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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

#211

Post by timc3 »

swiftcoder wrote: post #104
re-thc wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 mak…

I think a lot of folks make their lives unnecessarily complicated by trying to do things on AWS in an explicilty non-AWS way (I inherited a startup codebase last year that did this to themselves in spades). Why go to the trouble of running Kubernetes on top of AWS, when ECS does roughly the same job at a fraction of the complexity? Why use Terraform when CloudFormation maps better to the underlying primitives?

Vendor lockin. Knowledge transfer.

And I disagree that AWS is less complex. Managing services across AWS is complex, K8s is as well but I would rather manage K8S on bare instances.

Re: 2M users but no money in the bank

#212

Post by rkowalick »

zurfer wrote: post #33
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…

even easier, just a job board (like stackoverflow), where companies pay to advertise a job.

the job board could even pitch jobs in the language an exercism user is currently learning

Re: 2M users but no money in the bank

#213

Post by dools »

> My plan is to give beginners a rock-solid base, then funnel them into Exercism

Shouldn't you be doing this the other way?

If you have 2 million users, then just make something that you can sell to them.

Whenever you have a bunch of customers paying you $X there is a subset of those customers that will pay you $(X+Y).

You don't have to "make them the product" in the sense that you would be selling their eyeballs, but you're teaching people to code, surely some of them will want to get a job as a coder afterwards.

What about creating a paid placement program where you give recruiters at companies hungry for tech talent access to the coders that perform the best on some tests? The coders can voluntarily take the tests, so they know their info is going to recruiters.

You could also offer certifications as a service to companies looking to test proficiency of their existing staff or create a subscription model for use by companies who want to upskill their existing staff.

With 2m users surely you have people using it from all over the world. Companies might pay a premium to hire the best up and coming talent on Upwork because generally their hourly rates are not as high as experienced devs on the platform, but you can tell based on the code they're writing that, despite their relative inexperience, they're an outlier in terms of coding skill.

You could get affiliate revenue or commissions by selling other, paid certifications such as for SAP/ABAP, Cisco, Microsoft and the like.

It just seems like you can take this as the platform product and upsell, rather than trying to create another product that you sell to people who aren't already using Exercism.

Re: 2M users but no money in the bank

#214

Post by timc3 »

swiftcoder wrote: post #105
andrewstuart wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> if you don't have the cash to build out entire operational teams Its just not true that AWS doesn't need expensive experts to get stuff done - it really does. Anyone who is half decent on the command line in Linux can get all those servers installed and running without the spaghetti complexity of AWS. The cloud as a magical place of simplicity and ease of use and infinite scalability in every direction - I think i…

> Its MUCH easier just to load up a single powerful machine with everything you need. I'm not saying that works for all workloads but a single machine or a few machines can take you an awful long way. For the core service I tend to favour monoliths too, but I would say you are vastly underestimating the halo of other crap needed to operationalise a real website/SaaS. Where is your load balancer? Your database redunda…

Have managed all that in the past with bare metal and more (you forgot configuring routers, installing OS, managing upgrades, dealing with hardware swaps, etc). Its soooo much more sane to deal with that than AWS configuration, actually relatively easy for someone half competent. Luckily we can just employ people to mess around full time with AWS.

Re: 2M users but no money in the bank

#216

Post by ihid »

ordinaryradical wrote: post #161
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 had no idea you were in financial straits and was just using Exercism yesterday to teach myself a new language. I’ve really appreciated the platform and it’s already helped me learn so much. I’m donating today and I wish you the best.

Thank you so much for commenting. Always awesome to hear about from the people exercism has helped.

Re: 2M users but no money in the bank

#217

Post by temptemptemp111 »

ihid wrote: post #71
xrd wrote: post #53

This 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…

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 :)

[dead]

Re: 2M users but no money in the bank

#218

Post by 8bithero »

I was doing some Exercism tasks the other day and then saw this so if only felt right that I make a donation. Looking at some of the comments there seems to be a number of people who have also just made a donation.

Given the state of every service becoming subscription based, I can definitely see a lot of subscription fatigue. Maybe an alternative route you could try is the annual wikipedia "We want to keep this free. Please help us buy donating". I think a lot of people appreciate the service but a lot of the times it's easy to forget that running a service like exercism can get expensive, and would be willing to donate, given a compelling enough reminder of this.

Re: 2M users but no money in the bank

#219

Post by MrDresden »

dmurray wrote: post #202
insane_dreamer wrote: post #117

Congratulations on a very successful platform! (Success should be measured in usage/reach, not $). You've probably thought of this, but it might be easier to charge a very small amount -- say $1/month, which most people even students, could afford, rather than rely on donations. If you get 1% of users paying that, it's still $20K month which is more than you're getting now. (Of course managing the payments themselves…

How does it not "poison the mission" if it means 99% of users drop the platform?

Does that even matter if the mission is dead?

Re: 2M users but no money in the bank

#220

Post by rammer »

zip1234 wrote: post #195
insane_dreamer wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You'd probably want to charge $10/year (once) rather than $1/month. It's still an easy choice for many people (of course still inaccessible for students in some countries).

Another option is to make deals with universities or schools for access for their students where they pay a certain amount per year and the students can all have access

Uni sales cycles are horrendous. take forever and fickle
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