How Codecademy (YC S11) Snagged 200,000 Users in Seven Days

Post by allisonhouse » Fri, Mar 23, 2012, 1:49 AM UTC

mrtunes wrote: post #23

i stopped doing the lessons because of a lot of crashes. things like including print statements would cause Chrome to invoke my physical printer. i am curious how far the people who signed up during this big spurt are getting through the program, and if it can be evaluated against competitors like Treehouse? overall i am a big fan of competition in the e-learning space, because it's a topic that hasn't receive much a…

I'm so sorry to hear that silly bug contributed to your departure! I'm the Lead Designer at Codecademy. We're a lot more stable these days (that printer bug was fixed right away)—if you decide to give us another try, we'd love to hear your feedback about the experience: contact (at) codecademy.com. (Zach, our co-founder, makes sure the whole team internalizes member feedback. :D) Either way, thanks for giving us a shot!

Post by allisonhouse » Fri, Mar 23, 2012, 1:57 AM UTC

joeag wrote: post #18

graeme wrote: post #3

I used Codecademy for the first seven weeks. I started learning to program in January 2012, so the timing was perfect - I was their target market. It was fun and interesting for a while. But the instructions began to get cumbersome. You had to read 3-4 paragraphs just to learn that they wanted you to write a simple, one line loop. I spent more time reading instructions than thinking about or writing code. I was using…

I did about 6 or 7 weeks of Codecademy and then stopped also. I found the same issues mentioned above, mostly just wrote "code" without really understanding what was supposed to be happening. I like Udacity a lot more and have been able to stick with that (so far). I think the lecture videos used on Udacity make a big difference. I guess it's also different in that it's "computer science" rather than learn to code in…

Great feedback—thanks a bunch, joeag. I'm so sorry to hear the lessons didn't keep you on board, but we'd love to learn more about your experience and what we can do better if you're willing to chat! We're contact (at) codecademy (dot) com—feel free to drop us a line and one of our co-founders will get back to you.

Re: How Codecademy (YC S11) Snagged 200,000 Users in Seven Days

Re: How Codecademy (YC S11) Snagged 200,000 Users in Seven Days