Prentus

Today marks the start of the first apprenticeships!

1. A bootcamp grad designer is getting a shot to get real-life experience and show her worth at a tech startup called Base.
2. A bootcamp grad developer is joining a fintech mobile app as a backend developer apprentice.

The goal from here is to learn what makes apprenticeships most successful and then repeat it thousands of times after. This is the start of changing how tech careers are started, forever.

Still in shock at how fast things are moving. While I did not really put any work into marketing, the #1 thing that got me to $1k is pricing.

I only have two customers currently. The first customer, I only charged $100 because I was looking for some early users. Then I read a thread on IndieHackers about charging early on because you need to see that people will pay for your product.

Even though the platform is not ready and I have been manually fulfilling apprentice placements, I realized the value was still there. So I redid my site and added a pricing page with a new price of $450 per apprentice.

The same day, I got someone that requested a meeting. Met with them yesterday and they paid for 2 apprentices for a total of $900.

Lessons:

1. Charge early and charge a REAL price. Not discounted heavily. Might take a little longer to find a customer but it's important to find those customers willing to pay since they REALLY care.
2. Pricing communicates value. Charging $100 for an apprentice might turn off someone on our landing page since they might think it's international students. Charging $450 gets us closer to showing "hey we have job-ready, US-based apprentices that can start in less than 7 days".

15 months working on previous startup: $0 Revenue
21 days working on Prentus: $100 revenue

It's crazy what a difference it is with the new company but some insights:

1. Experience really makes a huge difference. I wasted so much money and time at my last startup but those mistakes all helped me learn what to do right.
2. Learn before you build. I spent time talking to both startups and apprentices which informed the decision to begin with the first customer.
3. You know you have a good product when people are excited and willing to try the incomplete version. My previous industry was crowded and I didn't understand my customers. Now I understand my customers and am in a very young but promising industry.

This is step 1 in what I truly believe will be a fulfilling journey.

In December, I posted on a careers Slack channel for Thinkful, the online Bootcamp I mentor at, asking if anyone wanted to work unpaid to get experience in converting Figma designs to HTML & CSS. I ended up getting a hit from an eager graduate trying to get his feet wet.

He worked with us for 3 months while we were trying to launch our MVP. They were hungry to learn and took on every challenge happily. We were able to move our launch date up by at least a month and a half thanks to them!

After 3 months, they left for a full-time job at another company. What a success story!

Our team became reliant on that extra help so I posted in Thinkful slack again, this time mentioning the success story. We were able to bring on FIVE people this time. Two weeks in, and they were referring their friends too but we were stretched too thin to take on more.

That's when the idea for Prentus hit me. I needed to connect startups like mine with all these students that needed a way to break into the industry.

This was on Monday, 4/13 and after a few sleepless nights thinking about it, I decided to close my previous business for good on 4/16. My team was shocked at the speed and tried to convince me but this problem was something I truly cared about. A stark contrast from my other influencer-related company.

What a sense of relief to be serving the customers I want with a product that matters. Time to start from scratch and build something awesome.