I Code Hire Me

• I have about 5 weeks worth of podcast interviews ready to be edited by our awesome editor (me)...so I wanted to focus on the website for a bit.

• Thomas whipped up our initial site in a few days, so now I'm going through and finding bugs and cleaning it up before we start pushing links to our social media feeds

• We use Trello for project management, so I created a handful of Trello cards with important, but small tasks for him to complete before we start promoting a little bit.

• I write my Learn to Code story in written form to get it ready for the site

• Edited and scheduled episode 5 for Friday release

• I added everyone that responded to my cold emails to Mailchimp to bring our mailing list to a total of 53 email

• At the end of the week, send out our first Newsletter email promoting the podcast episodes and new written content online.

We're still not sure what icodehireme.com will be ... but since we're focusing on content first, we decide for now that we will publish text-based interviews there (this is likely looking very familiar to you @csallen haha)

• I designed a simple layout and handed it off to Thomas to build
• Meanwhile, I started reaching out to people to do a written interview. I emailed 20 people, got 9 responses saying they'd love to fill it out. Now getting people to fill out the interview form is another challenge...2 of those 9 filled it out that week, but I'm hopeful in the coming weeks the rest will do it with some persistence.
• Thomas built a custom wordpress theme for us
• The site is live by Friday

I posted on my personal Instagram promoting the latest podcast episode. The boyfriend of an old friend from college DM'd me and said he was a technical recruiter from Google and wanted to chat about our podcast! This was some interesting validation that there could be a potential monetization strategy in the future with recruiters. We chatted with him and was super transparent how early the community is and that it will be useful to have him to learn from as web grow :) Pretty neat!

Now we're in a good groove with the podcast and it's only week 3!

• Invested $100 in some podcasting equipment. Nothing too fancy, but the audio quality is much better
• Cold emailed 15 people for potential podcast interview. Hoping to batch them up in on week so we have a bunch of episodes ready to go.
• Assuming the batching goes well, we'll use our the time we just bought for ourselves to figure out what we want to be on the website, icodehireme.com.
• We think maybe a forum style site like IndieHackers, but still aren't sure.

This week, we wanted to push ourselves to see how many interviews we could do in a week. There are two main tasks we had to do:

1. Find potential guests

• The goal was to find people that taught themselves how to code and are now software developers full-time.
• I figured I could look on LinkedIn to find people that graduated from coding bootcamps and reach out to them.
• It's a pretty tedious task, but I spent a few hours creating a list of linked in profiles that looked like good candidates, then I found their emails (through lots of stalking of their websites and GitHub), then send them a cold email.

2. Schedule/Interview them

• This is the fun and easy part. I tried my best to do only one interview a day, just in case other meetings came up during the day.
• The interviews typically lasted about 1 hour and they went pretty well!
• The first Episode I used Skype and Call Recorder which was a great way to get started. Yes, the audio quality isn't that good, but the content itself I think was good.
• The next 3 interviews, I used Zencastr for recording and the mic on my laptop surrounded by a bunch of pillows to make is sound better (and it worked shockingly well)

We did it! The "I Code Hire Me" Podcast is a weekly show where we interview people that made a career change into software development. Think if it as an IndieHackers for those learning how to code. There are some incredible stories from some incredible people that worked really hard to learn software development, eventually landing their first job as a developer.