One Month Rails (YC S13) Teaches How To Build Your Startup While Learning To Code
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
Incidentally, as long as I'm up:
A little birdy says that "Submit" is the worst possible copy you could use for that button, unless you're running an S&M site. Try [Get A FREE 7-day Video Crash Course] rather than "Sign Up For..." and [Send Me My Videos].
(As always: do it in an A/B test if you don't believe me. This one is generally cough fairly compelling.)
As for market saturation, I think it depends on what your thoughts are about theories that some futurists (like Doug Rushkoff) have put forward saying that one day everyone will have to learn how to code. If everyone will one day learn how to code, then it's a pretty big market.
Aren't you being too literal here? Vast majority of internet users have been trained to see "submit" for "okay I'm done filling out this form, next!".
But if you don't have an email form doing thousands of impressions and want to just bet on this one, your bet would be a very bad bet to make.
The reality is that you're limited in the number of A/B tests you can do, both by traffic but also by your own time and resources. So you can run a test against something that is generally accepted (like what text works on a button) or against more important changes like headline copy or page layout.
The rest of your comment is a straw man fallacy. Of course you can't test everything. But, you know...it might just be reasonable to test the conversion button on your landing page, especially when someone who does a lot of testing tells you that it has a big impact. Because that's a more informative prior than "we should just use the default behavior".
No-one ever got fired for buying IBM.
On a side note, this landing page is actually an A/B test we're performing on the effectiveness of an email drip campaign vs a hard sell to signup (which is currently still up on the homepage). The writer of the article was part of a 10% of people that were redirected from the homepage to the try landing page and so he hardlinked directly to that page in the article.
That's our mistake.
Also as a side note, you privacy statement link is 404ing.
Edit: got the email! thanks
Is this the same course offered on Udemy? (https://www.udemy.com/how-to-teach-yourself-to-code/)
Potential suggestion: add a syllabus or at least a (more) concrete summary of what course takers will learn/build. I read the 'Sign up for this course and you'll learn' section and it's very thin on the specifics. The Udemy page is much better in this aspect, IMHO.
Mailchimp's autoresponders can't be set for immediately, only "within an hour" because I don't think they want people using it as a transactional email / content delivery system
Good call on the 404. That's bad. Fixing now.
OneMonthRails is a start, especially if you want to learn how to program, but I find it unethical to insinuate that one can land a $120k/yr job after 1 month of training.
For all my fellow Canadian compatriots, I read the marketing page of OneMonthRails and see visions of Tom Vu [1] trying to tell us about his guaranteed technique to becoming rich (later found out as the greater fool theory).
One of those dev bootcamps sales pitch was the average coder makes $83,000.
This one is pushing the ante to $120k.
Do you know why developers get paid on average $120,000 or more at some of the world's fastest growing companies?
It's because of various contributing factors. But for $49 you can buy the dream.
This seems like a fine thing for someone who just wants to learn to sling together an app and learn some of the "Rails incantations." If they're self-directed, maybe they'll dive deeper. DBC eschews that -- one of the first things they try to unteach students is that programming is about memorizing a bunch of magic spells.
What's the different with peepcode, net tuts+, codeschool and co? What is the bigger picture here? Is this just a guy who was running a successful Skillshare course and decided to spin a company out of it and through his personality got into YC? Why even go through YC if he already had 5000+ student on skillshare?
Something I'm not seeing here?
We're trying to take a more human approach to learning about technology. There are live chat and discussion sections as well as in-person study groups which is not something you'll find on peepcode and the rest. On top of that, you don't end up finishing any of those resources with a live product that can serve as the MVP for the company you're trying to build.
Just some thoughts, though I'd love to get your take.
Rails hasn't used named_scope in a long time :)
I also found this bit to be just wrong
"I'm not even joking when I say this, but I think some of the resources out there make it intentionally hard for non-technical people to start learning. Maybe they want to keep this stuff a secret."
I don't believe for a second this exists. It's actually kind of offensive.
I've always loved technology but never had any coding skills whatsoever. To be honest, I didn't know where to begin. I would run a few searches and play around with a hello world tutorial and pretty much drop it from there.
Then I found this awesome speech by a guy named Mattan Griffel. He was speaking at an NYU event (pretty sure) and discussing how he learned to code in one month. I was blown away. It was like I was lost in the jungle blindfolded and someone handed me a map and a light. I finally had a way that all of this was accessible.
Griffel used a combination of a Lynda course, a Stanford course and Hartl's Rails tutorial to teach himself but in the meantime he had put together this course to learn Rails in a month.
Disclaimer: I didn't learn Rails in a month. I completed the course but I still can't build the next Facebook/Twitter/Linkedin/Pinterest on my own if it didn't have the exact same features that Griffel's tutorial had.
Here's what it did do for me. For a person coming from a completely non-technical background, I had a roadmap. Terms, technologies, languages, databases are all things that are obvious to any CS/EE major but totally baffling to an outsider. Griffel's tutorial brought me into the coding world. Eventually, I was so blown away by what I learned that I wanted to do this as a profession which led me to the Flatiron School and I hope to pursue a new career as a web developer.
The One Month Rails course gave me the confidence to see that it really isn't all that difficult to learn this stuff. Time, dedication and perseverance are your friends. If you're completely new to programming, want to know the lay of the land, and have no idea what Ruby, Rails, Git, Heroku and jQuery is, this course is exactly what you need.
Mattan, thank you.
It was not a good first encounter with Ruby or Rails, but a decent class once you have some background experience.
The class moves too fast, and he needs to practice his presentation skills (he types something out in a video, and switches screens immediately). Also, the material was not entirely up to date with the gems.
That being said, I really enjoyed the class and would take more in a similar fashion.
It was pretty good. Two things sort of dismay me though when I see something like this:
1. There are lots of free resources available online, like the above mentioned blogpost. We need to make a better case for open and free learning.
2. All start-ups are forms and the display of the information entered into those forms according to nearly all of the start-ups I run into in NYC.
1. Learning has always been free! (Okay, almost always.) You can walk into any library and pick up a book on any subject. But most people don't do it because there are too many resources out there and they're not synthesized in a way that is catered towards a particular audience. People still pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to go to universities to learn topics that they could theoretically learn on their own. Why? Because text is really energy-intensive to consume. I don't feel like having a ton of low quality resources online is not the solution. That being said, I'm all about reducing the cost of learning and making it more accessible, which is why I hope that this class can provide a similar quality of education as $10-$18k intensive (like Hack Reactor or General Assembly) for people who can't afford that.
2. 95% of products are forms and the display of that information - that's correct. That's why I don't think it's so hard for beginners to learn, and that's what makes Ruby on Rails particularly powerful. It's just tools for building forms, pulling data out of databases, and displaying that data in a pretty way.
Anyway the intention is to make a good first encounter with Ruby on Rails, so if you have any feedback about what concepts were too advanced or confusing, let me know at mattan@onemonthrails.com
As it stands now, the YC-backed startup has over 9,000 paying student customers, with a month of tutorials costing $49.95.
I'm guessing earlier signups got preferential pricing, but there's still a potential for $100k+ per month revenues there.. that's pretty striking! :)
(I only noticed because I've been a bit obsessive about twitter followers as of late, and noticed that they followed me.)
Besides, the canonical Ruby book is the "Pickaxe Book." What other metaphor fits?
"The email parameter should include an email, euid, or leid key"
Wow, for something targeting those who aren't yet coders, that's a scary error message. (I've been dev'ing professionally since 1998, and I'm taken aback)
Rails is currently a buzzword for those just starting to try to learn how to code - very attractive. But in reality, Rails is not the best way to start learning code, it's a framework for experienced developers. Rails takes a ton of shortcuts and pushes a lot of things under the hood. This is very convenient if you understand the concepts that rails has abstracted, but very dangerous if you don't. Rails makes it easy to set up a basic rest MVC app for testing, but making a full blown custom web app requires a good understanding of many concepts, some of which are detailed below:
- The principles of computer programming - SQL and relational database design - HTTP protocol, how it works - MVC architecture, why and how it operates - HTML, CSS, Javascript, and Ruby - proficient at least - The difference between client and server and how they interact - Basic web security - The command line and UNIX
I could go on with that list, but you get the idea. Building a real rails app is tough, and requires a large stack of knowledge that simply cannot be amassed within one month.
So how does Mattan handle this? He does away with the part where you actually learn any of these things. In One Month Rails, you are quickly introduced to concepts, then given code you can copy and paste in order to make it work.
For students, this is fantastic. They are attracted by the word "Rails" and the concept of becoming a programmer in one month (and allegedly making over $100k/year after that, as he claims). Everything works great, and it comes really easy. You skip the whole hard part where you actually need to understand things, and are just fed answers that always work. You look at him type the code, then you copy it exactly yourself. Developing an app suddenly became easy.
Fast forward to the end of the course. You have a working clone of twitter or pinterest or something, and life is good. You made this all yourself - you put in the code, ran the migrations, added the twitter bootstrap classes, etc. You are asked to review the course and of course you give Mattan a glowing review. It really worked - within a month you were able to build a full web app on your own!
By now, most of you will recognize where the scam is. You paid for the course, you finished it and you gave it a great review. But you also have not learned anything at all. And as soon as you actually need to go build an app or apply for a job, you'll quickly realize that you are out of luck. This is a successful and obviously profitable class, but at it's core, it's a scam. And to add to that, Mattan is at most a junior level developer himself.
This post is not here with the intent to be mean to Mattan or his company - he is a great guy, and the company has obviously been successful. I just wrote this here to tell the truth about what the company is doing and how it operates. I would love to see stats on how many people who have taken Mattan's class have gone on to actually having a career as a developer. I'm willing to bet it's 1% or less. But prove me wrong, please.
We often forget that products can evolve. I'm not pretending that I've come up with the best version of what this product could eventually be. But I've validated the need for a product, released a version of it that has a modicum of value, and an overwhelming majority of the people who have completed the class are incredibly excited and thankful. I just got this email today (completely unsolicited):
"Subj: $100K in wasted programming costs. OMR liberated me!
Hi Mattan,
I followed your Rails course and created Shruffle.com. It's a simple way for businesses to do text marketing. Nothing too fancy, but I'm marketing it to local restaurants and barber shops around where I live, and have been getting good responses.
Just wanted to say a big THANK YOU for making a kick-ass course. I wasted so much time hiring wack ass programmers in the past who never understood what I wanted to do half the time. Over the course of 5-6 years I must have spent at least $100K in wasted programming costs for various projects that never went anywhere. Your course liberated me....now I can build anything that I dream of without spending a penny.
Most of the other courses were a big freaking waste of time. I was looking for something that showed me how to do basic things quickly (login/logout, validations, etc etc), and your course did just that. Next step is to incorporate Stripe for payments."
Now I'll admit that I'm not happy with what % of people finish the course (it's higher than average for an online class but still relatively low) and I'm not happy that I don't teach enough to give people the flexibility to build more than just a fairly simple CRUD app, but rest assured that as the creator of this product, I'm more critical than anyone else of its flaws.
The first version was 3 hours, I took a lot of feedback and completely redid the lessons to turn it into a much longer class. The course has been redone 3 time so far and I'm currently in the process of expanding it out into a much larger one that teaches people the various concepts of web applications within the contexts of different kinds of applications (an about me, a wordpress, a yelp, a pinterest) which will give people more of that understanding that we're both looking for.
Anyway, as I'm sure you can imagine, it hurts when someone takes a product you've spent a lot of time on and calls it a "scam".
Are you at all confident that you have taught people how to research and understand what they are looking at?
I've known plenty of people who can follow patterns and regurgitate what they have seen, but have little to no ability to actually create. If what they want to do deviates just a little, they are toast.
Students who have taken the class have definitely figured out way more complicated stuff afterwards using some of the techniques we teach. Whether this person in particular will be able to figure out how to incorporate Stripe, I'm not sure.
At first, it might be copying. But having something workable that you can tweak can give you a good idea of how something works. After enough time tweaking, you can start building new things based on those best practices/examples.
I understand that this comment probably wasn't what you wanted to hear, and I apologize for that. Like I mentioned in the comment, it was not made out to be an intent to insult you, and I did acknowledge that I think you are a great guy, and it's obviously a successful product (but that has nothing to do with my criticism). I'm not here to troll, I'm here to push you to be better.
I think you haven't interpreted the word "scam" correctly. I believe that you have good intentions, but regardless of that, this product is dishonest. It says it will teach you how to be a rails developer, and it doesn't do that. It implies that you will be ready for six figure salaries after taking the course, and you won't. I know that you would call this "marketing", and sure it has worked. But what are you after in building this company? Money slash success, or the core reasons that you set out to build this company? You know - you mission: to really teach people how to code.
I think what you might be missing is that you don't learn how to code by cloning popular websites, and copy-pasting code someone else hands you. You learn to code by understanding how things work. Understanding how computers work sure helps. Understanding how the ruby language works helps too. Understanding how the web works, how databases work... all the things I mentioned in my previous comment. Then you take this general knowledge of how things work to build what you want, whatever that is -- whether it's a clone of a popular app (which it never is) or something entirely new and custom that nobody else has done (which is always the case).
I'm sure you are familiar with the flatiron school in NYC. They have a similar mission, but are actually doing it right (to be fair, also charging a hell of a lot more). You guys both approach the same problem, but get vastly different results. In the flatiron school, you spend full time for months learning and understanding how things work, and when you come out of it, you get a full-time job as a developer. In one month rails, you spend a couple weeks on and off watching online videos that skip all the underlying theory and come out with a low-quality pinterest clone and not even close to enough skills to land an internship.
What is your goal for one month rails? To make money, or to add real value to peoples lives? To have techcrunch articles written about you, or to actually promote the incredible mindset and skills that are building, creating, writing code? I think we both know that you are aimed after the wrong thing, and that's why I'm pushing you to do it right.
I'm making a bet here (and all startups are bets after all) that there are some people who can become good developers but learn differently from everyone else. Let's please at least try to diversify the way we teach things, at least in the interest of testing a hypothesis, instead of just accepting the standard dogma?
So the idea is this: get people genuinely interested in code by showing them what it can do. Isn't that how great teachers teach at the end of the day? Inspire in them a yearning to learn more.
Plus I think it's a real shame that people learning coding totally out of context from its application. People finish Codecademy not understanding how the hell anything they learned actually fits into a web application.
My goal is to give people a broad understanding of the various parts of a web application: the view, the model, the controller, routing, deployment, version control, gems, StackOverflow, etc. How many other online resources are there than cover all that for beginners in one place? Not many.
In addition, if you don't have interest in things like where commas go, it's pretty likely that you don't have an interest in writing code, since that's what code is all about, once you are on your own at least.
I think defining the theory of learning through understanding and aptitude as a 'dogma' is a little bit of a far reach. But what you are saying about the experiment does hold value. It would be easy to figure out the output of an experiment like this - take the flatiron school as all the way off the understanding and commitment end, and take your course as the option all the way off the other end, low commitment, little understanding. Then compare the outputs between the two -- how many graduates does each approach have into jobs in development?
Now as you go down the response here, you are getting more and more reasonable with your claims, which is good. Next, you are saying that the real purpose of your course is to inspire students. And that's totally fair - I can see that. Obviously you have done will with this: look at your reviews and the number of students you have had. You are a smart and passionate guy, and you can inspire your students.
BUT this is exactly my issue with the course. You claim to teach students to code, but you are not teaching them to code. You are exposing them to code and trying to get them motivated, with minimal real learning. You are, as you say in the last paragraph, giving them a broad, high-level overview of what it would be like to code, if they were to learn. If this is what your course does, this is what you should say it does.
As you get to the bottom of your comment, you further and further solidify the real purpose of your course. I like this, and where you have gone with it. I don't think you are going down a bad road. I do think though, that you need to be clear and honest about the goals of your course. And if you do, it will likely mean sacrificing some money, because what you're selling right now is an impossible dream, and lots of people buy into that stuff - that's marketing. But trust me, honesty and good work will come back and repay you, and the opposite will come back and bite... whether it's now or later, it is bound to happen.
Mattan, I wish you luck with this company. I wouldn't spend so much time here anonymously writing to you if I didn't care, at least a little. If there's anything you take away from this discussion, let it be that you should always be clear, honest, and transparent with your work. I promise that if you do, things will turn out better.
To be fair, students at the flatiron school would be more likely to obtain a job simply because of the resources they have put in. Months of their lives and $12,000 per student. But to level the playing field I believe that for every $12,000 spent on one month rails by students (245 students) will produce more people who will go on to develop at a professional level than $12,000 spent at the flatiron school (One student). I believe this is what Mattan is after with the course, the ability to show people it isn't impossible to learn to code while exposing them to working examples and a plethora of resources that are not common knowledge outside of the tech industry. On another note, I also wouldn't be surprised to see more than 1 out of 244 go on to attend a dev boot camp like the flatiron school after finishing one month rails.
Yeah, that's not a myth.
I think the question is even broader than that: how many people who buy into these programs will be working as developers in five or ten years?
I'm a self-taught programmer, so I know first-hand that you don't need a computer science degree to learn how to build web applications that provide value to real people. But I think some of the programs out there aren't realistic about what it takes to become a decent developer over the long haul.
In my opinion the viability of the 0-to-$120,000 in x months pitch is primarily a function of the current market and little else. The bad news: the market is not static, and when the next downturn arrives, a lot of jobs that exist today will likely go away, even if the tech industry doesn't see a precipitous drop in jobs overall.
A couple of points on this:
1. A lot of people in tech today didn't live through the first .com boom, or if they did, have chosen to forget it. There was a very similar dynamic: tons of people rushed to learn HTML, web design, etc. If you lived in the Bay Area and knew how to, say, code an HTML table, chances were you could land a high-paying job at a startup. Post-crash, a good number of these .com refugees left technology, moved into non-technical roles or went back to school.
2. If you're serious about a career as a developer, it's wise to consider what you choose to learn. From what I see personally, a lot of the demand for Ruby on Rails developers comes from "startups." There's nothing inherently wrong with that, but somebody just starting out who hopes to be employed as a well-paid developer five years from now shouldn't assume that knowing how to develop a Rails CRUD app with a Bootstrap front-end is a perpetual guarantee of a six-figure salary. As you note, there's more to development than a framework, but frameworks do so much these days that new developers often see little incentive to go beyond the framework.
I worked at a multi-campus, private college that had a series of classes for the MCSE certification program. Many of the students had no previous computer experience that would prepare them for the topics, and were told by the recruiters that riches await in the fast-paced world of network administration! The unfortunate truth is that most of those students weren't all that motivated. It wasn't possible for me, as a teacher, to give them every real-world scenario I could (I was a working network admin at the time), but I did my best. If they weren't motivated to study and to experiment on their own, they weren't going to get much for their money. They'd pass the class but they weren't going to pass Microsoft's tests or qualify for many positions if they weren't willing to go beyond the curriculum on their own time.
It seems to me that what Mattan is offering is no different than numerous other educational opportunities. Students will get out of it what they put into it. If they want to copy/paste his code and not ask themselves how it works, fiddle with it and see what happens, try to extend its functionality with their own ideas, then they probably weren't cut out for programming anyway. That's not his problem; it's theirs.
Do I have to have a Mac for your course? A Windows Laptop won't do? I want to make sure I don't get caught with the wrong hardware.
I asked YC a couple of days back, and most said 'no', although the q was not specific to your program: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6152605
Which Programming Language should I choose?
Truth is, in a world where everybody is special, nobody is.