This are the LinkedIn comments on this post:
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/exercism_activity-72374803032...
2M users but no money in the bank
51–60 of 367 posts
Re: 2M users but no money in the bank
#52This is the problem with ed-techs. Nobody wants to pay. Those that do (Universities, schools) are also competing with the platforms to some degree.
Re: 2M users but no money in the bank
#53This is one of the saddest posts I've read in a long time.
I love exercism. It's beautiful, works in the browser and from CLI. The lessons are really well designed. It's the perfect coding school environment.
So, I'm sad it isn't viable.
But, I think I am really saddened by the comments here, second guessing all the decisions they made. If I were to second guess the people behind most of the comments, I would assume no one has ever run a business with payroll, or built something with this much reach. The comments ring really hollow for the most part and seem really callous given this person has sunk his life into making the world, and my life, a better place. I'm scared for the moment he is in life and sad there are not more positive comments, and even better, comments from people where they would actually help by making a donation.
Re: 2M users but no money in the bank
#54Where 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.
Well, exercism is a "not-for-profit organisation registered in the UK" according to the footer of their website. Edit: It appears that their "not-for-profit" message in their footer is a bit misleading, as explained by those who replied to my comment.
They've not set up the structures for it to be not-for-profit here, they're just an ordinary registered company.
Typically you'd form a Charitable Trust or Charitable Incorporated Organisation, and Exercism isn't listed as either on the Charity Comission website.
Re: 2M users but no money in the bank
#55Earlier quoted context omitted.
OpenAI is a 501c nonprofit. Doesn’t stop Sam taking big time meetings more often than he checks his email.
Part of OpenAI is a nonprofit, not in its entirety.
Matt Levine uses a diagram to allude to the complexity. And that was before Larry Summers and the National Security Administration got involved.
A better term for OpenAI would be “rogue state”.
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2023-11-20/who-co...
Re: 2M users but no money in the bank
#56What does "I've lost faith in the nonprofit business model" mean? Non-profits have costs they pay. Many famously outlive their founders. Many, like co-ops or credit unions, don't depend on donations/endowments. They have revenue greater than expenses as a matter of basic accounting?
Yeah, that was a big weird red flag for me as well. He is blaming the failure of his dream on "the non-profit model"? Wait till he tries the for-profit model...
Then he goes on to say that he is upset that 96% of people stop the program. Dude, coding is BORING, but coding is hyped so much that people have high expectations so you get delusional people coming and signing up to your website.
Re: 2M users but no money in the bank
#57> 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.
With those stats, even with just 4% of people wanting to learn, and just a fraction of them actually paying, that would be dozens of thousands of paying customers. Even at 1USD per month, it seems a relatively sustainable business.
Yeah, I think he is confusing "non-profit" with "non-payment". You can have a non-profit company with paying customers. I think he need to take a basic economics class.
Re: 2M users but no money in the bank
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I don't think it is case of spam scam.
I do think they really can have legit sign ups, but people "wanting to learn code" usually fizzle out quick. I have my experience as a dev when friends/family/colleagues ask for guidance, I provide them with links resources and some mentoring and after 2-3 days they don't follow up ever again.
But not using metric like daily active users, returning users, might indicate that they want to inflate their worth or they convinced themselves to believe in the wrong metric.
Re: 2M users but no money in the bank
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Are they using AWS? Yes!
$50/month gets you a 12 core 24GB VPS with unlimited traffic on a 1Gbps link on Ionos. https://www.ionos.com/servers/vps $7500/month would get them 150 such servers. Maybe they should cut the AWS costs and hire their developer back. Id be really interested to hear the breakdown of their AWS bill. It would be a crime if they were blowing what money they have giving Amazon 9 cents per gigabyte egress.
If they are self-managing all the extras you get with a decent cloud setup (backups, node failover, load distribution and auto-scaling, multi-region or at least multi-DC for availability beyond single node failures, …), they are going to need an infrastructure person as well as that developer. Preferably two so the one isn't effectively on-call 24/7. And for that multi-DC for availability thing: you might need someone (or assign time from existing people) to manage the accounts with your various providers, you won't want tens+ of VPSs from just one provider like that. Of and on backups & failover, you need person-time (and other resources, but the people are probably the expensive part from the business PoV) to regularly test and adjust all of that, so you can be reasonably sure it all works when actually needed. And you need to manage replacing those people when/if they decide to move on to something new, etc…
Also note that a lot of the things you are paying for (CPU cores, traffic, network throughput) in those nodes are shared resources (that Gbit link especially) and/or have “fair use” policies attached to them, and while the same might be true of cloud providers those policies are often either more generous or (perhaps more important from the business stability PoV) at least better defined.
“Cloud” is still expensive compared to buying and managing individual nodes, even if you add in all the above and the things I no doubt forgot to mention, but it does give a lot more than the same cost in individual nodes than this sort of comparison suggests. And sometimes just not having to deal with all that, keeping the business more focused on its core competencies, is worth the extra expense.
In DayJob we use Azure a lot, and sometimes I see the costs of certain things¹² and balk, and we do still have infrastructure people to manage the platform, but overall it works better for us than managing our own resources more directly. We have an extra complication due to our client base (regulated companies like banks and insurers, who are storing PII of both their own people and their customers with us) in that we have to give a lot of assurances on security and such which would be more work (it is already a _lot_ of work as anyone else in that sort of B2B arena can attest) if we self-managed everything.
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[1] $2,400/yr for SFTP access to a storage account if you need it available 24/7?! Especially given we have at least one such account per client as their requirements understandably require that level of separation. I think we'll keep using the relay & management dashboard I setup in a few cheap VMs, thanks…
[2] and the performance given the costs: AzureSQL³ I'm looking at you!
[3] though again, some of that cost is in things like the scaling flexibility and other infrastructure convenience, which the business finds worth paying for
Re: 2M users but no money in the bank
#60> 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.
Non-profit doesn't mean you didn't get to pay yourself. It just means that any revenue that exceeds expenses must be reinvested into the business.