Codequarantine

So I just reached 228 subscribers for interests into the live coding classes and data science tutorials.

I am experimenting a lot with promotion, as I also started a YouTube channel to optimize for SEO.

One of the major ways for growth is reaching out on LinkedIn and share what I am doing. I probably got over 100 subs from this reach out. I am going to put even more effort into doing this.

I really have to keep going on the content wise. I did discover a righ format for structuring the courses. I have a course, this course is about lessons and exercises, and have to be all made in seperate notebooks, separate videos. And then I can combine them into a full fledged course.

Next steps are:

• Creating more courses
• Integrating a payment system and a premium offer
• Offering chat support

So in today's class, someone actually emailed me a 25$ coupon code for Amazon. He wanted to give something back as he was so happy with the classes he had followed on codequarantine. It's pretty cool to see someone actually giving me money without even asking for it haha.

I am working hard to crank out a more complete curriculum and add some sort of paid offering. Anyway cool milestone to achieve.

We have gained a bunch more subscribers, mainly through LinkedIn and referrals. Good to see people being referred by friends.

I still maintain a high NPS score in every class, which is great.

I am also making some huge improvements to the platform on google cloud in combination with jupyterhub. I have managed to setup auto scaling and customizing environments for each class.

In the next classes on the Netflix recommender system, each student will have 32G of memory and 4 cpu's. Which is quite nice, better then most peoples laptops. And some problems you can really only teach by doing it properly.

So I'm mainly thinking about eventually monetizing the platform. Where I will bring in personal support if needed and use the free classes as a marketing tool.

I think the main thing I want to focus on is to make it 100% frictionless to start coding for data science and figure out a way to optimize the completion rates of users.

Lots of work to do before I'm able to actually sell the product.

New update on Friday!

This week I have gained another 22 subscribers. I think I got most of my subs last week from my LinkedIn post, however when I posted the same link this week it didn't get a lot of views anymore..

The reviews on he classes are very good and are the best signal to me that I am on to a great service. From the 17 reviews so far, 12 people have rated the class a 9 or higher.

I am also migrating from digitalocean to a dynamically scaling kubernetes cluster on GKE, which will allow me to host bigger classer, different datasets and in the future gpu enabled environments.

A few learnings:

• Some people have mentioned that it is hard to transition from codeacademy like things to real world projects
• The personal attention is something people really value
• A number of people have asked me wether they can use the platform outside of the classes
• The classes are a little short to really get deeply hands on (although the classes are 1.5 - 2 hours)

The format I am thinking of is the following:

• People can access the platform on their own and start doing projects
• When people have questions regarding the exercise / the project they can send me a message and I will get in touch
• Once a week there is a class on a specific project

Hi all, just an update on Codequarantine.

I have to be honest, the first week is a big step forward. I would have been happy to just do one class with 2-3 people but it turned out quite a number of people like to follow classes on Python and Data Science!

I ran ads on Facebook for about 26$ but I'm not sure how many subs I got from there.

The biggest source of subscribers came from my LinkedIn post (which has reached ~3000) people by now, and some1 else also shared it on her wall.

I have about 73 people subscribed to the email list now. One thing that is interesting is that there are people from many different backgrounds and have different goals regarding learning Data Science skills.

The first class I held this morning was an introductory Python class. It's amazing how fast you can teach and help people if you are really doing it live. The attendants loved it and one of them actually asked if I gave a full course on python (the first sign of "real" demand).

One big thing is the difference between total beginners and more intermediate people. I'm hosting classes on beginner Python right now and I'm going to teach an introduction to Data Science class next week. However, I would love to teach some more advanced subjects and problems as well.

Moving forward I will continue to focus on making more content / tutorials and offering more classes each week and growing the email list.

I'm also starting to think about different business models related to online teaching. Any input?

Stay safe all!

This week I started codequarantine. The purpose will be to provide a better way of learning data science. I am still not 100% sure what it will be. However I do know we will need a lot more data professionals in the next 10 years. I want to help people get these skills with a personal and hands on approach.

I personally got most of my data skills from hands on projects on Kaggle (https://kaggle.com). However, most people still start courses on Coursera / Udemy / etc. The problem on those courses is that most people simply don't finish them, and they also lack sufficient "real world" work. My goals is to optimize for completion rates.

One big "tech" factor that I think is really interesting is the fact that in-browser coding with Jupyter (https://jupyter.org/) getting more and more popular. I want to setup classrooms using jupyterhub and develop it further to be able to help students in real time, review exercises and maybe make small "Kaggle like challenges" in sort of a hacker rank style. Ok, a lot of ideas haha.

I believe in early validation so I started making a landing page https://codequarantine.landen.co and my first goal is to get 10 signups for a first live class and see how it will go. I started advertising on facebook for 2$ a day to just get started.

Let me know what you think!