Cloudflare is easier than it looks, and I built a beginner course to show non-technical founders how.
In December 2025 I started a beginner series called Cloudflare Essentials 101. This first part was the plan: who the course is for, what you need before you start and what we build. The goal is to take someone who has never used Cloudflare to a working SaaS workflow without becoming a developer first.
The business case
I spent a lot of time looking at other Cloudflare tutorials online and trying to understand why the platform feels so intimidating. My view is that Cloudflare has very smart technical people who solve very complex problems, and they haven't figured out how to distill and market that to everyday people.
That gap matters for business owners. If everyday people understood how good Cloudflare is, I believe it would empower a lot of entrepreneurs to build some very impressive things. The barrier is the background knowledge it takes to get started.
So the course compresses that background into short lessons. My plan was 8 to 10 minutes or less per video, so you spend your time on the parts that get something deployed and skip the intricate details I had to learn the long way.
Who the course is for
I'm talking to two groups: business owners, and developers from other backgrounds who know something about building but have never used Cloudflare.
To give everyone a level playing field, I gloss over a lot of complex topics. Some concepts won't be strictly technically accurate. I made that trade on purpose. The course goes for efficiency, speed and the ability to deploy something fast.
The series sits in my free Vibe Code to Profit community on Skool. If you're non-technical and don't know much about web development, start with Foundations 101 there. Its lessons run about 5 to 11 minutes each and cover only the core fundamentals you need for this course.
It's part of a bigger mission: taking non-technical business owners, builders and would-be entrepreneurs from zero to their first software-as-a-service business. After this course, the next step is my 7-day challenge. You build a basic waitlist app, find potential customers on the internet and get them onto the list to find out whether you have a business.
Jump to
- 0:00 Introduction to the course
- 2:08 Target audience and resources
- 5:04 Prerequisites and tools
- 6:13 Course roadmap and projects
- 7:31 Advanced features and AI
The full video is on my channel: Cloudflare Essentials 101, part 1, on YouTube.
What you need first
You need two things before the first build. One is a GitHub account, and signing up is easy. The other is Visual Studio Code. Cursor is the next big editor and it's growing fast. It's basically a fork of Visual Studio Code, and I use VS Code in the course.
For design I use Lovable. It's the fastest way I've seen to get a design I care about deployed to Cloudflare, and that lets me teach the Cloudflare foundations without making the course about vibe coding. These were my picks as of December 2025.
The course roadmap
Next comes my take on why Cloudflare, in its own video. Then a high-level overview of how Cloudflare is set up. The services I focus on are Workers, Pages, KV, D1, R2, Queues and DNS, and Cloudflare's developer docs describe each one. If those names are new to you, Foundations 101 covers the basics, so I don't repeat them here. I wrote about the wider setup in building a business on Cloudflare.
The first build is a landing page. I register a GoDaddy domain from scratch, create a waitlist landing page and deploy it to Cloudflare. Then I add a database back end to store the people who sign up and use Cloudflare Workers to string the pieces together. It's entry level. My plan was to have all of that working within the first 15 to 20 minutes.
The second build takes the same waitlist page up a notch with Durable Objects and storage. It adds complexity without turning into a full application course, so everyone can follow the concepts.
The baldness waitlist
The third build adds AI to the waitlist page. The project I came up with is a joke premise: an AI that is going to solve baldness. AI is taking over the world, and people say it can cure cancer, so I picked baldness.
In the premise, demand is so high that you join a waitlist and sit in a queue while your request is processed. Then I add a step where you snap a picture of your head and upload it. The waitlist sends the photo to the AI, which rates how severe the problem is and gives you a score. The score moves you up the queue, and a real-time dashboard shows where you rank.
I think it's funny, and it lets me do a lot of things you wouldn't normally do on a landing page. It's a fun project instead of a boring hello world app. I also joked that a company with a baldness product might buy it.
What the waitlist proves
The waitlist is the same kind of app the 7-day challenge starts from: a page that collects interest so you can find out whether you have a business. Each build in the series adds to that page.
If you want the fundamentals before the first build, take the free Cloudflare course.
About Dwain
I'm Dwain Browne, Founder of LeadScore AI and SnapSuite. I'm a Toronto-based software architect with 25+ years across software, sales, operations and entrepreneurship. SnapSuite helps contractors and trades teams get paid faster, and LeadScore AI shows you which leads deserve your next call. I also run Vibe Code to Profit, a community helping people build software with AI.