
One Month Rails (YC S13) Teaches How To Build Your Startup While Learning To Code - mattangriffel
http://techcrunch.com/2013/08/05/yc-backed-one-month-rails-teaches-you-how-to-build-your-startup-while-you-learn-to-code/
======
patio11
There's going to be a lot more teaching-programming-as-a-product startups
because the user base is proven, the economics are compelling, and the
underlying story is that "Anyone who successfully figures out a scalable
process to turn people into programmers wins the 21st century."

Incidentally, as long as I'm up:

[https://onemonthrails.com/try](https://onemonthrails.com/try)

A little birdy says that "Submit" is the worst possible copy you could use for
that button, unless you're running an S&M site. Try [Get A FREE 7-day Video
Crash Course] rather than "Sign Up For..." and [Send Me My Videos].

(As always: do it in an A/B test if you don't believe me. This one is
generally _cough_ fairly compelling.)

~~~
badclient
_A little birdy says that "Submit" is the worst possible copy you could use
for that button_

Aren't you being too literal here? Vast majority of internet users have been
trained to see "submit" for "okay I'm done filling out this form, next!".

~~~
patio11
We have competing hypotheses about an observable future fact. We should
resolve them via the scientific method.

But if you don't have an email form doing thousands of impressions and want to
just bet on this one, your bet would be a very bad bet to make.

~~~
badclient
While I won't disagree that there might be other labels that perform better
than "Submit", calling "submit" as the _worst_ possible copy seems overtly
sensational. We both know it isn't.

~~~
mattangriffel
@dxm, haha I actually want to try "don't submit". That one may backfire and
actually work better.

------
typicalrunt
With these types of companies popping up, I'm left wondering how carpenters
feel when someone watches a few episodes of HGTV and decides they can build
their own house. There is so much more to programming and building a product
than simply typing some magical symbols into an editor. Sure, it's a start,
but once a product is built, deployed to production, and then has customers,
it will need constant nurturing. Databases get slow, hardware fails, logs fill
up diskspace, and yet that's only the tip of the iceberg in programming.
Stating you can learn to code in one month is nothing more than the 'Teach
Yourself $LANG in 24 Hours" from yesteryear. It minimizes the amount of skill
and experience one needs to be a programmer and make $120,000 per year (which
is still a lot of money).

OneMonthRails is a start, especially if you want to learn how to program, but
I find it unethical to insinuate that one can land a $120k/yr job after 1
month of training.

For all my fellow Canadian compatriots, I read the marketing page of
OneMonthRails and see visions of Tom Vu [1] trying to tell us about his
guaranteed technique to becoming rich (later found out as the greater fool
theory).

[1] [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iQNdi-
fRExc](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iQNdi-fRExc)

[2]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greater_fool_theory](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greater_fool_theory)

------
alaskamiller
Reinvention of the For Dummies series.

One of those dev bootcamps sales pitch was the average coder makes $83,000.

This one is pushing the ante to $120k.

Do you know why developers get paid on average $120,000 or more at some of the
world's fastest growing companies?

It's because of various contributing factors. But for $49 you can buy the
dream.

~~~
jfarmer
Speaking as one of the co-founders of Dev Bootcamp, they take a very different
curricular and pedagogical approach than this course. The emphasis is 100% on
fundamentals and Rails is used only as a means to that end. Curricularly,
Rails isn't touched on until week 7 or so.

This seems like a fine thing for someone who just wants to learn to sling
together an app and learn some of the "Rails incantations." If they're self-
directed, maybe they'll dive deeper. DBC eschews that -- one of the first
things they try to unteach students is that programming is about memorizing a
bunch of magic spells.

------
knes
I'm more and more disappointed in Startups that comes out of YC these days.

What's the different with peepcode, net tuts+, codeschool and co? What is the
bigger picture here? Is this just a guy who was running a successful
Skillshare course and decided to spin a company out of it and through his
personality got into YC? Why even go through YC if he already had 5000+
student on skillshare?

Something I'm not seeing here?

~~~
mattangriffel
I'm not sure, but if I'd make a guess about why I got into YC it's because I
was able to build something that tapped into a powerful need. It's definitely
a good indicator that something is when whent there are so many resources out
there and yet time and time again people who finished my class said it was the
first time they had ever successfully learned how to code (after failing with
other resources).

We're trying to take a more human approach to learning about technology. There
are live chat and discussion sections as well as in-person study groups which
is not something you'll find on peepcode and the rest. On top of that, you
don't end up finishing any of those resources with a live product that can
serve as the MVP for the company you're trying to build.

Just some thoughts, though I'd love to get your take.

------
rrouse
Being a developer that works with Rails daily, the first thing that jumped out
at me was the code on the screen in the landing page image.

Rails hasn't used named_scope in a long time :)

I also found this bit to be just wrong

"I'm not even joking when I say this, but I think some of the resources out
there make it intentionally hard for non-technical people to start learning.
Maybe they want to keep this stuff a secret."

I don't believe for a second this exists. It's actually kind of offensive.

~~~
Jimmy
I agree. The number of resources available on the internet for beginning
programmers is astounding. You can find tutorials and documentation for any
language that you might want to learn. Professional-quality tools are
available for free. There are numerous websites where professional programmers
will provide comprehensive answers to your questions within a few hours,
sometimes within minutes. The source code of major software packages, like the
Linux kernel or the Firefox browser, is available free of charge to anyone who
wants to study or modify it. Someone who wants to learn to program is limited
only by their intelligence and motivation.

------
dspecs
I took the class a few months ago so I thought I would offer my unvarnished
opinion of One Month Rails.

I've always loved technology but never had any coding skills whatsoever. To be
honest, I didn't know where to begin. I would run a few searches and play
around with a hello world tutorial and pretty much drop it from there.

Then I found this awesome speech by a guy named Mattan Griffel. He was
speaking at an NYU event (pretty sure) and discussing how he learned to code
in one month. I was blown away. It was like I was lost in the jungle
blindfolded and someone handed me a map and a light. I finally had a way that
all of this was accessible.

Griffel used a combination of a Lynda course, a Stanford course and Hartl's
Rails tutorial to teach himself but in the meantime he had put together this
course to learn Rails in a month.

Disclaimer: I didn't learn Rails in a month. I completed the course but I
still can't build the next Facebook/Twitter/Linkedin/Pinterest on my own if it
didn't have the exact same features that Griffel's tutorial had.

Here's what it did do for me. For a person coming from a completely non-
technical background, I had a roadmap. Terms, technologies, languages,
databases are all things that are obvious to any CS/EE major but totally
baffling to an outsider. Griffel's tutorial brought me into the coding world.
Eventually, I was so blown away by what I learned that I wanted to do this as
a profession which led me to the Flatiron School and I hope to pursue a new
career as a web developer.

The One Month Rails course gave me the confidence to see that it really isn't
all that difficult to learn this stuff. Time, dedication and perseverance are
your friends. If you're completely new to programming, want to know the lay of
the land, and have no idea what Ruby, Rails, Git, Heroku and jQuery is, this
course is exactly what you need.

Mattan, thank you.

------
TORIG-TG
Took his class on Skillshare.

It was not a good first encounter with Ruby or Rails, but a decent class once
you have some background experience.

The class moves too fast, and he needs to practice his presentation skills (he
types something out in a video, and switches screens immediately). Also, the
material was not entirely up to date with the gems.

That being said, I really enjoyed the class and would take more in a similar
fashion.

~~~
willbill
I remember reading his quite useful blog post on learning rails quickly which
included what was involved in creating a website and how to attain a simple
understanding of web-specific database design, REST and front-end design.

It was pretty good. Two things sort of dismay me though when I see something
like this:

1\. There are lots of free resources available online, like the above
mentioned blogpost. We need to make a better case for open and free learning.

2\. All start-ups are forms and the display of the information entered into
those forms according to nearly all of the start-ups I run into in NYC.

~~~
mattangriffel
Good points willbill, my responses:

1\. Learning has always been free! (Okay, almost always.) You can walk into
any library and pick up a book on any subject. But most people don't do it
because there are too many resources out there and they're not synthesized in
a way that is catered towards a particular audience. People still pay hundreds
of thousands of dollars to go to universities to learn topics that they could
theoretically learn on their own. Why? Because text is really energy-intensive
to consume. I don't feel like having a ton of low quality resources online is
not the solution. That being said, I'm all about reducing the cost of learning
and making it more accessible, which is why I hope that this class can provide
a similar quality of education as $10-$18k intensive (like Hack Reactor or
General Assembly) for people who can't afford that.

2\. 95% of products are forms and the display of that information - that's
correct. That's why I don't think it's so hard for beginners to learn, and
that's what makes Ruby on Rails particularly powerful. It's just tools for
building forms, pulling data out of databases, and displaying that data in a
pretty way.

~~~
marincounty
They go to college because that's what society told them to do. They pay for
that stupid diploma. I hope things change in the future? I still believe all
Learning should be free. If your Learning is really worth $49.99; don't you
think word of mouth would bring in the masses?

------
petercooper
As someone heavily into the Ruby world (and particularly the news side of it)
this has certainly seemed to come out of nowhere for me, though to be fair..
existing Rubyists are not really the target audience :-) How did it grow to
reach 9000 students?

 _As it stands now, the YC-backed startup has over 9,000 paying student
customers, with a month of tutorials costing $49.95._

I'm guessing earlier signups got preferential pricing, but there's still a
potential for $100k+ per month revenues there.. that's pretty striking! :)

~~~
BWStearns
OMR was on TC "university", while this was the only one I tried I assume that
had a lot to do with their numbers. I tried it because I saw it at the moment
I decided to give rails a go and I got it for $20 because of a sale. That
said, Mattan did make a good class for beginners and I've recommended at least
one friend who was interested in mucking around with rails but was a rather
novice programmer (even moreso than I am).

------
raganwald
As a business, this makes perfect sense to me. San Francisco is the city that
taught the world you make more money selling pickaxes and denim than from
digging for gold.

~~~
mattangriffel
I taught myself how to code on my own and realized that there are no good
resources out there that provide a clear path for beginners. Yes, and the fact
that I get to empower other people to build something they want to build is a
bonus )

~~~
raganwald
It may be true that many who buy pickaxes won't find gold, but if you don't
buy a pickaxe or make your own (as you did), you definitely aren't going to
find gold!

Besides, the canonical Ruby book is the "Pickaxe Book." What other metaphor
fits?

------
bdcravens
Submit without an email address, and you get this error:

"The email parameter should include an email, euid, or leid key"

Wow, for something targeting those who aren't yet coders, that's a scary error
message. (I've been dev'ing professionally since 1998, and I'm taken aback)

~~~
mattangriffel
Hmm, that must be a Mailchimp default. Agreed, it's not very good or clear.

~~~
bdcravens
Write a gateway in-between to process success and smooth out the error message
the end user sees.

------
zinssmeister
I see this "guy with macbook air and coffee" picture on a few landing pages
lately. For example here [http://www.timecamp.com/](http://www.timecamp.com/)

~~~
cmadan
Its from [http://unsplash.com/](http://unsplash.com/). We also have him on our
landing page - gonna have to change it if he shows up everywhere :).

~~~
zinssmeister
yeah usplash is a popular/great resource, and that unfortunately makes it
almost useless. Right now there is another HN post on the front page that is
using an image from that same MacBook Air series (as a background image):
[http://www.codingjohnson.com/an-awkward-
conversation](http://www.codingjohnson.com/an-awkward-conversation)

------
throwaway7989
This company is a very smart scam. I'm an experienced ruby developer, and have
been following them for a while. I checked out the course just out of
curiosity when it was up on Skillshare. The way Mattan approaches the topic is
interesting, and makes this company one of the most successful and not-scam
-looking scams you will find. Here's how it works.

Rails is currently a buzzword for those just starting to try to learn how to
code - very attractive. But in reality, Rails is not the best way to start
learning code, it's a framework for experienced developers. Rails takes a ton
of shortcuts and pushes a lot of things under the hood. This is very
convenient if you understand the concepts that rails has abstracted, but very
dangerous if you don't. Rails makes it easy to set up a basic rest MVC app for
testing, but making a full blown custom web app requires a good understanding
of many concepts, some of which are detailed below:

\- The principles of computer programming \- SQL and relational database
design \- HTTP protocol, how it works \- MVC architecture, why and how it
operates \- HTML, CSS, Javascript, and Ruby - proficient at least \- The
difference between client and server and how they interact \- Basic web
security \- The command line and UNIX

I could go on with that list, but you get the idea. Building a real rails app
is tough, and requires a large stack of knowledge that simply cannot be
amassed within one month.

So how does Mattan handle this? He does away with the part where you actually
learn any of these things. In One Month Rails, you are quickly introduced to
concepts, then given code you can copy and paste in order to make it work.

For students, this is fantastic. They are attracted by the word "Rails" and
the concept of becoming a programmer in one month (and allegedly making over
$100k/year after that, as he claims). Everything works great, and it comes
really easy. You skip the whole hard part where you actually need to
understand things, and are just fed answers that always work. You look at him
type the code, then you copy it exactly yourself. Developing an app suddenly
became easy.

Fast forward to the end of the course. You have a working clone of twitter or
pinterest or something, and life is good. You made this all yourself - you put
in the code, ran the migrations, added the twitter bootstrap classes, etc. You
are asked to review the course and of course you give Mattan a glowing review.
It really worked - within a month you were able to build a full web app on
your own!

By now, most of you will recognize where the scam is. You paid for the course,
you finished it and you gave it a great review. But you also have _not learned
anything at all_. And as soon as you actually need to go build an app or apply
for a job, you'll quickly realize that you are out of luck. This is a
successful and obviously profitable class, but at it's core, it's a scam. And
to add to that, Mattan is at most a junior level developer himself.

This post is not here with the intent to be mean to Mattan or his company - he
is a great guy, and the company has obviously been successful. I just wrote
this here to tell the truth about what the company is doing and how it
operates. I would love to see stats on how many people who have taken Mattan's
class have gone on to actually having a career as a developer. I'm willing to
bet it's 1% or less. But prove me wrong, please.

~~~
mattangriffel
These are all fair criticisms that I'm happy to respond to, but let's please
be careful when throwing around the word "scam". A scam is something dishonest
and I promise that I have good intentions.

We often forget that products can evolve. I'm not pretending that I've come up
with the best version of what this product could eventually be. But I've
validated the need for a product, released a version of it that has a modicum
of value, and an overwhelming majority of the people who have completed the
class are incredibly excited and thankful. I just got this email today
(completely unsolicited):

"Subj: $100K in wasted programming costs. OMR liberated me!

Hi Mattan,

I followed your Rails course and created Shruffle.com. It's a simple way for
businesses to do text marketing. Nothing too fancy, but I'm marketing it to
local restaurants and barber shops around where I live, and have been getting
good responses.

Just wanted to say a big THANK YOU for making a kick-ass course. I wasted so
much time hiring wack ass programmers in the past who never understood what I
wanted to do half the time. Over the course of 5-6 years I must have spent at
least $100K in wasted programming costs for various projects that never went
anywhere. Your course liberated me....now I can build anything that I dream of
without spending a penny.

Most of the other courses were a big freaking waste of time. I was looking for
something that showed me how to do basic things quickly (login/logout,
validations, etc etc), and your course did just that. Next step is to
incorporate Stripe for payments."

Now I'll admit that I'm not happy with what % of people finish the course
(it's higher than average for an online class but still relatively low) and
I'm not happy that I don't teach enough to give people the flexibility to
build more than just a fairly simple CRUD app, but rest assured that as the
creator of this product, I'm more critical than anyone else of its flaws.

The first version was 3 hours, I took a lot of feedback and completely redid
the lessons to turn it into a much longer class. The course has been redone 3
time so far and I'm currently in the process of expanding it out into a much
larger one that teaches people the various concepts of web applications within
the contexts of different kinds of applications (an about me, a wordpress, a
yelp, a pinterest) which will give people more of that understanding that
we're both looking for.

Anyway, as I'm sure you can imagine, it hurts when someone takes a product
you've spent a lot of time on and calls it a "scam".

~~~
rrouse
What I don't know is whether or not the person in that email is equipped with
what he or she needs to actually be able to figure out how to incorporate
Stripe.

Are you at all confident that you have taught people how to research and
understand what they are looking at?

I've known plenty of people who can follow patterns and regurgitate what they
have seen, but have little to no ability to actually create. If what they want
to do deviates just a little, they are toast.

~~~
skndr
People aren't stuck just copying.

At first, it might be copying. But having something workable that you can
tweak can give you a good idea of how something works. After enough time
tweaking, you can start building new things based on those best
practices/examples.

------
stevewilhelm
During a gold rush, sell pickaxes and shovels.

------
smooradian
I took this class on SkillShare with almost zero experience and loved it. I
wish the lecture notes were formatted for printing. Keep up the good work
Mattan.

------
prakster
Hey Mattan,

Do I have to have a Mac for your course? A Windows Laptop won't do? I want to
make sure I don't get caught with the wrong hardware.

I asked YC a couple of days back, and most said 'no', although the q was not
specific to your program:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6152605](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6152605)

~~~
mattangriffel
A Windows laptop can work, but it will be a little tougher (the videos are
recorded on a Mac so some of the commands are different). When you install
Rails using RailsInstaller, use the Git Bash program that it comes with and
most of the commands should be the same.

------
richsin
I did this course a few months back when it was on Skillshare and met Mattan
at General Assembly in NYC - he's a sharp guy and very pleasant to talk to.
The course is a great introduction for anyone new to programming to get from
zero to app in a short period of time. It also allows people to determine if
this is something they really want to dive into.

------
scubasteve
Looking forward to trying this out! As an FYI, you're missing a period in one
of your paragraphs for your email copy "...If you’re not sure what to build?
...no worries, I have advice for that too" \- that last line should be "too.".

~~~
mattangriffel
Good call, will make a note and fix that shortly. It's people like you
scubasteve that make me not look like a total asshat on the internet.

------
ulisesrmzroche
It would be far more honest to give a real starting salary rather than almost
CTO ones.

------
Yhippa
Hmm. I clicked on the intro video to play it. It started playing. I clicked on
the dark background to dismiss it so I could continue viewing the site. The
video still played in the background instead of pausing or stopping.

~~~
mattangriffel
Yep, that's because it's just being hidden and not stopped. It's a bug I need
to fix :)

------
eranation
Congratulations Mattan! I'm looking forward for something like this but on
growth hacking... since Googling about growth hacking yields so many great
items you wrote on the subject, is there anything planned?

------
xpop2027
I took this course and learned more while taking it than any other RoR course.

~~~
bdcravens
If you've taken multiple courses, then wouldn't your knowledge be cumulative?
If you're an absolute beginner, any given course may be too fast or confusing,
but after you've seen info on routes, models, generators a few times, the next
bullet point tends to stick better

~~~
mattangriffel
Absolutely agree here. Different people learn concepts in different ways, and
it's hard to know that teaching something a given way will stick. That's why
we have to try to reach as many people as possible until we can build a
personalized education system.

------
lrobb
This is eerily similar to what happened with seo: people started to realize
there was more money to be made teaching people _how_ to make lemonade than
there was in actually _selling_ lemonade.

------
saturdayplace
Well, if this isn't validation for my latest idea, I don't know what is. I
know it shouldn't, but finding out about competitors always seems to take the
wind out of my sails.

------
beh
Here's a code for 10% off:
[http://onemonthrails.com/signup?discount_code=rEEvPf](http://onemonthrails.com/signup?discount_code=rEEvPf)

------
cschmidt
Hmm, it says:

    
    
        Which Programming Language should I choose?
    

on a site called One Month Rails. I wonder what language they'll suggest?

~~~
mattangriffel
That's fair. But you'd be surprised how many people still ask me the question.

~~~
kyllo
Yeah, I bet there are a few people who sign up for "One Month Rails" and then
ask if they can use Python instead.

~~~
mattangriffel
There are actually :)

------
codex
Make money fast--earn thousands of dollars working from home in your spare
time!

Truth is, in a world where everybody is special, nobody is.

