I don’t know if Jeremy will see this, but:
At my org it’s hard to get justification for donations.
However if this was something like ~100$ a year or whatever per dev, I’d be paying it today for my team.
2M users but no money in the bank
41–50 of 367 posts
Re: 2M users but no money in the bank
#42I'm just thinking out loud here, but for 2 million users learning to code and improving their skills, there is a chance they want to change jobs or are already looking for one. Have you thought of adding a hiring feature? Where people upload their CVs, and companies search (anonymously) for talent? There is a hiring model called PPA (Pay Per Application), or monthly fees to search CVs. Your unique selling point would…
This is a tarpit monetisation method unfortunately. (I learnt the hard way) It's common for student ideas too (as in ideas with students/recent graduates as endusers/customers).
The general argument is - we can specifically identify talent and motivated learners/skill-possessing people, who will look for jobs. That's exactly what companies need and companies pay $5k-$10k a head during good markets for this rare STEM skill, like programming!
Problem - The people on these platforms are 70% likely to give up within 6 months or go into another field
Problem - Experience means 10x more than education to employers, especially fundamental experience
Problem - Your information on potential hires as the provider becomes outdated fast and supply-demand changes in hiring market can reduce your commissions by 50-75% in one year (as happened from 2022-2023)
I would go as far as saying these users - because they are typically earlier career - are actually worse for connecting with jobs boards/hiring than literally any random iPhone user for advertising purposes. And companies don't pay much to advertise to random iPhone users. I wish it wasn't so, but it is so according to how companies act.
If OP wants to monetise this way they should consider an affiliate programme to a CV upload or Jobs board site, it will test any appetite for hiring these people at the moment much quicker.
Re: 2M users but no money in the bank
#43Maybe this will be helpful to the author (partially already mentioned):
- Nonprofit business model does not equal "everything is free for the user forever", I'm guessing you already know that, but the wording on why you don't believe in nonprofit business models explicitly mentioned keeping everything free as the reason. You can earn revenue from users in a nonprofit business.
- You have a big audience with good engagement for the segment, there are multiple ways to make money without abandoning the core mission (job boards, screencast upsells for advanced courses, premium content, whatever else, look at how Remoteok.com makes money, copy-paste as the founder is super open on his process)
- Being a for-profit business and fundraising, will temporarily solve your issue of having funds to run a business. It will not solve the issue of not knowing how to/being afraid to charge users or other parties for the value they get out of your product. You could already be solving this problem today, and you have a 2million audience pipeline built in to solve that issue.
I'm not dismissing the challenge of some business segments being extremely difficult to make money in despite the value being meaningful, I work in healthcare, so I know, but since your new business will effectively be in the same segment, do focus on the revenue aspect much sooner and much than you think you'll need to, because you already know what happens if you don't.
And big respect for what you've built in a super crowded space, you obviously have the product and user empathy chops needed, wishing you the best of luck on nailing the business chops!
Re: 2M users but no money in the bank
#44Also internet is flooded with similar learning websites. First time I've heard about exercism though. Looks cool.
Completed the whole c++ and PHP paths there. It is by no means a way to learn those languages in my opinion.
Re: 2M users but no money in the bank
#45I just don't agree with this leetcode industry. That, recruiters and the whole tech hiring industry that has spun off from a process originally intended to get to know and gain confidence in a potential employee. It is just I have doubts in the educational help these platforms really deliver given that there are already so many resources to learn these days say compared to 20y ago.
Re: 2M users but no money in the bank
#46> For the last few months, I've been working on a new educational product teaching coding fundamentals that I'm going to launch in 2025. 96% of people who try to learn coding give up - which I find unacceptable, so I'm aiming to change that. Feels like you've been kickstarting a competitor/pivot on the side.
I think the tone of this comment is unnecessarily condemning (apologies if I am reading it incorrectly) – I can totally understand why someone who has worked for years on a non-profit business which has created a lot of value for people (I think exercism is pretty good software) might want to be able to at least pay themself.
Re: 2M users but no money in the bank
#47Where the fuck are the VCs looking at serious hackers with millions of users who haven’t gotten the business model dialed in yet? Y-Combinator says “build something people want”. Two million sounds like a lot of people. I’ve only glanced over this so I could be missing some critical fact, but superficially it sounds like pmarca or pg should write a check before the rest of us stop believing in the startup lottery.
Only real metric I see is 800 monthly donors and $7500 from them ($10 per person) - that's what that business is worth, those are really people that want (they pay so that's what matters).
Having 1600 people sign in daily and never logging back again - creating 2M zombie accounts is I suppose critical fact that you are missing.
Re: 2M users but no money in the bank
#48Re: 2M users but no money in the bank
#49Where the fuck are the VCs looking at serious hackers with millions of users who haven’t gotten the business model dialed in yet? Y-Combinator says “build something people want”. Two million sounds like a lot of people. I’ve only glanced over this so I could be missing some critical fact, but superficially it sounds like pmarca or pg should write a check before the rest of us stop believing in the startup lottery.
Only real metric I see is 800 monthly donors and $7500 from them ($10 per person) - that's what that business is worth, those are really people that want (they pay so that's what matters). Having 1600 people sign in daily and never logging back again - creating 2M zombie accounts is I suppose critical fact that you are missing.
If it’s two million churned out dead accounts, non-replaced, and 800 actual people who care then the author of the post was posting in bad faith and I’d retract my remark.
To get from 800 real people to two million user id rows one would be running some kind of spam scam, and if that’s the case I apologize.
Re: 2M users but no money in the bank
#50The biggest issue I had with the tech boom and the current tech culture is when they replaced "profit" with "people" as a metric of success. To me they took the phrase "people over profit" and turned it into "people are profit".
It is time investors businesses and started looking at the bottom line again, even non-profits. I mean can you imagine if we based the success of a store with how many people walked in even if they did not buy anything?
Even non-profits need to make money, so their business model was either wrong or they do not have a product worth paying for. On top of that we are probably in economic stagflation so we will be seeing more stories like this as the months go on.