While it's great to read about the success, this part gets me:
> They put up a simple web site and announced that they were accepting applications. And soon enough they had more applications than they had spots.
Methinks there is more that was done between step A and B rather than just putting up a webpage and sitting back. Would you be able to give more specifics on what they did between those two steps to get all those applications?
Since I am one of the crazy fools who started this thing (Mike McGee), I guess I'll chime in...
July 2011
Our main focus was just trying to build the site. Since Neal and I hadn't really built a professional site before, we didn't really know what we were doing and it was pretty damn hard. Luckily we got a lot of help from our instructor and other advisors who were developers and designers to lighten the load a bit. Still the main product was ours and it was definitely an MVP - http://bit.ly/PZpoSt
August 2011
By August I was down to about $200 in my account and we had still not received the funding we thought we would to market Code Academy to the masses. So we just decided to launch the site and see how many people we could get to apply by using Twitter, Facebook, sending emails, and going to meetups in Chicago. We launched Thursday, August 4th 2011 at 9am looking for 12 students to fill our inaugural class.
While we had the benefit of having a lot of support within the Chicago community, the applications we were getting were from complete strangers. We were getting applications from realtors, retail workers, lawyers, accountants, journalists, teachers, etc. They were also coming from across the country. California, Texas, North Carolina, Florida, Wisconsin, New York, the list goes on. Even people from outside the country (Israel and The Philippines) applied to our inaugural class!
By the end of August we had 88 quality applications from people all over the world without spending a single dollar on marketing.
September-October 2011
From there, we decided to accept 35 students instead of 12 and we started our first class in October 2011 with two web development courses instead of one.
I think the biggest reason why we were able to generate so much interest was the fact that we were addressing the right problem at the right time. There were so many people out there looking for a program like ours, but it just wasn't there yet. When our inaugural students heard about Code Academy, they jumped at the opportunity.
I went to an IdeaMensch talk by Mike McGee (co-founder), and it was actually surprisingly little. They knew what they wanted to build (a physical school, great space, excellent teachers, etc) but one of their funding opportunities fell through right as they were running out of money.
They decided to see if they could bootstrap it by getting 30 students who were crazy enough to enroll when there wasn't any of the stuff promised in place yet.
There were way more than 30, and had to reject a number of applicants. They rented their first space (at Groupon I think) less than a week before classes started, and bought the iMacs just days before it started.
> They put up a simple web site and announced that they were accepting applications. And soon enough they had more applications than they had spots.
Methinks there is more that was done between step A and B rather than just putting up a webpage and sitting back. Would you be able to give more specifics on what they did between those two steps to get all those applications?