I first met the founders of Codecademy through the Columbia Venture Community. Zach introduced himself during a CVC event at General Assembly, where we exchanged thoughts on startups internships and he told me about his experience at GroupMe. Ryan had been popping up on my radar throughout college, since we shared mutual friends and he was the online lead engineer for the Columbia Daily Spectator. I have much respect for both of them, and this personal connection only made me more excited to hear about their new startup and all the press it has received.
Recently, however, I have become more wary of startups that do show high levels of user engagement without a clear path to monetization. I’ve discussed this topic with a co-worker and here are my thoughts on how Codecademy would be able to monetize their product.
- Freemium: For many other Saas companies, such as DropBox and LinkedIn, the freemium model has proven to work remarkably. With Codecademy’s consumer focus, this model is probably the easiest to implement. Basic Java lessons can remain free with Codecademy charging a small fee for more advanced programming topics. Premium version of Codecademy may also include features such as live chat TA sessions or coding battles between students.
- Licensing: If Codecademy is able to build an engaging learning platform for programming, it has infinite potential to license this software to schools and corporations. At my firm, my co-workers and I are obliged to complete quarterly training exercises for regulatory reasons. I can imagine Codecademy serving refresher coding exercises to technology companies to help keep their workforce up-to-date.
- Crowdsourcing: While a lot of startups are addressing the pain points of recruiting and hiring developers, Codecademy can’t really address this market because I think they are more about educating than finding talent. However, if there is a way to add a hiring component to the existing educational platform, I see the potential for Codecademy to become the Mechanical Turk of small programming jobs.
- Branded events: There are already official Meetup groups in over 170 regional areas worldwide; people are clearly already excited about the company. I can see Codecademy hosting large-scale events similar to TechCrunch Disrupt that are in-line with its mission of teaching people to program.
- Advertising: While advertising has always been the business model of choice for most web companies, I think Codecademy can get creative with it. For example, instead of just displaying ads across the top, side, or bottom of the site, Codecademy can work with partner brands to offer sponsored lessons. Furthermore, it would be interesting to see how well advertisement would work inside the the lessons themselves, similar to how video games now feature branded billboards/items within the gaming environment.
What do you think? What are some other options?
I am surprised and honored to find out this blog has been included in Time’s list of 30 Must-See Tumblr Blogs. I can think of so many more deserving on Tumblr that should have been there instead of this one. To those responsible for this blog making the list - thanks!
To new visitors, I wish you a warm welcome and I hope you enjoy your trip down memory lane.
regards,
Jon
As gimmicky as they are, I actually enjoy articles like these because they point me to interesting and inspiring new things. (Just added about 20 new blogs to my tumblr feed!)
Sledding at Gas Works Park. In a couch.
Sometimes, I want to move somewhere where I can do this from my backyard. But then I remember that I’m a 20-something living in New York City. #FuckYeahEitherWay
Behold! What the Stop SOPA blackout managed to accomplish in 24 hours.
There’s hope that democracy may not be broken, after all.
Anonymous Asks:
beautyinbreakdown Said:
Hi!
No, I haven’t (yet) won the lottery. I’ve actually participated far less frequently than I had anticipated… wishful thinking, I guess. By now, I’ve gone enough times that I’ve memorized the lottery guy’s spiel. He says the same things each time, and still gets plenty of laughs. This is probably a standup comic’s dream job.
Though I have been consistently losing, it’s still an odd pleasure to participate. At every lottery, a small community of complete strangers forms outside of the theater for all of 30 minutes. For a short while, we all feel the same joyous rush of adrenaline when we think he’s going to call out our name. The crowd is also enthusiastically supportive — everyone always cheers for the winning ballot and the only cry of dismay throughout occurs right before he reveals the final winner. I guess we do keep hoping to snag a pair of tickets until the very end.
My friend Moses proposed a much more elegant analysis of my chances with this snazzy Wolfram Alpha calculation. The infinite sum of the probabilities show that I should expect to participate 13.7 times to win. (Anecdotally, some guy on Foursquare left a comment claiming to have tried over 20 times!)
Patrick Neeman, Director of User Experience at Jobvite, on the merits of San Francisco
(via Six Tips Before Moving to San Francisco as a UX Professional)
In the Rounds - Carousels Ventos by Pep Ventosa. “Part memory, part imagination,” he says. “Not unlike the way we see.”
During my travels throughout France, I was surprised and increasingly pleased to see carousels in nearly every city square.
Is Google Search broken? These two images indicate that it just might be.
(Background: The Spreading Santorum website/meme began in 2003, when sex columnist and gay rights activist Dan Savage re-defined Santorum’s name as a protest against the then-Senator’s anti-gay agenda. Ironically, Savage has stated on his podcast that he and Santorum used to be college roommates at Penn.)
Long considered the king of search engines, Google is now facing dissatisfaction from a number of users who have realized that its Page Rank, SEO-focused algorithm may be too easy to game. The results above is a good example of Google Search’s shortcoming. While most people know “Santorum” as a candidate for the GOP leadership, I doubt that any of them are looking for the perverse definition of “Santorum” that Google returns as its top result. On the other hand, DuckDuckGo returns the official results for Santorum, but also gives users the option of adding “Dan Savage” as keywords if you are indeed looking for the alternate definition. (Ironically, you can also add “Google Problem” to your search.)
DuckDuckGo is a search engine launched in September 2008 by Gabriel Weinberg. Often referred to as a “hybrid” search engine because of its ample use of various search APIs, DuckDuckGo prioritized the user’s privacy and promises not to track your searches. DuckDuckGo also differentiates itself by staying away from displaying websites in which low-quality content has dominated the SEO game (ie. “content mill”). Instead, it prioritizes information from crowd-sourced website, such as Wikipedia, and trusted/curated sources, such as the NYT.
What I appreciate most about DuckDuckGo is its efforts to “pop the filter bubble”. In an earlier blog post, I cautioned against echo chambers and talked about the biases that my own filters have encouraged. DuckDuckGo seems to pull in the other direction; it wants to show perspectives that would otherwise have been filtered out of my usual search results.
While I love the idea of DuckDuckGo, I wonder if its algorithmic advantage is enough to draw users away from Google. For one, Google already has a stronghold in mobile search with its native integration with Android. Secondly, I don’t think the Google problem is as severe as some make it seem — ultimately, the most relevant result will show up in the first few links, if not at the top. DuckDuckGo’s potential lies instead in a partnership with Apple’s Siri, where concise and accurate information is more crucial to the user.
