Hey hey IndieHackers!

I'm a self-taught developer and now run a software dev agency in Chicago with @thomasgorczynski. We know how hard it is to teach yourself programming, but once you do it (as so many of you know) it can be life changing.

The one thing we wished we had while we were learning how to code, was more people to look up to or talk to. It was hard to find success stories from people that learned how to code and then landed a software job. Sooo after a year or so of writing down SaaS ideas, we FINALLY decided to focus on this one for a few months to see what happens. So far so good.

Meet The "I Code Hire Me" Podcast :) and icodehireme.com

The goal is to eventually build a community like IH or some type of product for people learning how to code. But first we're focusing on quality content. Here is a breakdown of what we've been doing since we started 5 weeks ago:

Week 1: Launched the Podcast

We decided to commit the next 90 days at minimum to I Code Hire Me. Starting with the podcast. 

I reached out to and interviewed my friend Becky TWO days later. She transitioned careers into software development, it was a perfect first episode. We made sure not to put TOO much thought into it so that we didn't get cold feet on the idea. Turned out to be the right decision. After the interview, I edited it, found intro music on Pond5 and pushed in to all major podcasting platforms through Anchor.fm for FREE. And BOOM there you have it, we launched a podcast in a few days. 

For the interview I used Skype and Call Recorder -- no equipment other than laptop system mic.

Week 2: More Interviews

Interviewing was fun! So we decided to do as many as we could this week and found 4 more people in our network with learn to code stories.

This time I used Zencastr for audio recording. It's amazing. Still no recording equipment used. Although, I did lay on the floor surrounded by pillows for one of the calls using my laptop mic and WOAH was the sound quality better.

Week 3: 100 Podcast Listens

We hit 100 podcast listens...which I thought was cool because we didn't really promote it ourselves at all. We had a guest on that had a few thousand instagram followers and he posted to his feed promoting the episode he was in so my guess is that did most of the work for us.

Recorded 2 more episodes.

Started reaching out to people for written interviews for the website. 

Week 4: Website Live + Google Recruiter Reached Out 

I designed the site, and Thomas built a custom wordpress theme. Got the site up and running by Friday. I wrote my own learn to code story, and reached out to another friend to write his own. Cold emailed like 40 people to do podcast and written interviews. I'd say we got about 15 people commit :) 


Week 5: Website Content + Clean up 

Okay so the site is up with one article, now its time to get real content on there before we start promoting it. We had a few people fill out written interviews and our podcast pipeline is great -- we have 4 weeks worth of podcasts shows recorded and ready to be edited. 

We cleaned up all the small but necessary detail on the site, hooked up Mailchimp form, added in all the emails of people I've been emailing to the list. 

What's Next

As of today, we just hit 600 podcast listens ... which isn't a lot but it still blows my mind because I have not really tried to promote this yet. I'll keep updating weekly on our Indiehackers product page, so be sure to check that out or follow the product if you'd like. It's worth noting that we still haven't done a "launch" ... and honestly as I write this, I'm not sure why. I guess fear that we're not ready? idk I think I want more content on the site before we launch, because it's pretty bare right now. 

We need to get more written interviews, so if you have a cool learn to code story or know someone, send them our way: [email protected]

(I apologize for the scatter brained post, hopefully this was useful!)

What do you think? We love feedback :)