mkdev
Hire programming mentor
Imagine that you have your own personal Google; its search results suit your requirements perfectly and give you a straightforward answer to every question. This is what we give on mkdev as a way to learn programming.
How mkdev co-founder quit his day job
For us to keep growing, Leo had to quit his day job and switch to working on mkdev fulltime at some point in time. He wrote a whole great article about it, hope you enjoy it:
How Russia's government blocked our business - an
We just translated the story behind how and who tried to kill our business and how we survived.
Upvotes on hackernews are highly appreciated: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17591995 :-)
https://mkdev.me/en/posts/how-russia-s-government-blocked-our-business-and-how-we-dealt-with-it
Services for Online Education Startup
We are always very careful in introducing new services and we are always trying to reduce the cognitive load from using too many of them.. In this blog post, I walk through all the tools we use to run mkdev and how much money we spend on it monthly.
https://mkdev.me/en/posts/services-for-online-education-startup
How mkdev appeared and where it is going
A short history of https://mkdev.me/en is as follows:
Back in 2014 I got the point where I was ready not only to obtain new skills, but also share everything I learned so far. The first thing I did was writing a free book on how to learn web-development on one's own. The book, "Self-education for web developers", was a relative success, helping lots of people to start their careers as web developers.
Short after it was published online, I got a number of emails from people asking me to teach the programming. I filtered the ones who didn't really mean it by setting a modest price for learning from me, wrote a set of practical tasks focused on creating a new web application from scratch on Ruby on Rails and became a mentor.
As the number of students grew, E-Mail stopped working for me as a way to communicate with students. And this is how I wrote the very first version of mkdev - it was purely an automation tool around most common tasks I did as part of teaching people.
Eventually the amount of students grew too big for me to handle it alone, so I found another mentor to support me, and then another one and so on.
1 year after it was all started Leo, my old friend, joined me as a co-founder, taking over marketing and design activities. All this beautiful illustrations for every blog post we have, all the design - everything was made by him, and I could focus on the product and on polishing the teaching process.
Eventually Leo started working fulltime on mkdev, and back in 2017 we added another FTE to help us with customer support. I keep working on it part time, my primary job still being an Infrastructure and DevOps consultant.
Roughly 3.5 years later we have few dozens mentors, teaching a wide variety of technologies - from Ruby, Python and Java to Big Data, DevOps and Mobile Development.
Being bootstrapped and trying to fit work on mkdev into our tight schedules, we managed to double our revenue every year. We have lots of features on our roadmap and, as you already now, we are shifting our focus to Global market now.
Russia blocked our business - so we go global now
Earlier this spring Russian government started a holy war against Telegram. The approach was to block as many IP addresses as possible, including millions of IPs on AWS and Google Cloud.
The result? While Telegram is still working just fine in Russia, many businesses, who are hosted on cloud platforms but operate on Russian market got blocked.
We were one of these businesses and the hard this war made to our business was huge.
Even though we quickly rolled out a proxy server and, with the help of location-based DNS "unblocked" ourselves in Russia, we decided to shift our focus to global, English-speaking market.
Knowing that someone can just block our complete business, which generates substantial monthly income for few dozen mentors and couple of full-time core team members, we can not rely on original market anymore.
So this is where our journey begins :-)