Codum

these are just notes on a post I want to share my learnings about - but not ready to finalize here and on the go

Readers, ignore this for now please, @csallen it would be great to have a draft feature here, wdyt? :)

10 things I would do differently if I were to do it all over now - in the "age of AI"?
roadblocks
female founder learnings
learnings on human behavior and accountability from our early users
let me know what interests you and I am happy to get more into detail on that!

Taking some notes here that I want to elaborate on later. Monetisation in a changing (investor) market is for sure an interesting topic where we learned a lot!

• cold-start problem of communities
• B2B, B2B2C or B2C?
• path to profitability and do I need external funding to get there?
• shift in investors mindset // during a recession

My self-teaching coding journey began when I graduated from Business School in 2018 and set my mind on finding a job as a data scientist in Silicon Valley. Somehow I achieved this goal (with little experience and loads of motivation in my pocket), but the dream burst only a few months later when the company went bust… just about when I felt skilled enough to do “cool” coding stuff. What a timing!

To keep up the “coding game,” I continued learning and coding in my free time. Just to realize that without peers, a real use case, or deadlines, self-teaching can be VERY frustrating and, most of all, lonely.

To surround myself with like-minded people and to get involved in the tech space, I joined WomenWhoCode as a volunteer. Here I found my first coding buddy, Rachel, who soon turned into a good friend! We had a long-distance coding relationship from Germany to New Zealand!

When others heard we teamed up, I started receiving requests if I could pair them with a partner too. So, Rachel and I started building a matchmaking algorithm with a simple interface for other community members to find a buddy - initially, for fun and to learn by building.

Little did we know how many people worldwide were tired of never finishing their coding courses and learning by themselves - and were craving a coding buddy / accountability partner.

Read about Codum's beginnings here:
https://www.womenwhocode.com/blog/the-story-and-the-spark-finding-community-with-codum

What started out as a small initiative called "buddymeup.net" within the WomenWhoCode community turned into its own little entity "Codum.cc". Unfortunately my amazing coding buddy could take on any entrepreneurial risks, so it was me taking this step alone (cheered on by a lot of amazing supporters, many of which who had found their coding buddy through "buddymeup").

Read about my takeaways of my first year as a solo-founder here: https://medium.com/@isabella.hoesch/lessons-learned-in-my-first-year-as-a-first-time-founder-874f4e3398c9