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Following Your Passion to Build an Impactful Business with Quincy Larson of freeCodeCamp

Episode #056

Quincy Larson (@ossia) explains how he's built freeCodeCamp into a community that helps millions of people learn to code every month by engaging in storytelling, encouraging open-source contributions, and focusing on accessibility to people across every income bracket worldwide.

  1. 4

    This was exceptional, thanks!

  2. 2

    I owe freecodecamp my career! Thanks Quincy.

  3. 2

    I really enjoyed this episode, thanks for recording it and props to Quincy for taking the leap and building something so impactful.

  4. 1

    My Main Takeaways:

    • If you want to learn to code, (1) carve out at least 30 minutes a day. (2) Hang out with other people who code, at work, meetups, or anywhere else.

    • freeCodeCamp is a charity, so the income is tax-deductible. The average donation amount was $5, and they had about 4000 people giving donations each month, some set up a monthly recurring payment. They were receiving about $20,000 in donations each month.

    • Quincy was working as a teacher for the first 10 years of his career, but not in coding, he did not know how to code. His wife was more technical than he was.

    • Quincy identified a problem in one of the schools that he was working at, where there was a lot of manual paperworking being done. So he taught himself a tiny bit of technical skills and managed to automate the process, to the point that the school became the most popular school in the system. From this, he realised that just a little bit of technical skill, could make a really big difference.

    • From Quincy’s experience in automating the processes in that school, he set out to create a school management system that would automate more processes, but he realised that he’d actually need to learn how to code. Then he also realised how hard it was to learn how to code… suddenly the idea for freeCodeCamp was born.

    • Save money: Quincy saved money compulsively, he even did side-hustles on ebay where he’d buy and sell things for a profit, and from this, he’d make 10s of thousands a year. And he’d save all of his money.

    • Eventually Quincy wanted to quit his job as a School Director to pursue freeCodeCamp, he asked for his wife’s permission and she said yes (she had a job so they had some money coming in). Then quincy spent a few years with a very unstable income, while he learned to code, he read books, attended hackathons every weekend, did online courses, but felt like he was wasting a lot of time for the first 7 months. But when he eventually got a job as a developer, things started making sense.

    • Contribute to open-source software

    • One of the things that Quincy did back in the day was buy about 10 vending machines and put them around town. But he didn’t make any money off that. So the guy who he bought it off took pity on him and bought them back.

    • If it’s easy to do you will have a lot of competition, so go up-market.

    • For freeCodeCamp, he invested about $120,000 of his own money in the first few years. Now (at the time of this interview), they are basically break-even.

    • freeCodeCamp was born out of another failed project, that was about trying to recommend a curriculum for studying the skills required to get you from your current skill set into your next job. But nobody wanted to use this. So he scrapped this idea, and launched a curriculum for learning JavaScript. He launched it, started blogging about it, and tweeting about it, then people started coming to it and working through it.

    • Courtland says that developers tend to focus on what CAN be done (the cool blockchain AI fancy startup idea), rather than focusing on what SHOULD be done (the simple basic boring but HELPFUL tool).

    • Quincy said that he learned from his mistakes from his previous failure that he should keep freeCodeCamp simple, basic and useful. Not complex, fancy (and not useful).

    • At the time of the freeCodeCamp launch, he already had about 10,000 Twitter followers, so he just announced it on Twitter, and it got traction. He also wrote blog posts about it.

    • In the early days, freeCodeCamp had  a chat room, and Quincy would spend all day in those chat rooms, greeting everyone that came in, and asking them about their goals and aspirations. And a lot of the people that came in became contributors to freeCodeCamp since it’s open source.

    • Quincy contributes a lot of his success to luck.

    • The two key types of posts that do well on freeCodeCamp are: (1) the deep technical break down post, (2) the coding breakthrough type post highlighting how your coding skills have changed your life.

    • freeCodeCamp does not spread their content, their followers do. freeCodeCamp just creates great content, and people share it on their social media profiles.

    • Know your domain very well, care about it a lot. To get good ideas to tackle in your domain, you can go onto Quora and look at the questions people are asking there.

    • At the time of this interview, freeCodeCamp had published about 2,500 articles, and Quincy wrote 500 of them, because he wrote one every day for a while.

    • Quincy sends 1.3 million emails per week, and some people reply, so he puts in the effort to go through the responses and reply.

    • “A lot of people look up to the sky and look at stars and ask how they can fix them, but I look down at the pothole in front of me, and ask how I can fix it” - Linus Torvalds.

    • Quincy recommends that people should get a university degree only because it’s so societally entrenched, however he doesn’t believe in the education system as it is.

    • Quincy does not see websites like code.org or khanacademy.org as competition, he sees them as allies, because freeCodeCamp.org and all the others are a non-profit, and they are all working towards the same vision of free open education.

    • Advice for starting entrepreneurs: Work for somebody else and make a lot of mistakes on their dime (using their money), Quincy worked as a teacher for a decade, and saved a lot of money to the point that he was able to bootstrap a free product at scale.

    • Don’t hire developers to build your MVP, build it yourself.