The Profitable Programmer Course 2.0 – Rafeh Qazi

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The Profitable Programmer 2.0

The completely new and rehauled version of the Profitable Programmer is now a 16-week program that helps you break out of your 9-5, gives you the freedom to work from wherever you want, and ultimately puts you on the path to go from zero to 6-figures as a Python freelancer.

• What if you could look at a blank page in sublime text without feeling crippled and frustrated thinking “Ugh. I don’t even know where to start”?
• What if you could look at a blank screen and knew EXACTLY what to do to START and FINISH your next project from scratch?
• What if you had clients who you charge what you’re worth by building full-stack web applications because they see you as a trusted advisor who knows what they need & why they need it and not just some hired-gun freelancer who they hired because you had the lowest prices.

I’ve worked with hundreds of students on a 1 on 1 basis and thousands more online…and I’ve seen EVERY kind of message and question there is.

Here are some of the concerns they would express… 

“I don’t know how to go from coding to building a real world project”.

“I am ashamed that being a web developer I don’t have a portfolio to show off my work. I started so many times but couldn’t finish it as I don’t know which projects I can add, which I shouldn’t. I wanna also discuss being a full-time employee what projects I can show off, what not and why.”

“I don’t even know where to start”

If you’re looking to become a developer or already are a developer… here are some of the things you might’ve tried to overcome the pain you might be going through now…

You take online courses like “Learn to build websites with HTML5 , CSS3 , Bootstrap 4 , Javascript, jQuery, Python 3, Ajax, Laravel, PHP, Databases, ORM, Authentication, OAuth, SQL, Command Line, and Django!” So let me ask you… Why do you still feel lost when you have to start a project from scratch?

Every time you start a python project from scratch… You feel lost and your first urge is to use stack overflow or just google things. While that can work temporarily for small projects, you know this approach will fail you in the real world at your job.

Most tutorials you follow assume you already know stuff… And they always skip over the most important fundamentals which is why you always feel like there is a gaping hole in your knowledge. You find yourself thinking in despair “why are they always skipping over stuff”? That’s why even though you have good intentions… You lack the foundation and can’t make any progress.

You went on a course buying spree during Udemy’s 95% off sales and you haven’t even completed one and now all of them are collecting virtual dust.

When you open up the command line, you feel paralyzed. “What is this black box and what do I do to make it go away!?”

You still think Git and Github are the same thing.

You’ve taken courses from Codecademy, Team Treehouse, Coursera, Edx, you’re drinking from a firehose and while you still might have built a few projects… You know that those projects are way too basic to go on your portfolio and no recruiter or potential client would take you seriously.

Stitching together what you’ve learned from 5 different courses to build practical applications but you always feel like you’re falling short.

You copy paste code from online courses or Stack Overflow. It works really well when you’re starting a project from scratch. But, deep down you know that if you were working on a bigger project that had lots of moving parts… You’d be completely lost.

You hate your job. You’ve always wanted to learn to code and change your career. But when you come home… It’s already 6:15 pm on a Tuesday night. It’s time to cook & eat some dinner, watch some Netflix, and get ready for another day at work. And the cycle of mediocrity continues.

You started coding. 2 months later, you quit. You started coding again… 3 months later, you quit. And now. 2 years have passed… and you’re exactly where you were.

You want to get to the point in coding where you can earn an income while doing it and not just for yourself… But your family & friends. But, you don’t know where to even start.

You’ve tried freelancing. You’ve been on Upwork, Fiverr etc… but you’ve failed. You’ve failed miserably. You’ve tried your best to stand out. You read up on every blog post on freelancing.

It still didn’t work. You finally decided that the only way to get work online is by competing on pricing.

So you started competing but got lost in the sea of 3rd world country developers who charge $4.37/hour.

And you thought to yourself “there’s too much competition”. “The market is saturated”. “Maybe I’m not even ready to start freelancing yet”… And you finally gave up.

Now, what if you could fast forward three years into the future and life looks a little different…

Imagine this.

You wake up at 10:13 am to your alarm and hit the stop button on your iPhone X. You roll out of bed with a smile on your face. First up… Instagram. Next, Facebook. You see a post from your friend that he posted an hour ago complaining about the traffic to work.

It stresses you out a little bit. So, you pick up your phone and ask “Hey Siri, what’s on my calendar?”. And her response “I didn’t find any appointments for today”. The smile on your face returns and it’s bigger than before.

You go to make a cup of coffee & on your way there… Your phone buzzes. You look down and the notification reads “Stripe just sent a payment of $2,450 to your bank account ending in 7823”.

You click it to read the details and you realize it was a payment for when you integrated a Django API with one of your client’s e-commerce store.

… And what if the voice in your head, instead of sounding frustrated, confused, and overwhelmed on your journey to becoming a developer… What if that inner voice in your head said things like this instead…

“I feel very comfortable with my python skills to solve any fundamental or intermediate problems and maybe even some advanced ones.”

“Even if I’m starting a project from scratch… I feel confident & know exactly what to do to complete my full-stack web app with Python & Diango from START to FINISH.”

“Thinking about starting a project from scratch doesn’t feel like a daunting task to me anymore… It literally gets me SO pumped and I CANNOT wait to get started on the next project.”

“I now make enough income to be able to not only support myself, but my family & friends”.

“I’ve built many relationships that I could depend on even if something were to happen to my job or my career”

“I know exactly how to setup my environments perfectly. Command line doesn’t scare me. The black box called the command line is something I love”.

“I can version control every project using git comfortably. I feel confident with Git & Github”

“I know how to find clients, build a relationship with them, demonstrate my value to the client without having to be a sleazy alpha-type salesman or needing to show them a piece of paper to prove my skills, and charge what I’m worth because my clients see me as a trusted advisor and not just some commodity freelancer”.

That is how it feels like for me now every single day. But, it wasn’t like this. In fact, I can’t imagine a more humble beginning…

How it all started for me…

When I was 12 years old… I was with my family and got in a car crash. Everyone else came out just fine. Except for my mom. The doctor came out and told us that both of my mom’s back disks got dislocated. My heart sank.

And I would have to see someone I loved so much go through so much pain & misery for 9 straight years.

Getting her a surgery was out of the question. It was $30,000 for one night at the hospital. And even though my brother was working in an IT company and my dad was working double shifts as a security guard… None of them were able to afford her surgery.

She would have to call me to walk her up the stairs. Tuck her in bed. I would always have to be on full alert when I would sleep because if there was something wrong with her, I could jump out of bed and go help her.

That was the worst feeling five ever had in my life. It was a crippling feeling of complete helplessness. That was the moment I thought to myself that when I’m older I wanna be doing something different with my life. Not just a regular job where I can barely make enough for myself to survive. So this NEVER happens to ANYONE that I care about.

It became my mission that when I’m older, I’m gonna have enough money to live comfortably for myself, take care of my family, and help my mom get her surgery.

I mean don’t get me wrong. I wanted to be able to make A LOT of money. I wanted girls. I wanted respect. I wanted to feel significant. I wanted people to look at me in pure AWE and just go “Wow… I have no effin’ idea how this guy does that.”

But, my mom was my #1 drive on getting started on my journey to becoming a developer that kept me going through all the hardest shit I would have to go through.

You have to have vour WHY. Or you will not make it through.

“Get a degree they said… It’ll make you stand out they said”…

As I got older & got into Oakton community college I was always trying to focus on doing something outside of college because I knew the traditional path was that you graduate, get a job, a promotion, another promotion, retire and then you die… All the while making barely enough to support yourself… Much less support the loved ones around you.

I think this might have been also one of the reasons why I was such a bad student in college with a 2.0 GPA. All of my friends got into big universities like Princeton, Harvard, & Stanford and they would just make fun of me for how terribly I was doing in school.

I kind of felt that the academic system wasn’t really designed to get you jobs. That’s why most people would leave with really high loans, unable to land jobs and lacking practical skills.

I began looking up different fields in technology where I could get jobs that would pay me really well without having to wait on finishing college & getting my degree. I started my career search very superficially, purely based off of what fields paid a lot of money.

IT (computer networking) caught my eye… I spent 3 months studying like a maniac & got my CCNA (Cisco Certified Networking Associate) certification.

Now, I know what you’re thinking… “Of course, Qazi, being from a brown family you are supposed to have a genetic predisposition to fields like IT”. But, here’s the plot twist… I absolutely hated it with my guts.

Finally, I discovered coding and I absolutely fell in love with it. Just being able to take anything that’s in my head and putting it out into the real world where other people could use it. That feeling was just unbelievable. And I realized that not only is this something I could see myself being able to do for the rest of my life… But it was also something that could help me make a great living… and ultimately help me get my mom her surgery.

But after spending some time learning coding I found myself bashing my head against the wall. Spending all this time looking at so many different online resources and just finding myself completely overwhelmed by all of them without making ANY real progress.

After a lot of struggle… I had completed courses like Udacity’s Intro to Computer Science, CS50 on Edx, Codecademy’s Python track, Coursera’s Principles of Computing in Python. While I still felt confused – I was starting to fall in LOVE with computer programming.

Like DUDE. Coding is f****** amazing  how could you NOT like it?

I started falling in love with problem solving. 

In the start I SUCKED at it. Like really bad.

But then, I got good. Like REALLY good.

But after I got really good… I thought to myself…

“Hmm… I’m pretty good at coding at this point… Is it possible I can find someone who would pay me to leverage my skills?”

And soon I found out that the answer was a resounding “HELL YES”.

So, I made profiles on online platforms where I could coach students who either needed to get better grades, learn programming, complete their final projects, or required help with their jobs.

After a few weeks of tweaking my profile, getting in touch with a few students, here’s me landing one of my first clients at $35/hr on Wyzant after a few months of coding experience…

So you can see that I incrementally increased my hourly rates from $35/hr to $75/hr in just a few months.

Now, this was pretty decent. I was making between $3-5k every month coaching students in python. This allowed me to make money from doing python but more importantly, it boosted my confidence, taught me how to get clients, build authentic relationships, have a recurring stream of income, quit my other job so I could focus 100% on coding, and improved my coding skill 100x in a VERY short amount of time.

I didn’t realize it at the time, but all these skills would play an incredibly important role later when I would start trying to freelance.

So far, I was making good money but if I was going to be able to help my mom with her back surgery… I would need to do better.

I knew I had to get clients who needed my skills to build web applications for them and that they would be willing to pay me more than someone who needed coaching.

My next question naturally was…

“Hmm… I know how to write code… But how do I create web applications with python?”

I think I actually literally googled that too.

Lots of results on Quora showed up. The results were astounding and a little contradictory. Some people were saying you MUST learn HTML FIRST or you’re the antichrist. While there were others swearing that starting with SQL was the only true way. 

There was debate on front end developer vs. back end developers. Then there were other people talking about learning SQL, Databases, Django, Flask, HTML, CSS all at the same time and it was super confusing. I was like “MAKE UP YOUR MIND PEOPLE!”

I mean I was excited to do it but I was also frustrated cause there weren’t any clear answers or simple paths.

I remember thinking to myself, “Like how hard could this web development thing really be?”

Boy, was I in for a surprise.

Anyway, I decided to start with Python’s Django framework for web development at the time and I started with some Django courses…

It was really hard to catch up on what the instructors were doing.

I would think things like this to myself all the time:

• “What part do I do in the command line”
• “What’s this running code over some 8000 server port thing everyone’s talking about?”
• “Why does my app look so ugly?”
• “What’s this version control business & aren’t Git and Github the same thing?”
• “How come none of my stuff gets saved… And when I restart my application… All the data is gone!?”

Those were just some of the beautiful thoughts that would come into my head.

Then I took courses to learn more back end stuff on Udacity.

Some more courses on Coursera.

Regardless… I practiced. And I practiced. And I practiced…

Every day I would wake up and get double tall white mocha with two shots of espresso from Starbucks to aid me in coding and then drink Monster energy drinks every night!

Here is an instagram post I had made in 2016 with the hashtags #allnighter #monster #codingislife

I was going STRONG. NO WEAKNESS.

I remember I was suffering from some serious malnutrition.

I couldn’t even find time to eat. I went from eating 3 meals a day, to 2, and eventually 1. And then that 1 meal ended up turning into a bag of nacho cheese doritos because I needed more time to code & learn this shit inside out.

I was coding for at least 18-20 hours a day at that time.

Here is what an OFF week for me looked like… (~40 hours of coding in 7 days…)

I was staying up all night every night baby.

I was popping pills like rappers in society (don’t worry, they were just Advil).

I had like 1,000+ bookmarks on web development resources after a few weeks.

Started creating web applications using Django so I could learn in a project based way.

I read up on every blog post I could find.

I watched every YouTube tutorial on Django you can imagine.

I went to every local meetup where there were other developers.

I bought books on Django and completed them cover to cover.

I invested thousands of dollars to get mentorship from professional developers (one of the best decisions I made).

I learned every technology that’s required in the web development stack to become a great full-stack Django developer.

And then I got good in web development… And I mean REALLY good.

Then I thought…

“Hmm… I know how to create web applications with python using Django… How do I make money from coding?”

Getting clients wasn’t a problem for me at this point anymore. Getting coaching clients had taught me enough already. But, I didn’t want to just work with anyone. I didn’t want to work on 10 different projects where they were all worth like $200.

I wanted to work on a bigger project with a client where I could deliver them amazing results.

I knew how to get clients for small things but I didn’t know how to demonstrate my value to clients in a way where it would position me as a trusted advisor (consultant) and not just a commodity freelancer.

I had to learn that you have to dig deeper to understand what the client really needs, and then sell that.

I had to learn that no one pays a drug dealer for the drugs – they’re buying the high. No one wants to pay your for a web app – they need more customers and your product is a vehicle for that.

Once you understand this, selling becomes as easy as selling your best friend on watching Terminator 2 with you because you know he LOVES great action films. 

What you deliver to your client gets them better results, they get a bigger ROI, they make more money, and you make more money. It’s not a zero-sum game, everyone wins. If you’re the only one winning… You’re not winning.

I also had guidance & mentorship from other developers who’d been where I wanted to be.

After lots of searching for the right client… I finally found my very first one.

They wanted…

• login system (user authentication)
• The ability to register employees
• To be able to assign jobs & manage their employees
• Automate the process for  their employees doing tons of manual paperwork
• An invoicing system so they could see everything in one place

There were a lot of technical things that they wanted but I had to dig deeper and find out what was it that they really needed.

Me: “why do you need this”? 

Client: “so it could save us and our employees time”.

Me: “why do you or your employees need to save time”? 

Client: “So we could save money, we’re paying thousands of dollars just filling out stupid paperwork. This would help each employee save at least 10 hours a week.”

Me: “how many employees do you have?”

Client: “20”.

Me: “How much are you paying them?”

Client: “Hmm… About $15/hr.”

Me: “Why do you need an invoicing system?”

Client: “Qazi, we need a formal way of sending invoices because otherwise we forget to follow up with the companies & collect invoices. Not to mention it makes our business look unprofessional.”

Me: “How much money does it cost you NOT to have a proper invoicing system in place?”

Client: “Well… Just this last month we lost a client that was paying us about $30,000/year. Hopefully, that puts it into perspective.”

Aah. Interesting. 

What do you notice?

Here’s what I notice… Crafting a solution to their problems would have a very direct impact on their bottom line.

1. They were paying their employees $15/hr. They had 20 employees. Each of those employees was wasting about 10 hours per week on “doing stupid paperwork”. Doing some simple math I found out they were losing $12,000 a month in revenue at the VERY least. That’s $144,000 a year.
2. They needed a simple system that kept track of everything and all in one place. Not having one cost them at least $30,000 a year.

After I got off the call with them…

I immediately hopped on a call with one of my mentors.

I shared with him my thoughts and together we crafted the perfect proposal (which we would refer to as the Profitable Proposal in the future).

The most important thing to do in the proposal was to shift the focus of my client from the cost of the project to the VALUE of the project.

I had to help them understand that it would save them at least $150,000+ a year according to their own calculations.

My mentor was pushing me and finally convinced me to quote them $100/hr.

This was gonna be my first client ever. I was FREAKING out. “How the hell would I be able to charge them this much. There is just NO WAY.”

Now you have to understand that at this time, I was going to a community college, had a 2.0 GPA, and this was quite possibly the biggest opportunity of my life.

As I was hitting send on this email. Thoughts were going through my brain at a million miles per hour. I was SO nervous. My index finger was literally dripping sweat.

It was kind of disgusting actually.

“There is NO way in hell they are gonna say yes.”

“Even if they said yes… How the hell am I gonna actually get this done?”

“They’re not gonna pick me, I don’t have any experience”

“I don’t even have a college degree… I have no chance.”

One day passed. No reply from them.

Another day passed… Nope.

My heart sank into my throat. I had that feeling in my gut like I was punched by poseidon himself.

And then I was talking with my friend and sharing all the reasons they aren’t gonna reply to me.

My phone buzzed in my jeans. I reached into my right pocket and read a notification from outlook. The subject line of the email read “let’s get started this wednesday”.

I literally threw my f****** phone on the sofa and started SCREAMING. My friend and I teared up harder than I can ever express through words. I went home and told my parents. They had tears in their eyes. I facetimed my brothers who were in California and they couldn’t stop yelling out of excitement.

It was one of the most amazing moments of my life.

But, when everyone went away and it was time to be alone and by myself.

What kept me going wasn’t the cheers of my friends, the proud faces of my parents, or the support of my brothers…

It was much quieter.

It was much more powerful.

It was a fire.

The fire that had ignited when I was 12 years old and felt truly helpless.

And now that my goal was becoming a reality… The fire was burning stronger than ever.

Deep down for me why this was SO important was because it put me closer towards one of my goals… Helping my mom.

Here’s a super lame picture of me on my first day at work on Wednesday, May 18th, 2016.

I thought I looked SO cool 

When I walked in… My client even had my office ready for me!

This picture is taken at 2:30 pm on my first day at work from my new office…

(did you notice my sexy coat on the seat ?)

I couldn’t get OVER IT!

“MY OWN OFFICE. FOR ME!? WHAT!!??”

I was getting paid from this client on a net 7 basis (weekly payments). Here is what I got paid over the span of about 2 months of me working them and completing their project…

I was working roughly about 20 hours a week and I got to work from anywhere I want. Going to the o