Python for Entrepreneurs Transcripts
Chapter: Making money (credit cards and businesses)
Lecture: Making money introduction
Login or
purchase this course
to watch this video and the rest of the course contents.
0:02
So are you ready to learn about how to take your online web app and make money with it? Accept credit cards, set up business models,
0:11
talk a little bit about charging for products, things like that? Well those are the kinds of things we are going to learn in this chapter,
0:18
we are going to start with accepting credit cards and actually working with the APIs
0:22
as well as just talking more generally about some of the options we have for creating and accepting purchases via credit cards in our web applications.
0:30
Once you start accepting money, you will have to of course have a business model and that has sort of two components in my mind,
0:38
on one is how do you form a company, right? Once you accept money and you start entering purchase agreements with people,
0:45
you don't want to do this personally, right, you want to do this through some kind of formal business that has limited liability,
0:51
or some kind of protection for you, at least in the United States, the two primary models are LLC (Limited Liability Companies) and Corporations,
0:59
so we'll talk a little bit about that and even if you are outside of the United States
1:04
how you can still create one of these within the US as a US company, if that makes sense.
1:10
The other part of this is how do you actually sell your product, do you sell by recurring subscriptions? Do you sell by one-off purchases?
1:17
do you not sell it at all but sell ads? Things like this, we'll talk about some of the trade-offs there.
1:24
And finally, we'll also talk about other ways to accept money from customers,
1:27
we'll see that many of your best customers won't put their credit cards into your system, instead, they will say can we do a bulk purchase?
1:35
Can we buy something for my team? I'd like to set up some kind of arrangement for my whole company, things like that,
1:41
and for that you typically use purchase orders and invoices, so we'll talk very briefly about those as well.
1:46
Now, once you've created your web app, it can be scary to charge for money. But there is a picture I want you to keep in your mind,
1:54
something like this- it's definitely something that's hard to get right,
1:57
how much should you charge? What business models should you use? If you charge, will all of your users quit?
2:01
Instead of thinking of charging money as a negative, think of it as a positive.
2:06
As long as you are fair, charging money will allow your business to grow, it will allow you to hire other people to make whatever your users like now,
2:14
make that more awesome and provide more value to them. Not everybody will pay for what you have,
2:19
maybe you have some kind of free trial model or something to this effect, I don't know what your web app is, but your business will definitely be well,
2:27
a business and not a hobby if you charge money for it
2:30
and it will let you put all of your time and energy into it once you get it to grow strong enough.
2:34
So think of charging money or asking for money from your customers and users really as your ability to grow.
2:42
They are getting value out of what you are doing, many of them will be more than happy to support your work long as you are fair about it.
2:49
The path is not always a straight line to where you are going. Let me give you a little bit of example from how I started.
2:56
In April of 2015 I started the podcast, and in the beginning it was just a hobby more or less, I never really expected anybody would sponsor it,
3:07
you can see there is an ad at the top of the page, I didn't expect that, that was a pleasant surprise and so I started this as just something to share
3:15
with the community, start telling stories and something I wanted to do
3:20
but then I realized after companies came and started to want to sponsor and so on, that maybe I could make something more out of this,
3:27
maybe I could actually if I could take it a little bit farther, I could actually make this my job, make the podcast more awesome,
3:33
put more energy into it, make sure that it keeps going, things like that. Moreover, I had always wanted to start some kind of online training company
3:41
but there is such a chicken and egg problem of how do you find people who like what you are doing, how do you get people to know about you,
3:50
how do you get them to trust you. Instead of just going and saying starting this company directly,
3:55
I actually started the podcast first and then once that had a good audience and people knew me and trusted me from there, then I felt confident
4:03
to actually go and launch Talk Python Training where you are taking this course. So had I just gone and tried to start this training company on my own,
4:11
maybe I would have succeeded but the odds would have certainly been against it,
4:16
it would have been much harder than if I already had built up some kind of audience.
4:20
Maybe I could have made this work going through some other training company
4:24
and try and work basically as a subcontractor like an author on royalties sort of thing, but starting my own business that was quite risky.
4:31
However, with the podcast there as the foundation, then it becomes not so risky, so I want you to think about all the building blocks in the way
4:39
you might create one thing and then level it up to another instead of necessarily just going directly towards the thing
4:45
that you might have in mind at the end. OK, so there is many building blocks,
4:50
many ways to put this together and build up a business and just be creative.