bonapart because allegedly he was shorter so yeah I I my understanding is he was actually like uh like standard height for the time for like a typical Frenchman but for some reason that's why I said allegedly cuz I'm like cuz yeah exactly it seems like like that may be more of like a myth and just more of the times and of course people have gotten taller and taller over the centuries with better nutrition and like less childhood injuries and stuff like that so yeah he he's probably short you know maybe compared to you and I but like he was probably pretty standard but any anyway that's a good name for a bunny uh yeah very very adorable animals uh so have you like a lot of people go out and they buy when when they get like exit money from selling a project or something they'll go buy like a A superar or do something like that like what do you I'm so boring when it comes to that I don't spend my money on that to me what matters is my my time Freedom which is kind of funny that I ended up taking a job and there's a reason for that but my time freedom is very important to me so I drive a 2016 Mazda 6 I'm going to upgrade to some kind of SUV now my wife and I share a car my father-in-law always wants us to get a second car and I'm like we do everything together now with a kid she might need the car for appointments but I work from the house if we go to coffee shops we go together and we're usually traveling so I I don't really buy much luxury uh my clothes is pretty standard and I just try to invest it and make sure that I have a a fund for when I need it that's kind of my thing that's what matters to me so time and and and freedom are like if you were to think about like know material possessions is one angle you can't have all three you know you you probably have lots of friends I certainly do from from like you know High School who uh H have bought like they have expensive nice things and they're working really hard uh to be able to earn those and they have less time and they have less Freedom as a result of you know because the higher pay jobs J yeah they take jobs that they don't like because of that um I I I took less money because of I was able to to get a job that I really liked and also take less money because I wanted certain flexibility like there was there was offers that I've gotten that would have uh more than doubled my pay but that's not what's interesting to me and um that's yeah much more important to me and if I lose sleep over anything it's it's the protection of my family like that's what matters to me I was never really afraid of much until I got married and then it's just like I I want to make sure that she's taken care of like that's what scares the hell out of me which my wife by the way is in the tech industry um I taught her how to code too because if you're around me you're going to get the bug and uh she's a more of a front-end developer and got in and had a a good job until you know we decided you know we decided to start the family and and she kind of want to go in a different direction but that security of knowing if anything happens to me that she's more than capable of not just having some kind of career but a prestigious one if she needs very respected and where she was at it makes me very happy for her yeah that's really cool that you like turn around and like to further you know give her independence and like if something you know Heaven forbids you were to get hit by the proverbial bus or something tomorrow uh she would still be able to provide for your family and your your kids so um so and and also that's so cool that you're like teaching programming and then why not go ahead and teach your wife that right well first it was help me she has an eye for design she's a photographer and uh she kind of stopped She didn't really like you know working for customers and uh she has an eye for design though so that like natural creative side of her would come into play and she would help design a lot of the sites that I built and she would use Photoshop and then eventually I was like hey just learn figma and then hey can you just can you just C this for me like here's some HTML and CSS let's go through some lessons and then I got her into tailwind and she's actually liking it to where she's able to implement that on her own it's really cool yeah that's great man she designs my thumbnails too not that I have good thumbnails CU I don't really get too much into the thumbnail game I've actually kind of scaled that back but that's that's her work yeah that's that's very cool um yeah definitely like I talked with Jessica Chan her husband's like an animator has yeah great videos I love their style like of effort that she puts into videos is incredible yeah yeah well it's been such a pleasure talking with you learning about your origin story as you know being a younger kid in a much larger family and immigrant family having to learn English at you know at age five or six uh and and still to this day continuing to expand your uh your verbal skills uh communication skills and then like all the learning that's come along the way and it you know it's it's wild to me to remember that you're you're 30 yeah yeah like like I said before the before this uh this talk I feel like I've lived like so many lifetimes I feel mentally that I'm like in my 50s somewhere like I just want to just want to relax sometimes and just enjoy life yeah well I'm very excited to see what the next few decades have in store for you uh Dennis and and I'm excited to see you know like like you continue to expand your skills and expand your Ambitions um while continuing to teach as you learn so again I just want to thank you for being a big part of the global developer community and the uh teaching community and you know it's an honor to teach alongside you yeah thanks for having me it's it's definitely a privilege of mine and you know having my first video on free code Camp not too long ago like that's that's exciting stuff and I don't know if we've posted anything else before that but this is like the first one I made for the channel itself and yeah um it's it's weird because it's a dream come true because for me it's more of uh uh I made it type of mentality like this is where I learned and now I'm able to contribute and and I don't like the term give back necessarily because I'm just like I always feel like I'm giving I'm giving back to the community in a different way but uh it's definitely a privilege to even like be speaking to you and and contributing here well thanks for your kind words and thanks again for everything you're doing for uh the developer Community uh just a quick reminder that we have tons of interesting stuff in the show notes or the video description if you're listening to the audio the show notes on the podcast and uh be sure to check out Dennis's course uh be sure to check out some of the other things we'll have down there uh I was able to Google around and find the exact type of spacecraft that I was talking about that I read about in a book 20 years ago and just popped in my head as potentially an interesting analogy uh but uh yeah until next time everybody I hope you have a fantastic week and Happ happy coding take care everybodyso my biggest rule in life and this is from my dad is he says if your family is the first thing like if you don't take care of that there's there's no honor in anything else he says if if your wife has to worry or your kids wherever you're at in life um that to me was what was ingrained in my life and my biggest thing was to never stress uh stress her out it's the reason why I left my first business and if that means putting on a suit and tie and you know a what do you call that that '90s office worker with the fat tie and the mustard color T-shirt button up that goes here I'll do it that's that's my number one priority welcome back to the free Cod Camp podcast I'm Quincy Larson teacher and founder of freecodecamp.org each week we're bringing you into it from developers Founders and ambitious people getting into Tech this week we're talking with Dennis Ivy he's a software engineer and prolific freelancer he dropped out of college at age 18 taught himself how to build websites started his first agency built and sold products and eventually started teaching his skills on YouTube Dennis it's a pleasure to have you here man excited to be here Quincy yeah and I've been a longtime fan like of your tutorials and of course free Cod campus published some of your courses over the years and like I've just learned a tremendous amount uh about you know teaching and about YouTube from you and of course learned a lot about Jango and Python and stuff from watching your tutorials as well so yeah thanks for coming on man yeah definitely an honor I saw your lineup and and who you've had here before so the fact that I'm even considered in that is exciting I wouldn't have expected something like this for years ago and originally seen free code cam content so it's pretty cool yeah look I'm on TV well I will tell you man like uh you have a very unique uh Scrappy story if I had to describe like your your uh ENT entree into the field of software development and working as a uh developer you know consultant essentially building projects for clients um it's been like incredibly organic the way that you entered the field and it is a very non-traditional path and I think that it will resonate with a ton of people who are listening to this the the freeo camp audience uh certainly for this podcast is about one-third developers onethird students onethird people working in other fields who are trying to transition into Tech so it you know at least uh two-thirds of it will benefit a great deal from listening to your Insight and the more experienced developers might learn a little bit about like SEO marketing things like that from talking with you as well because you have a deep expertise in those in addition to software development yeah absolutely and and when you talk about untraditional I definitely think it's one of the like if there was a spectrum of how people get into Tech I think mine was pretty far in that way and just by accidental uh entrance into the industry and then how it's developed it's been a little bit different for sure yeah well let's go ahead and dive in and I am just curious about how you got started because you did not have a traditional like American upbringing in the sense that like you grew up maybe you grew up in the BBS like I did but I I'm like a fourth generation American and I had the benefit of having you know grandparents great- grandparents here in the United States who were kind of gradually saving up and sending their kids to college and and like like you know I'm like a third generation college graduate and stuff like that right like so we all I already benefit from kind of that inner generational momentum but your childhood was not quite like that maybe you can talk about your early years and and your family yeah sure so um I'll just uh give some context to how I grew up and then also where where I originally came from so I'm actually um a son of an immigrant uh immigrant family and my family came here back in into to the US in 91 and we immigrated from keev Ukraine so I'm Russian Ukrainian father's Russian mother's Ukrainian and kind of a mix of that so um I'm not bilingual multilingual I speak three different languages and uh growing up we came here with a pretty large family and I'm one of 13 so eight boys and five girls in the family and uh with that my father really had to work his way up in the US came with nothing we originally came to Dallas Texas and then with a within a few months moved up to the Northwest here so my father was very Scrappy he was putting himself through school working jobs anything he can get at the time and that led to us um really not having much growing up that meant everybody was working all the boys were earning their own money from a very young age I think I had my first paper route at 6 years old with my brothers and uh ever since I can remember I was always uh making my own money if I needed to uh buy anything on my own other than just food and clothes which my Mom would for the family just cook a massive pot of borish and that was our meal uh we basically had to you know raise ourselves in that sense it was kind of a a fun but challenging upbringing and with that that kind of developed my personality of being very independent being very Scrappy which led into my career you know in later on in life so with that I wasn't really fortunate enough to be able to like specialize in a specific field it was just always looking for ideas always looking for opportunities and uh when it came time to leave high school which I actually went through a program that basically allowed me to uh go to college while I was in high school into a community college so I started in the 10th grade so when I graduated I actually also dropped out of college and from there that's where things kind of picked up but that's like the origin story we can dive into different parts of that but I can kick things off that way yeah man well I mean maybe you can give us some context to the decision not to go to college like was it a purely economic one were you just not interested in college like like what was uh what were you thinking at age 18 I think when you made that big I mean that's a big decision yeah yeah so it was it was two things one um I I already went through two years and it was a lot of the prerequisites that I took a lot of uh um did some political science uh just the basic English math those type of things and I for myself I'm I'm a very untraditional learner and I couldn't really see the value in it for the first part of things and it's not like I didn't see the value in college at all it was more of the mix of that but at the same time I didn't have any money to continue and the US College is very expensive uh there was no way my father was going to pay for my college tuition you know big family nor he wasn't going to do it nor could he do it and I didn't want to work four jobs just to put myself through school so I decided to as my friends were taken off to uh well they're getting ready for college in that summer I decided to just take some time and I said I'm going to figure myself out I'm very entrepreneurial I'm always looking for some kind of idea I had my own like clientele mowing lawns at that point I I knew that that's not what I wanted to do with my life but I knew I can figure my way out and uh eventually come up with something so as I was making that decision it was more of like confidence in myself knowing that I'm capable of anything I had a lot of people in my my family line that really put themselves uh through life in a very Scrappy way so I was very encouraged by that my grandfather from uh fighting in World War II to being in a concentration camp to making something with his life to my dad you know immigrating with nine kids and then having more in the US but always figuring something out he ended up being pretty successful in life but that really gave me a lot of courage to say anything I do in life I'm going to figure it out and I'm going to be the best at what I can do didn't it mean I always had that natural confidence in that I lot I had a lot of Doubt but I knew I can figure something out yeah yeah Faith In Yourself faith in uh your own like whatever resources you have on hand that you can figure out how to uh make it work um so it sounds like that was the big thing that that uh there were practical economic realities and there was also just like a mismatch between like okay I'm learning all this General Ed stuff and a lot of people who go through University in the US are frustrated that the first first two years is just learning more stuff than they learned in high school right more English more history you know more like General Ed and they're like when do I get to the actual you know software engineering or when do I get to the actual accounting or whatever it is that they actually wanted to study when they enrolled in University so um yeah but it I mean you hit the ground running and uh it sounds like you made very good use of your time and uh maybe you can talk about like how you started learning software and like SEO of course you know great deal about that marketing uh and and most importantly probably being the proverbial client Whisperer and being able to figure out how to talk to a stakeholder and convince them to give you the budget you need to be able to get things done and uh achieve whatever you know business goals that that person has uh yeah yeah absolutely so um let let's go back to that that point in time so it was a 2012 actually that's when I graduated so um at that point I'm kind of figuring out my life right I I end up taking jobs I work construction I even worked as a janitor in a church at some point uh like working in the maintenance department like just doing a lot of like work with my hands but I was um I started reading like a lot of business books I would just research online just looking for opportunities and I was trying to like find something that would fit to my lifestyle and back then the online world like the whole make money remote or from home wasn't really a thing like nowadays kids just grow up in it like that's just a norm well in that point in time it wasn't the case but I did stumble upon maybe people that were scammy at the time but they were showing this lifestyle of like living remote and making money and I thought that was the coolest thing in the world but I didn't know how to enter that world and I kind of got used to certain lingo that they would use talking about buying uh Facebook or Google ads they talked about landing pages and websites and I had no knowledge of that world so at that point I was like I already had the ideas was rolling I always had like a list of of notes always handwritten of things that I could do in life and I was basically working out my options and my entrance into web development actually started by accident through a different industry so I had a buddy who worked this job as a locksmith technician and he explained the business model to me and who he worked for and it was really interesting because he was a contractor but he worked for uh companies or one company I don't remember what it was but they essentially learned how to like rank on Google they bought Google ads and the broker leads out to different technicians and he would go out and service them and they would make a cut from that so with that I actually got this idea like hey man like what if I can what if I can learn how to rank sites build websites and broker leads like I'm just printing money and sitting at home like that sounded like the coolest thing in the world yeah as a young 18-year-old kid I'm like this this can be awesome pass V so yeah yeah exactly so so at that point like I I um I just go to Google and I just type in how to websites and like the first results come up and they're like you have to learn how to code like this is how you do it right HTML CSS all that good stuff and I'm like that's that's way over my head there's no way I can do that I'm not really that smart I not I'm not going to college I just assumed there was all this like pre you know knowledge base that you needed to have to do that so I kind of skim over that and luckily before I stopped looking I found these like low code website Builders there was like WordPress there was Weebly Squarespace at the time and I tried those but those were a little bit too difficult and I ended up actually settling on one called wix.com like the easiest one I can find and it was like a drag and drop Builder and basically I just like found a template like going through the default steps and what Wix had to offer like they kind of navigate you through building a website and this is like 2012 so Wix is way oversimplified back then like it's apparently way more advanced than what it is now and I was able to scrap together a side just by like adding copy I made it Like A A Locksmith looking website so I made ourselves look like a legitimate business and like I had the site going and then I started learning about SEO because I couldn't get traffic to it you know the phone calls weren't coming in and I wasn't being able to I wasn't able to broker out those leads so I learned about SEO that took a long time I learned about Google AdWords like as part of this book there was something called The Art of SEO I was reading like one of the earlier editions of it and eventually I bought Google AdWords and I actually landed like my first client by accident through a phone call that found our website so really quickly we scrapped together a business got license I ended up broker and out leads to my friend and we ended up like at our Peak within a few months we were doing about 6 to 10 maybe 12 phone calls like servicing anybody that had their house uh like door locked and they couldn't get in or a car and we were making like between 60 to $100 $120 a phone call so we started making some money out of this right W okay so so back up so so you're just like chilling and you get a phone call out out of the blue and it's somebody who found your website yeah so what happens is I I run my first Google ad on the the search ad those are the ones that pop up like when you look up like I'm stuck locksmith my city name right and it took about two days for Google to approve my ad so at that point I'm like check it in Daily and it's still like pending in review and I get a call and this guy's frantic and he's locked out of his car and he's like hey I'm locked out like do you guys you know service this area and I'm like I didn't really know what the phone call was about it just wasn't on my mind so I'm like oh we're busy right now but you should call these guys like this other locksmith in the city so I basically forward it out to another company and then I call my buddy up and I'm like we have customers like we need to get going so we kind of worked up our deal but yeah it happened like suddenly because of those Google ads so a huge portion of the amount of money that is going to a lock smith like let's like I haven't been locked out of my house in a long time but I have called Smith before like maybe 10 years ago and it was a lot of money uh it's very expensive the technician came by they unlocked the door uh and you know or you lock your keys in your car or something like that and um they came over they fixed it and it cost a couple hundred bucks and I'm like ouch and a lot of that money went to the the lead gen essentially the lead generation person who actually like kind of like the the finders fee for finding this client for them uh can you talk about most of it it's over like 50% what over 50% yeah so you got to remember that you're paying between uh three3 to like $8 a click so the problem is there's a very shady tactic in that business where they advertise like $15 car unlock or service charge well that's like a service charge that they throw on with everything else and that was one of my things when I entered that field was like when we get in we're not going to advertise the price we're just going to say it up front and if anyone's like oh okay I'll call someone else we would just warn them like hey if it says $15 on the website on someone else's it's going to be more this is how the industry works because there's just no way they can charge that little between the technician fee between the Google ads it it would cost like 20 bucks to get a single client because people click on those ads and you're getting charged every time yeah so maybe you can talk a little bit about the SEO angle because SEO is like earned traffic uh essentially search engine optimization that's what SEO stands for and free cam knows a lot about this because we're you know like I made a point to learn about it at some point I was like oh I'm not going to such that it's like a kind of like a scammy thing for a long time I was just like uh but uh then I think in like maybe 2018 2019 so several years into free cooking I'm like well my friends keep telling me that we can get a lot of traffic this way and we don't have an advertising budget because we're a tiny charity and like how can we get people to hear about us well we're already writing all these tutorials and creating all these courses we just need to like figure out how to like you know use HTML the right way and and like maybe slightly change how we make the um the headings uh the the the titles and things like that and like figure out uh so so I did kind of like a deep dive around SEO and then and then we learned how to get a whole lot of people coming to freeo Camp's publication and reading our tutorials through Google and now and you know the same sort of stuff works on on YouTube of course but you have learned probably way more than I have about SEO so maybe you can talk about like first of all it sounds like ads were a huge source of early um I guess r because you are there's a cost associated with that you're you're paying like 8 20 bucks to get a client but then you are able to charge the Locksmith Company like $60 or something like that so you're netting like $40 or something like that so so your your margin might be like 60% or something like that after you've handed over the client but if you can get people to just go directly to the website without having to click on an ad through like location you know specific keywords or um other techniques you can use uh using social media using all these other things then essentially that's like organic traffic that you don't actually have to pay Google ad for Google adward you don't have to pay Facebook Google and Facebook are the big ones there might be some other ones yeah yeah so AdWords was actually like really the key to SEO for me because for me it was a lot of uh reverse engineering with Google the funny thing is is I was literally reading the book and updating like meta tags on Wix and rewriting my content based on what the book said and it was just like following steps but it got to a point where I kind of figured out like just trying to think like Google I was like okay what does why does Google reward a specific site and I pinned it down to click-through rate and time on the website like there's different factors Google's always changing it but I think if you stick to that like you mentioned with uh with free code camp we had all this content it was about fixing things up so outside of the basics I pinned it down to if we get clicks on Google ads like first of all time on site was very important to us uh I realized that that was a key factor like Google can track how long someone's on your site but if no one's coming to my site how do I how do I get that time on site so I realized if I get the click from the ad then I can get time on site which in return lifts up SEO and it's like this cycle so there was a lot of push in the beginning but yes when Once the organic SEO kicked in that's when we really started making a lot more money as far as the profit margins because I would always run the ads and luckily for me I was able to get the ads down to like 80 cents a click I was able to really optimize those because Google rewards good ads as well they're willing to sell you a click for $1 as opposed to your competitor for $8 if your click is more valuable that's a very key thing because Google doesn't want to just maximize profits they're more interested in long-term profits so understanding stuff like that really helped and and we can talk about that click in in the the bidding ratio later if we if you'd like yeah absolutely so uh I'm trying trying to think of a good analogy for this I mean there's this old saying that like you have to spend money to make money um and uh there's like this type of spacecraft this is maybe really weird but it's basically it's like theorized it doesn't exist yet but it could in theory work you got all this intercellular hydrogen out there in space and uh the idea is like if you have enough Hydro like you can burn the hydrogen and then you can create more thrust so if you just get the spacecraft going through space it can just grab enough of these like atoms if it's traveling fast enough that it can actually burn and keep itself going right but how do you get the Thruster going in the first in the first you know Place well you have to actually burn some other kind of fuel to get it up there and get it in space and pointed where you want it to go and then you start going and then eventually enough hydrogen is going in the intake at the front that they it just becomes self-perpetuating right um maybe that's like not the simplest analogy funny actually a really good analogy it's a it's a nerdy analogy but it's really good like I don't know if everybody will get that like that's like the you you made it the most technical as like you made it as technical as possible but that's actually like perfect so so a lot of companies like and and if you are listening to this and you're like a a small business owner or something like that and you're worried about Google ads Facebook ads first of all they're kind of like a unnecessary evil because there's like an ad duopoly on inline online marketing uh between Facebook and Google the ads work I've heard so many people everybody says the ads do work as long as you spend the time to like come up good ad copy and it's relevant and people click through your website's not like some sort of scam it's actually like hey this is the service we provide or there's some useful information uh that that is generally helpful like here like five tricks to not get yourself locked out next time you know stuff like that maybe like people actually read that and that is time on site and then Google sees that people are clicking through and they're actually spending time on your site and then you start climbing the ranks and most people will just click the wor thing on Google but but if they're doing like Google is very context sensitive as well like so if they're on a phone if if they're in a certain place uh there like all these different contexts and and of course their previous search history things like that all factor into like what they're likely to see at the top so um it is possible that you can be like the top ranked um you know locksmith in Brooklyn or something like that and you'll just get like this huge amount of calls naturally without having to spend money on ads by virtue of getting up to that position right uh I mean that is theoretically possible but in reality it's incredibly competitive I would imagine yeah very competitive especially when somebody if you think about the customer type when you're locked out you're not going to be scanning through Google you're not doing your research you need the service right away unless you're like trying to get like a car Reed or something like that and you're at home and you're planning this weeks in advance so those top three spots get like 90% of the traffic maybe top four um but with that as you mentioned the the ads if if Google doesn't have data on your site they can't really rank you like if they don't know anything about you they have no context to who you are so the ad is a way to to get that like that in my case it was time on site read time yeah and maybe you can give me an update uh an idea of how you approached okay once you get people to the site was there like conversion rate optimization was there just like a big phone number like call here how did you track people like did you have a special phone number that people would like how did you actually like attribute yeah so our our uh our customers are on their phone so phone number click call button right away down below you know you get some Imaging in there that looks like a service company uh like I mentioned earlier they're usually not doing too much research so a couple reviews in there a little bit of context some FAQ and that's it like the more we simplified it in fact I I realized when I would try to make the site my way like when I try to make it pretty and make it work the traffic or the time on site would go down that would actually hurt my myself which was really weird because the site that worked the best was the one that I would on my own rank as the worst like I If if you if you put a layout of all the sites and you put five of the versions that I built the one that I think was the best like sucked and the one that I would have hated and said I don't want that as my website that's the one that worked it's weird because you see these sales Pages sometimes like with just a bunch of copy and like really ugly text everything centered and a buy now button and yet that's the one that that seems to work yeah yeah I mean if you are tunnel vision like the smartest person in the world they get locked out and they're like late for a meeting or something they're they just want the number to call and they'll pay whatever price there's a high in elasticity of demand they just need to get into the door so that they can get on their meeting or something like that or you know uh get into their car so they can get on to the next thing with their day and they don't want to be waiting around you know time is money right and uh so I I I could definitely imagine like even very intelligent people just like having tunnel vision and not being that different from the average person on the street in terms of how they would interact with the web page if they just need something real quick right yeah yeah it was an easy industry to convert let's just put it that way like people just call five numbers that they find and they just find the one that can get there the fastest as you said yeah yeah so maybe you can talk about like what happened from that point in your life like so you you said you're you're the janitor at a church you you had like a lawnmowing business you're doing these other things uh and you're making money and surviving but you just hit on something that you can it will actually be a skill where you can scale and this is like a key thing that I think a lot of uh people want to go into business they want to like create a restaurant or they want to create like a medical like a dental practice or something like that right like it's difficult to scale your own personal effort when you have to physically be there doing something right I mean you might be able to hire people you still have to like there's only so much scale you can get with certain types of business but with certain like web scale they call it uh businesses like the the sky's the limit right like the more you can do what you do in theory the more the bigger your business can become and the more um you know different geographies you can enter and all this stuff and it's it's software that's taking the proverbial orders right it's not you having to check every single patient's you know teeth um in order to you know and also the cost obviously it costs a lot of money to buy Google ads but you don't have to have like you know a store front per se like a physical storefront you don't have to have like a back office anything like that you can be just working on your laptop on your couch and in the background a whole bunch of people you you know like free Cod Camp is a charity we're not a business but uh there are currently as we speak probably about 10,000 people using free Cod Camp right and I'm here talking with you I'm not thinking about like oh no I need to you know uh this person just requested this I need to get this for them no the software that we wrote is doing that right the software that the community maintains through the open source project and the 100 plus servers around the world are all like handling those requests and everything's working deterministically to the point that we have n we have 49 up time we had 99.9 I saw that congrats by the way that's that's impressive yeah uh and and again we can work on new stuff like creating new courses doing podcast interviews things like that that aren't um and then that software just gets there gradually gets improved and stuff like so systems over you know like yeah yeah yeah if you're trying to keep I like that kind of business model that was my vision at that point already it was something that scales something I don't have to physically be there at and and can you know not not turn off without me there that's a big deal for me yeah so take me back to that that moment when you're like hey we can go into business we've we've got we've got clients right uh for locksmith and like where did you go from there like just walk me through as much detail cuz I I love these kind of stories of like the Revelation like wow this actually works Eureka I had two I had two options at this point so first was to scale up the locksmith business because if I can broker out leads why couldn't I do this in other cities that was the first thought but the second thought was I in a weird way it's funny because you have to look at things that matter to you in life and one of the things that I don't like to admit but some sort of prestige did matter to me like as far as like if I'm meeting people at a cocktail party or something I I want to be able to be proud of who I am and what I do and I the the the locksmith thing didn't sound like a buzz word that I liked so I decided to go option number two which was utilize this skill that I just learned and start selling web services I mean I wasn't even coding at this point it was just Wix but what happened is I had the success story and instead of scaling up the locksmith business I just went and started connecting with every business owner in the community that meant going to Chamber of Commerce meetings anywhere where there were people doing something from your dentist to your construction uh business owner uh plumber anybody that would talk to me lawyers anybody and I would tell them what I did with my locksmith business I would share stats with them and I would eventually get them on board as clients whether they had a website and they weren't ranking at the moment like I would do a lot of research so I knew who I was talking to or if they didn't have anything at all I would uh just pitch them on these ideas so I went the route of first freelancing actually and I ended up like pulling in clients to the point where really quickly like within like 3 months I think I was at the point where I couldn't keep up as far as clientele go because people like that success story and when you can when you can pull up on your phone and type in you know on their phone usually that's what I would do I would say pull out your phone and type in locksmith and then the city name my site would show up and they're like can you do that for me like it was like it was like selling you know giving candy to a baby I guess so everybody wanted it and my pricing was pretty cheap in the beginning but pretty soon I was selling web development services SEO then eventually some digital marketing but really quickly I was 19 at this point so like some time went by because my birthday's in November so like after the Summer I Turned 19 pretty quick um I hired my brother who's 17 he's still in high school and I'm like hey like Eric I can teach you how to build some websites you want to come work for me and we just kind of scaled up from there and basically had our entire city you know buying web development services from me so that's kind of how it scaled up and at that point there was like this Natural Evolution from uh customers wanting you know basic sites to requesting features because I did scale up in the customer model so it was like the local coffee shop to then somebody trying to sell some kind of e-commerce product and Wix didn't have all those tools so it led me to this Natural Evolution of looking for better website Builders so I went to Wix sorry not Wix WordPress uh WordPress had like plugins woocommerce plugins to be able to customize a site very robust ecosystem tools for businesses yeah yep so I ended up learning WordPress like at this point I had confidence now because I did something like when you get a little bit of confidence it it beg gots more confidence so I taught myself WordPress taught my brother WordPress and then I taught my my buddies whoever I hired how to also build in the same text tag and then there was a Natural Evolution to more custom features can we have this drop- down menu with these icons and so on and if I couldn't find a plugin for it I was I had to make the decision of okay I need to build that out myself so so I started learning HTML and CSS I bought the book by John Ducket and I just like read through the book started building sites from scratch just to understand the concept and then eventually went to modifying my WordPress themes and during the day we would build and at night I would have sessions we had a whiteboard in the office and I would sit down and I would code and we put a projector in the office and I would basically have sessions with everybody that worked with me uh and I would teach them everything as we went along and at that point we were having so much fun with it that no one doubted themselves in their ability to learn because it was beers and and code at that point it was just having fun and doing stuff like that so we just saw it more as camaraderie and and hanging out and it was weird how I was able to bring people into Tech without really like them having the vision of tech they just wanted to hang out like we would have fun in the office you know with our uh we had a we had golf in the office I bought a little uh green so we kind of putt with that and just kind of hang out buy pizza and everyone was more there for that environment beer pizza and golf very very American kind of startup uh experience yep and uh I just want to say that like what you what you said about like there wasn't this culture of like oh this is scary this is technical or oh this is nerdy like you know I'm a business person why why am I admiring myself in these technical details like the the way you describe it there was no fear there was no judgment it was just kind of like hey let's let's learn this stuff let's take this off the shelf and it's this incredibly pragmatic approach to uh software development that like I think isn't as common in the United States that like I I definitely uh I've spent a lot of time like trying to encourage people to learn to code and and talk to people uh and and just going to different uh you know universities and talking to students and trying to get get them into it and uh a there's a lot of reluctance because it's like oh isn't it like don't you have to have a really good math or something like that yeah it's always math I don't get that I thought the same thing I was like I'm not smart and I don't know math that I just counted myself out because of that yeah it's always funny how that works yeah and uh it sounds like you were able to cultivate a culture in your in your peer group and your your Lo your friends uh and just get people to like share information freely and man that's that's a great uh kind of tribe to find so to speak um and yeah I like I encounter this all the time when like I spend a lot of time overseas uh and and uh you know especially in China there's like no Stigma of coding being nerdy or anything like that or coding being hard it's just it's what you do like and so I'll go to like a startup in China and I'll talk to people and they're they're all just like totally down to earth like it's it's not like a geek culture thing or anything like that it's just like this is what you do it it would be like you you know you've worked construction I worked construction for like a week it was the hardest job in my life doing de demolition yeah it is rough on your body and it's dangerous and uh you're out in the sun all day sweating like certainly down here in the Southwest Texas Oklahoma area like it was absolutely miserable and yet like nobody like kind of like questioned like oh you know you're it was just like people just went there and they did their job you know and uh they didn't think too much about it they didn't overthink it but I I feel like we coding a lot of people overthink it and they're like yeah but it's just a bunch of skills it's just a bunch of tools you just like you would learn how to do carpentry or something like that and and use those tools you learn how to wield like you know uh bash scripting for example or um you know operating a web server to be able to take requests and respond to them and stuff like that right um it's just tools and so it's incredibly refreshing to me hearing kind of like the Casual way that you all approached learning this stuff that so many people would probably find very daunting uh and and think like oh I'm not smart enough for that like you said yeah it was always more about the end result for us uh for me like the fact that I got into it because I wanted to make money not because I wanted to build websites like that was the end an end conclusion for everybody that worked for us it was like do you want to do these cool things and we always talk lifestyle we would always dream because everybody that worked with me we were all like very similar upbringings we're very broke and not broke that's not the right term because we always had cash on hand because we worked but we were used to you know having broken fingernails and bruised fingernails from construction and dirt under our nails like it was this image that we had but we didn't like it like in my culture it was you either did construction or you sold cars and I really hated that and I would always talk to um all of my buddies and we would try to break that stigma for ourselves we're like that's not what we want to be we were uh we had a you know people draw conclusions to who we were based on you know our race and such and that that really bothered us so we just really wanted to break out of that so it was like hey we can we can go to work and not you know be sweaty and and smell you know like the environment we're in we can actually wear you know a buttonup shirt and be clean by the end of the day and uh and not be exhausted you know so when we sold that you know when I I guess I kind of sold that Vision you know we can travel we can go out and get an Airbnb somewhere back then I don't even think Airbnb was a thing we would just rent on craigslist uh we would go out and just get a caught and hang out and work and I would always draw that image like work doesn't have to be you know this thing that you try to get away from it was fun when we would all sit on our laptops and work on a project you know at a beach house somewhere so it was really that lifestyle that helped us yeah awesome man well um you have gone on to do so many things and I do want to uh touch on some of those things but one of the things you were able to successfully do with as you gain these skills and built up a cohort of other people who could help you with various you know tasks and stuff you you kind of built like consultancies right like like you were working you were going out and getting clients and then you and your your peer group would like build projects and and you would manage these relationships with clients uh and so it's it's it's basically like building your own agency model like like a freelancer is kind of like a an agency of one but you went bigger than that can you talk about that yeah so that was simply just uh just scaling up like we like I said I went from a freelancer by myself to a full agency you know created a company name around it had everything structured company website and so on so we just we went up from there um the the funny thing is that that only lasted for about 2 two and a half years before I actually shut it down for a very specific reason and it wasn't because of a failure that was the interesting thing because uh when I did close it down I actually ended up having to offboard a lot of clientele that were disappointed that they couldn't work with us anymore um so there was like this weird abrupt ending that happened because of just life circumstances and for me that was uh just the age I was at and the fact that I got married very young as well that kind of interrupted that and then a certain business partner which I don't like to get into too much detail yeah um that was a critical part I had somebody who was much older than me so um I think he was like 32 at that point and I was maybe like 20 within this time maybe 21 and we had a situation where it just became very uh how do I put this they they weren't very ethical with the business in what they were doing and they really deviated our Direction which created like animosity between a lot of the core group and and this specific person and at that point uh just the direction in life kind of shifted from okay I'm running this agency it's very stressful while it was fun it was very stressful at that point and I had developed also a interest in coding like coding itself like at that point I was very happy to be that nerdy person into the tech that actually became very intriguing to me because I at some point got kind of got bored of building the same old website every you know over and over again yeah um so I had to make this decision do I pursue my education or cap it out right here here and just focus on the money or do I make this shift and kind of split up the company and go a different direction so there was like a interesting Evolution there yeah I mean you don't have to say this person's name or anything but like I I've talked to a lot of people like this is textbook like founder issues uh you know there's there's an entire book called like the founder the founder dilemma I think and I think I've heard of that yeah I think it's all about like founder issues essentially like they both share equity at the start and one of them just stops getting things done and like kind of like on the other person's Laurels right and then you have the super motivated person who will stop at nothing and then they look over and they realize that they're doing they're working like 10 times harder and this other person has the same say the same Equity all this stuff they realize they've made a big mistake and that blows up so many companies I mean you hear about these stories and and the founders are always portrayed as like super Cutthroat they had to like you they had to concentrate power themselves just like you know like a Roman Emperor or something right but but the reality is uh and I always tell people this don't have a co-founder if you can avoid it and uh try to to be like the boss of the organization just so you have the ability if if there is somebody like on your team who is dragging things down or like you need to have the ability to like get rid of that person like what was the situation here were you able to just push them out if they were doing unethical stuff well it got to the Point yeah so like there was definitely legal stuff that they would do like I'm talking money missing from the account and it became a regular thing it's like okay what's going on here essentially yeah yeah and I don't I I like I never took legal action because to me it was I'm very much like if if you if you uh if you pull one over on me uh I I'm I'm pretty easy to forgive and I'll just look I'll make sure to keep my distance from you but then we're just done and that's kind of it like I like to kind of disable like I'm calling the cops basically right yeah yeah and this person was a friend from the past as well somebody I knew through through family history so long story short I basically um the irony was they were never in the office and I called them up one day because they're always into some other Venture and I called them in one day and I said I need you to sign this document that says you are relieving all control of the company and they were shocked and um it was very it was kind of like a very manipulative tactic that they would use because they were always bring in the next thing this person's job was basically to pull in clients for the company yeah I was the one pulling in all the clients and when I brought that paper to them it was like well I see why you're doing this but I'm about to land the big client that's going to change everything and I'm like no no no we've we've played this game long enough it's like the abusive relationship where it's like now I'm going to change now I'm GNA like yeah we're not doing that you know I I'm I'm very aware of this and um I was able to figure that out early and notice that characteristic to where I said no once you pull that on me a couple times I'm I'm cautious of that so yeah I signed that over but it led to like one of the hardest decisions which was uh after I got married I had to like disperse the company at that point I was I was just so exhausted burnt out like it started taking a toll on my marriage in my first year just because I was working ridiculous hours like going to sleep at 2:00 in the morning waking up at 6:00 and going back at it like really low on sleep and the hardest decision was to take care of my employees at that point because I didn't want to just end the company because they were all relying on me for a paycheck so it actually took me about a year to dissolve the entire company it was calling up clients it was telling my brother hey if you want to like if you want to keep some of these clients for yourself go ahead and do it some of these clients are really like high value like we had clients that would just basically pay us $4,000 a month on autopay just because of ads that we're running so we kind of divvied up clients I made sure that some of my employees whoever I could help out I got them jobs before before I cancel or Clos the company and then dissolved it from there but that actually led into the next venture which was me taking a step back and I actually ended up keeping a few clients as a freelancer and I actually got hired by one of my clients as a full-time employee he didn't want me to dissolve the business but he said if you want to come work for me uh let's just bring you on board you'll just be my head of marketing run our website and run our Google ads for us and that was like a transition and I ended up doing that for basically like a year and a half before I picked up my next coding Venture because I'm always kind of I can't sit still so I always had to jump into something and that's where I saw another opportunity and that led into my uh my website sale that that we mentioned uh pre- interiew here yeah let's definitely talk about that but first I want to make the observation that you went from freelance uh and to running your own consultancy to becoming an employee at one of your clients and a lot of people think isn't that kind of like backward don't you work at a company then you leave and you you Branch out the other way um but I mean it sounds like this worked out pretty well for you and I mean it was certainly appealing enough at the time for you to to take that offer can we just uh maybe talk about that Dynamic a little bit and like misperceptions people may have about how freelancing works and like uh the appeal of working for somebody having a stable income having a single employer that you're helping yeah so first of all it was an ego blow for sure like it it was humbling coming in and and answering to somebody because from 18 to 21 till the time I got married I was the one calling all the shots like it it no one really told me what to do as a kid you know since 11 years old like my mom just made sure we were there in the morning like she didn't have time to yeah look after us so I had no one to answer to for for such a long time and now I'm I'm in this position which I I didn't like but I was humbled enough to to to just do it and I did it because when I got married I needed stability and there was times when I would pay my employees and keep nothing for myself just to you know get by just to make sure that everyone else was taken care of I took a lot of pride in making sure that um no one was left out so I did that for stability but at this point uh when I'm while I'm running this company I did really good with Google Adwords by the way like we went on a national level this is a a fuel testing laboratory and we're competing with multi-million companies and at the time that I came in there the company was doing about 750 in Revenue basically selling like uh laboratory services so like you know how you can get your blood tested they draw blood you send it to a lab they tell you what's going on yeah um fuel has the same thing diesel fuel like a lot of uh companies like uh AWS for example has a lot of servers or Amazon does and they have to test thousands of generators in these remote areas and by law they have to test them like I think every year every gas station has to te do quality checks on their fuel so the laboratory's business model was simply testing that fuel and between my uh with what I was able to do in my web development services in Google AdWords I put us on the map to where I think we brought the company to about 3 million within a 2-year time span uh from 750 like it was not big numbers but uh we definitely got out there because of what I was able to do between like the agency and and my what I personally did but as I was working at the company I uh so I was already interested in coding and I really missed it actually I really missed building sites because now I wasn't doing it as often I was managing one website and then just a few clients but I noticed that the company was uh we had some I guess uh issues internally with with the products that we were using the software and how we managed our our lab samples and at the time my boss was actually looking for a a developer or some kind of agency to build out a new system for the company this is just lab management software it takes in data and spits it out to the client so I noticed a lot of inefficiency in this and I had this idea like hey if I learn how to code and really get into development maybe I can build it and like come on board as a software engineer and not just a web developer so that's when I kind of had this brilliant idea I didn't tell anyone and I just started learning how to code like with python at first and then using Jango as a framework and I built out a prototype for my boss to pitch in a meeting so so I ended up like drawing out this whole vision of it I put in all of our issues what I think I can solve I went to Microsoft Paint and like you know created a dashboard and I said hey this is what we have this is what I can do and uh he loved the idea because he was getting it free because I said I'll do this on my own time and uh basically said go for it if you can build it we'll hold off we won't pay for the system at the time we were getting bids between like 70 to I think like 120 grand for it so I ended up basically learning how to code built it and uh started servicing the company with that piece of software wow that's awesome so just to reflect on what you said you're already working you know as head of marketing I think is the title you mentioned but B basically doing all the SEO doing all the adby uh doing you know website optimization and and doing web development in the sense that you're updating you know web pages but not doing like uh proper coding as pantic call uh you know but but you're like learning python you're you're building an actual system that a lab laboratory can use to uh essentially like handle samples and so so kind of like back office logistical software yeah almost right and so you voluntarily just dropped everything and you probably didn't completely drop stuff you probably had to keep your old responsibilities going but you just like just started learning and you had the gumption uh the confidence to to go ahead and build the skill set a lot of people rest on their Laurels uh uh I always tell people like um the what what separates somebody who's merely successful with somebody who goes on to become prolific is uh they don't just stop once they get to the top of the hill they look around they find other Hills that are even taller they go down the hill and they go up the taller Hill and then they repeat you know until they're on like the highest point they can get to right uh and uh it you definitely strike me as is the kind of person who is like that who is doing the hill climbing algorithm and looking around trying to get a better vantage point and so uh maybe you subconsciously maybe you very consciously knew that like learning Python and learning these different skills would uh put you in a position where you could build even more sophisticated systems uh but kudos to you for doing it so what did you do once you built this system so the there there's a really key thing that occurred at this point because mentioned my boss didn't pay me for it it was all on my own time and I was very adamant about it and I kind of foresaw this from my first uh founder issue so I was very cautious in the beginning to keep all legal documents all receipts to like you know my Heroku bills AWS and so on so I buil this system out and I actually ended up working my my my boss into a deal where I said hey let's run this separately and in order for me to be able to build it and work these ridiculous hours you just paid me like a service fee so we'll just slap on like 30 cents per sample that goes through the system so he actually ended up paying me not directly but for the service of the system and I created an a separate entity for it that he was actually a part of so we actually created a company around this software and this thing was such a big hit because in the industry it was revolutionary like if you sent in a sample to the lab uh historically we would send you a PDF back and that was really redundant and then if like for example like we would have clients that had data centers with thousands of generators they would call up and say okay we're we need to check this diesel sample from 2013 and we want to see like a trend line of what what's going on with this sample like is the fuel getting worse is it better what's going on so in the office we would have to have people go in and look for these PDFs trying to search their emails just to find this data the system I created had really good search functionality and it also Trend lined your data so that meant that every s every generator had some kind of ID on on it so it was really easy to find all your data for the clients and I also created a client portter portal I said you don't have to call us anymore just log in and go find your sample like punch in your location and you'll see the data so because of this uh sales our company sales went up like crazy because we were now the one of the only Laboratories that provided anything even similar to this so it was kind of a big deal so I basically serviced this for the next two years and uh with the model of him paying a commission per per sample so I was making money on the side with that it was kind of interesting and there was a time where we basically had some disagreements in where where we're going with the direction of the company and we had to reach a conclusion of hey what do we do with the system because I decided it's my time to leave I think at this point I'm like four years into working for this lab yeah two as just a web developer and then two as a web developer marketing and you know maintainer of this software and we get into this like legal battle where he's saying hey that's my system you know I'm just going to take it and uh I had all the records that said no like all the bills are under my name I did it in off hours I was able to prove to a lawyer that uh there was no cross contamination I guess in hours which is very tricky um like I used my own laptop everything I was very adamant about that from the first experience and uh basically we got into the legal battle and I decided to just do a clean exit I gave him a fair price it was actually in toal $61,000 but I had taken an investment from someone else to help me fund that system so my profit from that was 41,000 as I as I sold it to the lab which made the lab a lot of money like over that time frame we used it in marketing materials at conferences we would have a a big TV and a dashboard and clients would you know people would walk up and they would see how we trended the data they would see how beautiful the interface looked which I actually have uh pictures of it and it's in a video that I did where I dis where I showed it yeah you can find that I would love to link that in the show notes so people can check that out um yeah yeah I'll do that yeah just but I I want to um first of all compliment you on being so um Forward Thinking in terms of uh you know keeping all these records so that you could like kind of paper it as they say and like have you know all the documentation so that that they wouldn't be able to because a lot of employers uh I mean like a lot of judges might decide with Employers in this case because usually that is probably the case usually the employee is not keeping sufficiently comprehensive records but by um completely I guess uh quarantining all all the work you're doing uh and keeping it separate I'm I'm trying to think of a better word than that but basically uh you were able to uh just track all that stuff and and have everything you needed to be able to to force them to the negotiation table so that you could actually properly sell the software that you developed because I mean by default it's going to be a work for a hire they're they're going to say well you're using company resources so it's actually pretty remarkable that you had this much leverage at this point uh well it's funny because him not wanting to pay me up front for the services was actually the thing that backfired on him and him paying me per sample is where I had the legal power because there was a record that showed he was paying me for for the system through a different entity so the second that first payment was made showed that it was separate from the company that was kind of like the the um the thing that really pushed him out was was or basically uh lost the court case for him we didn't officially go to court we were able to do that through litigation on the side but I had the upper hand because of that the lawyer basically said yeah it's not worth pursuing this cuz he's going to win it or even if if my boss were to win that case uh there was leverage that I had that could have really damaged the business because of the the keys that I held yeah well I mean it sounds like it all worked out great for him anyway because he's got this industry-leading software that you developed he can bring it bring bring in another python developer to potentially maintain and extend the functionality but he if they're already using this as like a centerpiece of conference uh you know booths and all this other stuff like hey use our tool use our tools because look we've got all this stuff everybody else is just sending you PDFs right like I mean that's it's really compelling and here is one of the reasons why I'm so enthusiastic about the future of software development people often like you know I I've talked with so many experienced software Engineers on this channel um and it's extremely rare that I meet somebody who thinks that the number of developers is actually going to go down in the near term like over the next 20 or 30 years because there are so many Industries and so many different com companies within each of those industries that are doing things by like paper oh my like I I tell people don't don't try like if you want steady income and you're looking for opportunity and you don't care about like you don't care about the industry being sexy or anything like that there is so much opportunity it is ridiculous any company you go to you will find such inefficiencies like people sending out PDFs and like by the hundreds of thousands and this is all across the board there are so many companies 10 20 years behind that if you learn how to solve one of those issues you're golden it's it's about creating tools for that it's not about creating the next Facebook or or you know social app like that's where everyone tends to want to go because that's what has all the buzz but staying in the boring Industries it's ridiculous like we're we're so behind in those areas and there's so much opportunity yeah and I mean in the fuel testing industry uh which I didn't even know was an industry but it makes sense there there I didn't know either like it's not like you brought some revolutionary like like people weren't caring about like uptime probably they weren't caring about performance and how much you know uh Ram the Chrome tab was using or whatever people probably weren't caring even like necessarily about like accessibility and like a lot of other considerations uh like a lot of the the newer kind of like state-of-the-art you might very well have just been able to take Tech from like 10 years before and still build this system that worked well enough like that's exactly what I did yeah that's that's exactly what it was the funny thing is this system was no different than just a CMS that plugged into their lab yeah that's all it is like very very simple and it's not revolutionary at all it was just revolutionary to that and the the funny thing is about the end users is my my biggest issue actually came in from Internet Explorer users because the type of user of our system was usually uh a little bit older and they were working in some kind of basement in a warehouse somewhere or like uh in some kind of uh Data Center and they were not very tech savvy it was more of your blue collar type of worker that got some kind of call from some legal agent agcy that says hey are you are you up to your requirements and they don't know what to do so they don't really understand this stuff and they just need to tap in and see this portal and they really didn't care about speed or anything like that they didn't understand that part and my Internet Explorer users were the ones that really bothered me because anytime I tried to use more up-to-date Tech they would not see their interface and that's actually my story into react because at that point uh react had all the things built in already where I was just using jQuery and JavaScript built things out from scratch on the front end uh certain things like template literals meant that an Internet Explorer user couldn't render out data because Internet Explorer didn't know what that was yeah like there was browser compatibility issues so when Internet Explorer died I was very happy yeah I mean like like to to to kind of summarize your pragmatism toward like okay let's just get these tools that work well enough I mean even the most primordial of software development tools are going to be you know Generations ahead of you know phone call between different people in different offices with file cabinets and stuff like that right um at the end of the day like I think a lot of people make technology for technology sake but technology is not the thing it's the thing that gets you to the thing and that thing is usually you know some sort of human conversation or or like some compliance with some law or some you know whatever the Practical thing that you're trying to accomplish is and I think people often get like lost in uh you know a whole bunch of like latest and greatest technology and they discount their ability to affect change with just some you know cursory python skills and like a relational database yeah I mean Peter levels uh using raw PHP not even larl and jQuery I mean it's funny you can people I the reaction on Twitter was crazy about that but I I admire it because he's just getting an end result and he doesn't care how he gets there and and there's certain time where you have to optimize for 200 milliseconds and there's times where it doesn't matter and in his case if that doesn't affect his clientele it works there might be some security flaws in it but I think that's always going to be an issue yeah absolutely I mean that you could probably like he's a solo Dev who's like maintaining all these different he runs like Nomads list and remote okay like a lot of these popular tools that are designed built run by a single you know Creator um Peter levels uh also by the way he was on a recent podcast uh The Lex Freeman podcast and uh he recommended free code Camp oh really learning the code yeah I only got like I I saw the the the clip that went viral on Twitter and then I I think I'm like an hour into it maybe a little bit less I I listen in the gym so when I'm running or working out that's when I get my podcast time in so I need to catch up on that that's really cool exciting same here it was just like a quick comment like recommend like free cooking is good but it's cool to know that like somebody that practical still finds any uh's a littleit uh practical lessons I've got a ton of questions for you but I just want to like fully ride through your story up to here you're only 30 years old I mean it's amazing how much you've accomplished in this amount of time I didn't even start learning to code until I was 30 I think it was like 31 or something when I got my first developer job so um so you've already ridden this very crazy curve also getting married very young 20 21 I got married when I was 25 I think so I was also I was still young too yeah yeah but but like it it changes your priorities right like do you have any kids uh first on the way actually we're expecting in in two months so end of October pretty excited congratulations and uh Hing everything goes smoothly uh for you and Mom yeah so so you you get out of this situation you got you know $41,000 in addition to like all the other money you probably saved up from just being yeah some savings him ful entrepreneur right um uh cash is your lifeblood right like I I think most entrepreneurs have this reflex to just save as much as possible because they can roll that into their next venture right but what was the next venture so you you you finish this where do you go from there so this is right before Co it's 2019 when when I make this exit and I had a few decisions to make and uh I talked to my wife so my biggest rule in life and this is from my dad is he says if your family is the first thing like if you don't take care of that there's there's no honor in anything else he says if if your wife has to worry or your kids wherever you're at in life um that to me was what was ingrained in my life and my biggest thing was to never stress uh stress her out it's the reason why I left my first business and if that means putting on a suit and tie and you know a what do you call that that 90s office worker with the fat tie and the mustard color T-shirt button up that goes here I'll do it that's that's my number one priority so I I consult with her and I said hey I could go take another developer job like I have this resume now built up that people will you know will hire me for this um I don't really want to go back to freelancing I'm a little bit traumatized by that and I'm exhausted and I I want to continue with my education but I don't want to just go take the the traditional path so I tell her okay we have this money saved up and I estimated it out to where we were able to basically survive about a year and a half based on what I had saved up and and the money I just took from the sale and I told her if uh if you're okay with this I'm going to go all in and I want to teach which seemed ridiculous because I I literally had no YouTube channel no subscribers or anything like that but I said I learned from Justin Mitchell I learned from Brad traversy I learned from Bucky from the New Boston and from free code Camp I watched these videos and I was as I was learning I always wanted to do something like that uh me being a nonnative English speaker as well I always try to uh really better my English and get more fluent in talking I I get Tongue Tied a lot uh that goes to the fact that I didn't speak English till I was five and growing up in a large family uh you kind of get your voice gets really bullied down in a way by your brothers like when I try to speak up it's like if you don't catch someone's attention right away your brothers will just over talk you know and basically overshadow you and I wanted to do something that challenged this fear of mine of speaking but I also wanted to learn technology more and I wanted to get out there so I basically said if we get to $5,000 and I and I'm not making money with this I'm going back to work I'll go put on a a button-up shirt and go do the the nerdy thing and I started teaching so uh petrified like my first videos like an hour long video took me probably 15 hours to film and I would just go through this and I would just sit in in my room for hours and hours and I I'm no uh hard work is something I'm very familiar with so I would just power through that and eventually I got decent at these basic tutorials so I started my first course and I'm very awkward but I also have a lot of empathy for self-taught developers I know there's sometimes controversy over the term self-taught but in my opinion selftaught is somebody that didn't go through a traditional route yeah and a lot of people really uh resonated with that go ahead I was just going to say like you could argue that people are not self-taught if they didn't like I don't know like what is selftaught just a arent is you didn't just learn it on your own without you know reading or you know like no one can really teach themselves right but my argument is you had to if you sat down and bought books and courses and like pushed yourself through it yeah that's self taught you can get into the technical of it I defree with that sentiment and I would say if you're going through free C Camp uh if you're just checking out books from the library if you're listening to podcast if you're watching Youtube I would consider you self-taught and I would say anybody who is pedantic and says well technically people taught you because they wrote the books or whatever like there's nobody who's truly self-taught in anything other you could look at like uh okay so libowitz and uh Newton right they created calculus both at the same time right they figured it out they discovered calculus unless you discovered an entire new field of study you're not self-taught in that by the most strict definition so I just throw that definition out the window and I say you know if if most of your skills were acquired through learning on your own uh and using learning resources and you didn't formally attend like an academy or a university or something to learn those skills then yes you are self-taught uh I just I just want to go ahead and say that like I strongly believe that uh people who hair split and criticize over self like they don't know what they're talking about 100% agree yeah yeah so with anybody like that though I had a lot of empathy for that because I I know what it's like to to feel like an idiot when you turn on a a a YouTube video and someone's saying these these these uh acronyms they're talking about all these things that you're just like you just kind of your eyes glaze over and I know what it was like to find a video like that and then to find someone like Bucky Roberts that like tells jokes as he's teaching he tells you these Side Stories he keeps things very short and he assumes you know nothing and like yeah literally points the cursor to everything he's doing this is why this is happening and it seems silly to some people because it's like talking down but someone like me needed that yeah so when I started making videos like that a lot of people resonated with it uh because I just assumed you knew absolutely nothing and I wanted anybody to watch a video and be able to do something with it so that kind of took off until um I think I got like 2,000 subscribers within like a a 3month period so from like September to December I got like 2,000 subscribers and then in February I released the video where I tell the story of the lab system and that video goes viral I think within a week it had like 880,000 views right now it's at 1.5 million and what happened was and I actually strategically placed this because I was very aware of marketing and SEO and how that game worked so that was a huge Advantage for me in YouTube I didn't just come into this completely from scratch like my video skills were bad and my teaching skills weren't that good but I was aware of keywords to use I was aware of how to title certain things and I wanted to make that video in September right after I left my job and sold that software but I realized okay if I teach some D Jango content I can build up a base I can build up some students because if I release this video later I know it's going to get a lot of views I want to be able to pull people in to watch that watch this video and then go check out my other content because if it's my first video they're not going to subscribe to my channel they'll just see a video they'll say this is cool they'll comment and then they're gone and I wanted to pull in that that viewer so with that video going viral it Skyrock is my channel to where I think within the first year I hit 100,000 maybe it was like a year and a month or two but it was very strategically placed and I just ended up uh getting to the point where I think we were at $6,000 in in the bank account before I hit a specific number that was like okay we can live on this it was a YouTube paycheck I um I had partnered up with the with Brad traversy actually on a course uh Brad became my friend throughout this time period I tried to help him in any way I could because that's a good contact to have and I felt like I owed him so much and I ended up uh basically turning that into full-time income and as the the the ship was sinking I'm trying to make sure it's in frame I make money and then we just like Jack Sparrow before the the ship goes under the dock walk off like that's how it felt I was already job searching I was interviewing and ready to to get back into the market and that's when like just the YouTube checks started coming in they weren't big but they were hitting the $1,500 mark my course was making like 4,000 to to 5,000 a month from that couple where did you publish your course on like un to me or so yeah that was udem me um that uh the first one was udem me then I I did one before that but it was like a free video on YouTube but I sold a course guide so you can watch the videos for free but I have a written guide that takes you step by step and it's like the written explanation with code examples a very bad site actually I don't like it today I'm actually embarrassed to even talk about it or share it but it worked and that also was able to bring in you a couple thousand a month from that and you were able to you able to thread the need you were able to pull together enough uh income streams that you could continue to pay for your family and yeah and survive that's great man uh and since then of course you've developed a lot of courses uh you developed some courses that that we published on the free Cod cam channel uh you're you're working with aight uh which has created some grants to develop courses on the free Cod Camp Channel as well um very cool uh low code uh no code slash low code no code I don't know whatever I would say low code maybe I I just use I always pitch Firebase as the example actually I'm like we're like Firebase but we're open source so yeah you know a lot of people know what Firebase is we're not shy to to bring that up we're punching up so it's okay for us to do that yeah so so basically the way I maybe you could just take a moment to describe like as somebody who has been on both sides of this both using ecos systems like Wix like WordPress and now can basically just build like you know nose Jango and Python and can build web servers and has even taught other people how to do all that stuff like maybe we could just talk for a minute about low code and why why low code like why why it went back there or why you should use it in yeah why why should you use it and um because I know a lot of you know experienced devs who use low Cod tools it's just yeah there a time save but maybe you efficiency that that's what I would say it's all about efficiency it's about getting a product to Market uh personally for me I like building back ends actually so it's kind of funny that I went to aight and there was a reason why I did that but for me is if you're a solo developer let's say you you're really good with nextjs and react and that's your stack and uh you have some templates that you work with maybe you have a UI library that you like when it comes to building a full product you usually need you know parts of the full stack and if you're building this by yourself you have a few options you can either learn how to uh work with some kind of backend whether that's with larel Jango whatever your uh preference in technology is or you can hire somebody to do that or you can go to a low code tool and a backend as a service so you don't have to learn all these things so for me it's simply efficiency it's about getting it done uh scalability uh these these things when you get into them take a lot of time and resources and if you're trying to get a product to Market uh you're removing that overhead there's this argument where well I can build it cheaper by myself and do it from scratch Peter leveles actually talks about that in his interview on Lex Freedman and it works for him uh but I would rather pay $15 here $20 there from for some kind of server maybe a little bit more for a database if that can you know save me thousands in the long run if I have to hire a developer that I have to pay thousands to but only pay a couple dollars per service here and there uh it's much more worth it for me therefore I have more capabilities to be flexible when I need to because I can control all aspects of it and I I can make pivots much faster so it's all about making my MVPs or simply scaling I'm very okay with relying on these resources I'm not um like there's a azero for example as a service I've heard people make the arguments well you don't own all your own user data well you can own it in other ways but I'm I don't know I'm not really concerned about that I to me that saves headache yeah and I I would much rather trust them in certain areas than to get a phone call known we had a breach in some area and then all of a sudden I'm liable z uh we use it um and I think like don't roll your own authentication yes there's some great nodejs authentication libraries if you misconfigured them it's your butt right like off zero like one of the reasons people pay them is don't get hacked have have world class security and never let anybody hack you uh and that that's one of the reasons they're like this big company uh and that everybody uses them right um yeah um go uh I was going to say very quickly about Peter levels he does use uh lowco tools like like I think he he's used um like uh Loco tools in the past as well and I think he talks about that a little bit on that podcast which I will link to it's a 4H hour long if you thought my interviews were long wait till you L Lex freedman's interviews well it's it's funny because everybody has a l a line they draw I I've heard people make the argument no I like to build my own I'm going to roll my own off um and I like to understand all the code but yet they're using a framework and then I'll ask them well where do you deploy oh I use Heroku and vers versel or something like that yeah I'm like well so you're using a tool like that you're not building a server out in your garage uh Peter levels uses stripe that's a low code tool that's he's not building all his own payments out he's not writing or getting checks mailed to him or uh connecting to banks by himself he's using a tool that's there so we all already do it at some level uh in one way or another I don't I've never met a developer that writes everything from scratch without a framework and doesn't use some kind of provider in one way file storage I've never met a developer who doesn't use those tools who gets a lot done because yeah that fundamental constraints to what you can actually accomplish as a single person and you know like there might be Fortune 500 companies like I I would I would venture that even a lot of Fortune 500 companies use stripe you know uh like even if you're Amazon do you really want to be creating like Pro you know credit card processing software and like dealing with all that you know overhead and all the security considerations the privacy considerations uh I don't think most companies do want to do that so so yes I I I think it's you really hit the nail on the head when you said that it's there's a line that every developer like every developer has a line somewhere but yeah there's always a line somewhere where you're just like okay I'm not going to you know write my own payment infrastructure or I'm not going to write my own cloud I'm I'm to build my own cloud right uh you can absolutely do that you can absolutely do that but that's generally the the domain for people that have massive teams at their disposal massive budgets uh who who could potentially like actually get like infrastructure in a data center somewhere yeah and and then you're kind of like off off offloading the data data center management like do you build your own data centers right like there there becomes like a practical kind of barrier that I think um the world is incredibly complex there so many things to consider and uh yeah so so loow CCO tools like we use them all the time at fre CCO Camp uh we use tons of uh different Services as a charity by the way we get access to a lot of these tools for free like like I think we get Cloud flare for free we get off zero for free um we get some small amount of Amazon credits it's not as generous as I would like if anybody from Amazon's listen to this and want to give us a bunch of credits it certainly help uh digital lotion is pretty pretty good about giving credits things like that but but yeah like these developer tools are out there for a reason use them it would be my advice and don't don't be like thinking that you're not a real developer because you didn't roll your own XYZ that's funny cuz sometimes that's the case like for me I remember uh first of all I like building back ends but I remember people recommending Firebase to me and at that point I'm like well I came from the low code world and I put all this time into learning what I want to know now why do I want to take a step back like it almost felt like I was going back into that world where I'm proud to be able to write my own code so there was kind of like that barrier for me and uh really quickly I learned to to you know put that ego aside because there's plenty of areas where I can write my own code now and just those tools allow me to focus on my specialties as opposed to that but that I've seen as I've seen that as a barrier for some people where they just simply don't like to admit that these tools can help them yeah well I want to fire a whole bunch of Rapid Fire questions that I've got like this list of like 20 questions um first of all early in your career I I love this uh when I learned this about you people would call you Google boy yeah what's the story behind that so uh there was this one client that I had it was actually a friend he uh he was one of the original Founders I think in WebMD and he was an older gentleman who was very successful and he would um I met him in my city and he would just like to hang out in our office because he loved the energy of being around around a bunch of young kids doing something and he always had these ideas that he was bringing to me and he' always asked me for advice and he just referred to me as Google boy because he loved the energy and I feel like sometimes uh there's people that will hang out just because of that as I mentioned we had a lot of fun in our office so he simply had a lot of questions around that and and I guess like the idea so that kind of took off and and he would mention that to people so he would bring me into a meeting and there' be like you know four older gentlemen for me it was much older than me but in their like 50s 60s and and he would just introduce me this is you know my my Google boy whiz kid and he actually end ended up investing in one of my Ventures but uh he would always just introduce me that way and it was it was pretty cool I was proud of that because I went from my history to now having any form of ref reference to Google which was a cool thing yeah and um I'm curious how you go about like doing SEO research like let's say hypothetically you got a new project and I'm not asking you to disclose proprietary information you're not even really doing SEO that much these days it seems like you're mostly developing courses but um let's say hypothetically you you had a client um we we'll call it um Ben's plasma donation center or something like that blood donation center can we use something more practical okay I'm kidding I'm kidding I'm kidding yeah coffee shop yeah okay coffee shop all right very very simple okay everybody know I know how to Doo for plasma donations okay so uh I think most people actually don't donate plasma because they have to like pull the blood out of your arm and run it through all these machines then put it back into you uh I think people get paid for that and I don't think it's like uh something you do unless you really need the money but blood donation uh maybe a blood donation center is is more what I thinking yeah so let's do that instead of the coffee shop because I think the coffee shop is kind of a generic example uh so I want to get people to come and donate their blood uh especially people that have like o uh positive or yeah o oh is it o oh negative that can be the universal I'm not sure actually okay um sorry this isn't going to we're not going to attempt to recount like science class from like high school here uh but basically you want to get uh people in some geographic area to come and donate blood so like let's say hypothetically I was hanging out with my brother and my brother donates a lot of blood he's donated like literal gallons of blood over the past I think he's done like 60 blood donations he does it every month and like man I want to do that I haven't donated blood in years right just cu I'm busy and so I started searching around trying to find a blood donation center nearby me and that was reputable and was not not going to like gouge hospitals on it and where the blood was actually going to get used and stuff like that and they weren't going to give me like infections from drawing my blood and stuff like that so like let's say hypothetically you had a client that was a blood bank like how would you go about like doing that we're going to do a quick Clinic um sure yeah so the first thing I'm doing is I'm I'm looking up the keywords that I would look up to find it I try not to let the market influence me right away I just try to punch in those key words and I I like to see what the competition is like what's going on out there and I scour their sites um I've used tools like Moz and Sam rush and I also look for variants and keywords that that are being used for this so what are all the ways that people are looking into this or how do people find it in search results there's various combinations of those keywords once I figure that out uh then it's all about just going through the basics making sure the site is there meta tags are there the content is is up and going and from there I usually look for opportunities to convert traffic that aren't direct clients just to kind of get that site trusted by Google so whether that's through articles I'm looking for longtail keywords that's a big one for me uh for example if you're competing for the search term bloodbank San Francisco CA right that's usually how people search something like that um that's a very difficult keyword to get what I like to do is I like to find some keywords like uh best BL Blood Bank in San Francisco or uh top rated or maybe um let's see there's there's different keywords they're called lawn tail because their volume and traffic like if you were to look at a chart let's do this right here like let's say it goes this way your top keywords up here everyone competes for this when you go for those sub keywords there's less competition so there's less traffic down at that point I wish I can like draw on the screen there's less competition but that means those are easy to get so I usually trying to find ways to find those keywords and then create articles around them so if those keywords only get me uh 10 250 site visitors a month and don't convert into actual like users that maybe go to the blood bank themselves uh they're at least using my site and collecting data and can get there from One path to another so I'm usually doing that then I'm looking for social strategies if I can do Google AdWords I'll see what the competition is like there then I'm really big on the social strategy because I believe in SEO today outside of having a basic site uh it's about getting other social presence involved there it's something that uh Google does like to see so I'm seeing if I can uh find a strategy online see what competitors are doing and just trying to get any engagement there uh YouTube videos that's always a good one so I'm always just looking for those type of keys those are there's a lot we can do here but right off the top of my head it's that kind of analysis I just I like to know the industry and that's one of the things that I sold to my clients by the way was I would come into meetings and I would know a lot about what they're doing so like if it was a a dentist or if it was a lawyer I would like learn their lingo and scour through and actually read their competitor's websites and what they're doing and I'll try to understand that and they're always so impressed like if there was a coffee shop owner I would say okay you're this area is getting searched you know you have a thousand searches a month and your competitors are pulling these and this is your rank and you're only pulling you know x% and looking at your your coffee shop you have like 20% off occupancy there's a lot of Empty Tables uh we need to increase that number so I would always use data like that to also sell that I know that's a side tangent but um it helps no no that's absolutely helpful because my next question was like you have gotten a lot of clients over uh the years and one of the ways you've done this is by putting yourself out there and in places where you're likely to encounter clients you mentioned the American Chamber of Commerce right uh amcham I think uh but there's there's like other variants like there might be like local Rotary Club there's plenty of local ones yeah yeah it's every city seems to have those they have like a lot of these organizations that meet up business owner groups and such let's say hypothetically you're starting over you got a new body of completely new life the only thing is your brain is the same and you still know everything you used to have and we drop you into a new city like s Cincinnati and now you have to go and make a living and let's say like hypothetically we took away your developer skills so you've only got um I know I said your phrase the same but you don't have the ability to like build web apps uh or or sophisticated you know systems like the one that you build for fuel testing but you you do have your marketing skills um we're dropping you into a new city and you need to get clients like how where would you go and when you go to those places what would you do in preparation and what would you do once you get there so first of all uh with with nowadays tools um I would if I don't have those skills I would probably find someone that would be willing to do those if I needed money I would find a a web developer a freelancer that I would partner up with and say hey I can pull you leads give me a cut of these jobs then I'm probably going to meetup.com I'm I'm researching the city and I want to know where the business owners hang out so if it's Chambers of Commerce meetings or or meetings like that that's where I'm going if there's any local talks I can attend or any kind of trade show that's anything relevant to those clientele I'm going there uh if it's high class bars or restaurants where there's a way to Network I'm simply just talking to people that's that's something that I wasn't good at but I developed that skill where I can sit down at a bar and strike up a conversation and find your interest and I'm usually using what they're doing as the starter of my conversation it's not a pitch into hey this is what I do here's my business card I I I never Ed that tactic it was talking about their industry so if I went to a Meetup and I was talking to a plumber um usually I would like to have my research already prepped before then but if not I'm usually asking them about the industry I'm asking them who they're competing what what competing with uh what's going on what are challenges they're facing and if I'm starting from scratch that's what I'm doing I'm going to be a a u what's the what's the I'm like a I'm like a puppy at a dog park in that sense I'm just getting as loud as I can and talk to Talking to as many people as possible and the issue sometimes with this is that it doesn't you you don't see the results right away so it's about building those relationships and network so through time as you're doing that you might pull one or two uh leads from that but people end up getting to know you and people talk so it's about like getting that momentum as we talked about with uh you use that space analogy what was with the hydrogen things kind of take off yeah yeah uh momentum takes off so when you're chasing clients in the beginning it takes some time but once they get going you're pushing clients away like people will end up talking so I'm simply just networking like crazy and probably just showing up in those areas like right now in Tech when I wanted to break in it was it wasn't just the Brad traverses of the world because he's he's high-profiled compared to where I was at the moment so I knew that that was a far reach even though I reached out to him and I actually sent him a couple emails it wasn't an ask it was more of hey you did this for me you know is there anywhere I can help you then I would offer certain services or not services but like i' would offer to help support his comment section for example so I'd provide something there but it was networking with anybody in the local Tech Community I would go to meetups here whenever I could even though I should have done that more often but it's putting your ear to the ground and knowing the industry as well kind of a longwinded answer no that's super helpful and and the the main thing I want to draw out here is the long game is it's about ensconcing yourself within this community and gradually getting to know people uh as to directly quote what you said because I've been taking notes furiously as you've been talking uh you know uh people get to know you and people talk people will eventually word will eventually get around as you build your reputation and uh who knows maybe that plumber you're talking to has a friend who's a carpenter and that person needs help that's that's exactly what would happen uh when people are having beers at a you know over a football game or a cocktail party they're they're usually talking about work that's the irony right we all try to get away from it at times but yet that's what like when when I get together with my friends it's always business talk just you know where are you investing what are you doing and it's always those kind of conversations so if you're part of that and you can have an impact your name will come up and they'll ask you and then I you get phone calls hey so and so recommended to you let's can we meet for coffee so you you said that sometimes you do hire developers to work with you uh maybe like on a job job basis or do you have like people wh with whom you have like an ongoing you know payroll type relationship like when you bring on devs what do you look for in devs because you're you probably have all kinds of different work that you're going to be throwing at them they're not going to be just building and maintaining a single system or a single tool they're probably going to be jumping from one project to another how do you hire devs so the the first one is more of the obvious one that's just can they do it that's that's the first issue uh or the first thing that I'm looking for but I I need to I need to like who I'm working with I I will never work with somebody like there's sometimes where it's transactional but uh anybody that I'm spending time with if I'm working with you there's a there's it's assumed that I'm going to be spending you know x amount of hours in a year with you and I want to enjoy that time I want to I want to really care about you I want to know who you are I want to know your family like one of my developers that I contract a lot of work to uh he's getting married and you know he's inviting me to his wedding like this is somebody across the world from me and I genuinely care about him and that to me is is a key part of that because that builds trust I I would trust him with my life actually in this specific person but yeah I I like to make sure that there's a good not just a gut feeling because that can be misguided sometimes um but there's some kind of Rapport there outside of work as well so I'm looking for the ability the report but then I'm you know looking for their work ethic and what they're doing and I think if I can hash those out that's about it if if they can do the job and I and I like them and I trust him we're we're set awesome and I want to talk about like learning to code a little bit because you're somebody who taught themselves to learn the code and uh you did this uh what what years were you like actively like learning not like obviously there were two stages there was like learning web development in general and then there was like learning properly building software systems it was 2016 or 17 I believe September like I can actually go back to my notes I um I'm I was a very Avid uh not notetaker but I was very Avid about documenting my my time mhm and like like to the hour so I can go back to my notes I think it was August of 20 2017 is when I started learning Visual Basic like that sounds hilarious but I thought like I didn't know what language to start learning and I just went with Visual Basic because I I like Excel started that and then right around September is when I started learning python I think it was 2017 actually yeah so about how much money do you think you spent in total on like books and courses and things like that in total since then uh maybe 15 2,000 or $1,500 to $2,000 yeah I'm it's a rough estimate I think I'm going a little bit higher but uh the books I bought were always expensive like like these uh we have Javas eloquent JavaScript like this is a $60 book and you know systems design interview here that I'm I'm reading as well pitching these books um I don't know maybe like I've boughten maybe 50 of them over the years like around that rate maybe a little bit less maybe two grand I'm trying to do the math yeah but I mean two grand I I would venture to say that like a lot of people listening to this who want to learn to code like they might be able to couble together you know $1,500 $2,000 to learn the code and that's for like physical books and things like that like in theory like knowing what you know today like if you had to go back do you think you could learn a code for free yeah so let me let me correct that answer by the way not corrected let me uh update a few things um in the beginning by the like in order for me to build that system and learn how to code I paid about $50 for HTML and CSS by John Ducket and then I bought python crash course which was also about 50 bucks I think in order to actually learn the base knowledge base is probably under $300 like the books I'm buying now is simply me furthering my learning so if you're talking about someone starting from scratch you need to scrap a lot less together than I did um I didn't buy a UD me coures still way later in my career that was just simply to pick up another technology to do it faster cuz maybe the content is better but it was very little on actual education in terms of learning to code like you said something that I thought was really profound in one of the interviews I listened to you said never blame the code forgot where I said that one but I do remember saying that yeah what does that mean uh I get a lot of emails and comments uh people get very frustrated in their process and they will lash out out at at what's going on at the you know from the instructor's perspective you didn't explain this right or I'm stuck here what's going on and anytime I am able to jump in and help and and I don't always do that because that's not my obligation after I put together a 10-hour video it's usually a mistake on their end it's usually some kind of configuration setting and I remember writing code and I'm like there's a bug in Python there's something wrong with this system and I would I would get very frustrated where it was always an issue on my end and I have to assume that if I'm in the early stage ages the issue is not on on the framework's end or the language itself and I would uh once I accepted that it meant that I can start seeking the solution as opposed to blaming I would often blame the book maybe myself even if I was reading something they didn't explain something well enough well maybe I didn't read it and I need to go back to some documentation and read more thoroughly and once it's kind of like uh you can't you know in order to um what's the term in order to recover from being an alcoholic you need to admit you're an alcoholic type of thing it's simply admitting that the mistakes probably on your end and and look deeper inside then you can begin to to solve the issue that's how I've seen it because I know what it's like I've I've gotten angry at instructors on YouTube like I like they're putting stuff out for free yet I'm upset with them because I can't figure this out and it's and I'm really stressed out and I have this deadline and I need to deliver this product and I don't I don't have the solution and I just wish they they explained it better and I don't kind of blame them in a way yeah so kind of like personal accountability and just like okay let's say this problem is outside of me and there's no way I can influence it what do I do about it I can't do anything so it's almost always better to assume that there's something wrong that's happening where you can control it because then at least you can eventually figure out a way to fix it so I I I just find it a more constructive uh perspective to always try to frame things where like okay maybe I screwed up here you know um and and then work from there to figure out so but but I love that that like just never blame the code um I had that with Visual Basic by the way I started Visual Basic because I was using Excel and that frustration if I just thought well it's the code I wouldn't have come up with the solution as opposed to did I pick the wrong the wrong tool for the job I wasn't familiar with it that led to me researching more and finding a problem but the blame just leads to a roadblock yeah I I mean like precisely what you said like if you're using the wrong tool for the job let's say you're using uh you know a regular hammer and you're trying to take down a wall instead of a sledgehammer oh Sledgehammer is actually designed for knocking down walls I'm using the wrong tool for the job so of course it's frustrating when I'm bang the wall with his tiny H not doing it right or or like let's bust out the actual Jackhammer you know uh so I want to close by talking a little bit about your lifestyle because I think this is really interesting like uh you have optimized in your life for having this level of Independence like from a very early age you had like a landscaping company uh you of course have had consultancies where you've brought together friends and I I love that the people that you work with you insist on working with people that you like that you respect that you trust um that's such a cool story about one of your um team members who is having a wedding and invited you where which country are they in Bangladesh wow so yeah his name is a sharir shuo I just call him shivo because it's easier for me to say but I'll give him a shout out when he watches this I'll make sure he sees it uh just just a good friend just just down to earth and and I love that he calls my wife sister I just think I think that's such a cool thing in that culture where it feels so cool like he when he when I got him his I got him a job actually at my last company and we're congratulating him and he calls my wife you know sister solam and I'm like man that is so cool like I know that that's more of just how they talk in that culture and it's also in my culture that way but it just felt so personal but I'm like yeah that kind of summarizes you know that relationship though like like we call each other all the time just to check in you know what's going on and outside of work yeah that's really cool and and I I must add that there are so many great software engineers in Bangladesh and Bangladesh is going through like a pretty tumultuous period right now uh but there's just like a ton of amazing talent on the market uh people that you know their local industry has been going through crazy roller coaster with like all the political drama and everything going on and uh yeah but some of the best developers in the world are in Bangladesh uh just like extremely like hardworking kind of like hardcore engineering culture over there um that's really cool so I know that because you've structured your life to be so um I guess independent where where you have control youve prioritized having Independence over going and getting like a Fang job or something and trying to bring in tons of money and and just saving it and stuff like you'd rather not have to wear the suit and tie and you'd rather be able to work from your home uh or or work are you able to travel a lot I I travel a lot um I I wake up often and I don't know where I'm at we travel that often um like we'll be out like this last uh in a or in uh in June no May wow I don't even know what month we're I have a house in Florida so we just go there and we spend a month and my wife loves a beach there then we went down to San Diego in June um I'll travel out of the country and we'll just work remote so for us it's like we take little vacations while we're on vacation and uh that's one of my favorite things is is working Barefoot with sand still on my feet you know in some at a kitchen table and I try to you know always make sure that my setup is kind of built for that but it's very rare when when we're at home like between our family like I think I spend maybe seven months of the year in my actual like in my own bed it feels like sometimes maybe a little bit more but I love it that way uh I know when once we're having our our our first child we're it's going to be a little bit different but I do fully plan to get a acclimated to it and then go take off and live in in Airbnb for a couple months and we'll just have somebody house it we have a a bunny so somebody has to stay with us what's your buddy's name Napoleon uh he's a Netherland Dwarf so he's named after Napoleon bonapart because allegedly he was shorter so yeah I I my understanding is he was actually like uh like standard height for the time for like a typical Frenchman but for some reason that's why I said allegedly cuz I'm like cuz yeah exactly it seems like like that may be more of like a myth and just more of the times and of course people have gotten taller and taller over the centuries with better nutrition and like less childhood injuries and stuff like that so yeah he he's probably short you know maybe compared to you and I but like he was probably pretty standard but any anyway that's a good name for a bunny uh yeah very very adorable animals uh so have you like a lot of people go out and they buy when when they get like exit money from selling a project or something they'll go buy like a A superar or do something like that like what do you I'm so boring when it comes to that I don't spend my money on that to me what matters is my my time Freedom which is kind of funny that I ended up taking a job and there's a reason for that but my time freedom is very important to me so I drive a 2016 Mazda 6 I'm going to upgrade to some kind of SUV now my wife and I share a car my father-in-law always wants us to get a second car and I'm like we do everything together now with a kid she might need the car for appointments but I work from the house if we go to coffee shops we go together and we're usually traveling so I I don't really buy much luxury uh my clothes is pretty standard and I just try to invest it and make sure that I have a a fund for when I need it that's kind of my thing that's what matters to me so time and and and freedom are like if you were to think about like know material possessions is one angle you can't have all three you know you you probably have lots of friends I certainly do from from like you know High School who uh H have bought like they have expensive nice things and they're working really hard uh to be able to earn those and they have less time and they have less Freedom as a result of you know because the higher pay jobs J yeah they take jobs that they don't like because of that um I I I took less money because of I was able to to get a job that I really liked and also take less money because I wanted certain flexibility like there was there was offers that I've gotten that would have uh more than doubled my pay but that's not what's interesting to me and um that's yeah much more important to me and if I lose sleep over anything it's it's the protection of my family like that's what matters to me I was never really afraid of much until I got married and then it's just like I I want to make sure that she's taken care of like that's what scares the hell out of me which my wife by the way is in the tech industry um I taught her how to code too because if you're around me you're going to get the bug and uh she's a more of a front-end developer and got in and had a a good job until you know we decided you know we decided to start the family and and she kind of want to go in a different direction but that security of knowing if anything happens to me that she's more than capable of not just having some kind of career but a prestigious one if she needs very respected and where she was at it makes me very happy for her yeah that's really cool that you like turn around and like to further you know give her independence and like if something you know Heaven forbids you were to get hit by the proverbial bus or something tomorrow uh she would still be able to provide for your family and your your kids so um so and and also that's so cool that you're like teaching programming and then why not go ahead and teach your wife that right well first it was help me she has an eye for design she's a photographer and uh she kind of stopped She didn't really like you know working for customers and uh she has an eye for design though so that like natural creative side of her would come into play and she would help design a lot of the sites that I built and she would use Photoshop and then eventually I was like hey just learn figma and then hey can you just can you just C this for me like here's some HTML and CSS let's go through some lessons and then I got her into tailwind and she's actually liking it to where she's able to implement that on her own it's really cool yeah that's great man she designs my thumbnails too not that I have good thumbnails CU I don't really get too much into the thumbnail game I've actually kind of scaled that back but that's that's her work yeah that's that's very cool um yeah definitely like I talked with Jessica Chan her husband's like an animator has yeah great videos I love their style like of effort that she puts into videos is incredible yeah yeah well it's been such a pleasure talking with you learning about your origin story as you know being a younger kid in a much larger family and immigrant family having to learn English at you know at age five or six uh and and still to this day continuing to expand your uh your verbal skills uh communication skills and then like all the learning that's come along the way and it you know it's it's wild to me to remember that you're you're 30 yeah yeah like like I said before the before this uh this talk I feel like I've lived like so many lifetimes I feel mentally that I'm like in my 50s somewhere like I just want to just want to relax sometimes and just enjoy life yeah well I'm very excited to see what the next few decades have in store for you uh Dennis and and I'm excited to see you know like like you continue to expand your skills and expand your Ambitions um while continuing to teach as you learn so again I just want to thank you for being a big part of the global developer community and the uh teaching community and you know it's an honor to teach alongside you yeah thanks for having me it's it's definitely a privilege of mine and you know having my first video on free code Camp not too long ago like that's that's exciting stuff and I don't know if we've posted anything else before that but this is like the first one I made for the channel itself and yeah um it's it's weird because it's a dream come true because for me it's more of uh uh I made it type of mentality like this is where I learned and now I'm able to contribute and and I don't like the term give back necessarily because I'm just like I always feel like I'm giving I'm giving back to the community in a different way but uh it's definitely a privilege to even like be speaking to you and and contributing here well thanks for your kind words and thanks again for everything you're doing for uh the developer Community uh just a quick reminder that we have tons of interesting stuff in the show notes or the video description if you're listening to the audio the show notes on the podcast and uh be sure to check out Dennis's course uh be sure to check out some of the other things we'll have down there uh I was able to Google around and find the exact type of spacecraft that I was talking about that I read about in a book 20 years ago and just popped in my head as potentially an interesting analogy uh but uh yeah until next time everybody I hope you have a fantastic week and Happ happy coding take care everybody\n"