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2M users but no money in the bank

exercism.org

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Re: 2M users but no money in the bank

#91

Post by re-thc »

swiftcoder wrote: post #78
andrewstuart wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> which doesn't actually buy one a whole lot of servers/databases/bandwidth/monitoring/logs/etc. It buys you 150 machines for a month 12 core 24GB VPS with unlimited traffic on a 1Gbps link See my comment below.

And then you get to stand up your own databases, load balancers, monitoring, logging, etc. For which you need a development team with significant operations experience to do correctly - who will surely cost you more than $90k/year I get it, AWS looks expensive, but a bunch of their foundational services are real force-multipliers if you don't have the cash to build out entire operational teams.

> And then you get to stand up your own databases, load balancers, monitoring, logging, etc.

You get all if not most of this on DigitalOcean, Linode, Upcloud, Scaleway, etc all of a LOT cheaper.

> but a bunch of their foundational services are real force-multipliers if you don't have the cash to build out entire operational teams.

No, it's not. As above and for a lot of things AWS' complexity and silly factor can make it even worse. In GCP I can setup a dual region bucket. As simple as that. In AWS I need to setup 2 buckets, a replication role, bucket policies, lifecycle policies and a lot more just to get the same. Force multiplier? As in make it slower? EKS takes longer than the default Terraform timeout to provision. The list goes on...

Re: 2M users but no money in the bank

#92

Post by ihid »

leetsbehonest wrote: post #89
ihid wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We're not really part of the "leetcode industry". People have used Exercism to learn new programming languages for a decade. We've deliberately not wanted to become a place of competition or a recruitment space. We've always focused on helping people learn based on their intrinsic motivations.

Sorry you are right, what I posted isn't fair. I should have read more into it.

No problem. Thanks for acknowledging that! :)

Re: 2M users but no money in the bank

#93

Post by ihid »

xrd wrote: post #83
ihid wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you for being so kind and supportive. I really appreciate your comment. I'm ok. I'm hopeful for the future. I believe there's lots of amazing stuff we can do and that Exercism has a great future. But right now it's in a hard, low place. The last few months have been pretty tough emotionally, but I think getting to this place is one of acceptance. The only direction now is up :)

I've gotten so much from your site. I'm sorry you have put so much in of yourself and haven't been able to make it work financially. Would you email me (chris@extrastatic.com). I've got a few people I think would help depending on what direction you want to go in.

Done, although I emailed the email in your profile. I'll send it to that one too :)

Re: 2M users but no money in the bank

#94

Post by dspillett »

nh2 wrote: post #84
dspillett wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 someon…

> they are going to need an infrastructure person No. I run multi-site Ceph+Nomad clusters with NixOS on Hetzner for our startup and maintaining those takes less than 5% of my time. By using great tools and understanding them well you can do it with little manpower. I learned all those tools in around 3 months total -- so around as much as getting a basic understanding of AWS IAM ;-) The only thing you don't get with…

> By using great tools and understanding them well you can do it with little manpower.

“and understanding them well” is doing a lot of legwork there. From a standing start how does a startup that has the skills & experience to make the product but not necessarily manage the infrastructure get to the point of understanding the tools well, or even knowing which tools are best to learn to the point of understanding well?

> So it is definitely possible to self-manage everything, for 5% of one engineer.

I can accept that as true, if you have the right person/people, and they are willing (particularly the on-call part).

Re: 2M users but no money in the bank

#95

Post by JCharante »

slkjdlskjdklsd wrote: post #67
kelnos wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That sounds like Amazon to me.

Except amazon shares would be worth much less if there was a promise of no dividends ever

Re: 2M users but no money in the bank

#96

Post by JCharante »

philipwhiuk wrote: post #23

> 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.

Charging people $1 on sign-up would probably lower that 96% metric

Re: 2M users but no money in the bank

#97

Post by rahimnathwani »

bux93 wrote: post #12

What 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?

I read the comment more narrowly. I think he's lost faith in Exercism's specific non-profit model, not non-profit models in general.

Re: 2M users but no money in the bank

#98

Post by sickblastoise »

ihid wrote: post #82
Oras wrote: post #21

I'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…

It's also worth pointing out the Exercism isn't for coding newbies - it's for developers learning new languages. This often gets missed.

I think this is a major selling point. If developers could upload their CVs, exercise could package together the users yoe + industry experience with the users learning veracity + main language. I think that would be a solid product that hiring people would pay money for.

Re: 2M users but no money in the bank

#99

Post by yieldcrv »

vidyesh wrote: post #66
mef wrote: post #9

out of money, final payroll, no alternative but to go into zombie mode, yet for the last few months the co-founder has been working on his next product which will launch in 2025. maybe everything that could have been tried was tried but this comes off like some of the effort spent working on the next company could have been spent keeping this one alive

They said they will be using the proceeds from that for-profile company to pay for a team member's salary and keep Exercism running as much as they can. So this next company could be considered to be an effort to keep this old one alive!

Oooh contingent on the next unproven idea being economically viable.

Amusing. I walk away from all business partners that think this way

They hand waive away “who will pay what”

Re: 2M users but no money in the bank

#100

Post by yieldcrv »

So you need to charge, but don’t want to lie about the 100% free part even though you can change that

So you need to upcharge. It is 100% free… to start

and then there is a subscription that is paid to finish the language course, shown in monthly cost but charged annually by default

more languages? charge more

You can sell the account data to recruitment firms. Everyone hates this but you know that your users are the product, your users know that they are supposed to be the product. Keep a cut with the recruiters so they have to pay you a little commission when candidates land a job

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