What's up, everybody? This is Cortland from IndieHackers.com, and you're listening to
the IndieHackers podcast. On this show, I talked to the founders behind profitable internet
businesses and try to get a sense of how they got to where they are today. How do they make
decisions both in their personal lives and at their companies? And what exactly makes
your businesses tick? The goal here, as always, so that the rest of us can learn from their
examples and go on to build our own profitable internet companies. Today, I'm talking to Quincy
Larson, the creator of Free Code Camp. Quincy was once a school director who turned into a
self-taught software engineer and decided he wanted to teach people how to code in a way
that's much more effective than the way that he learned himself. Today, his platform, Free Code
Camp, has turned into a community of millions of people from all over the world who are learning
to code together. So Quincy, welcome to the show, and thanks so much for coming on.
Absolutely. Thanks for having me, Cortland.
So we've got a lot of people listening who are eager to start their own internet business,
but who don't know how to code. And they're not sure if they should learn, they're not
sure where to get started, they're not sure if it's even possible for them to learn successfully
in the amount of time that they have. So let me just ask you right out of the gate here,
Quincy, what should these people be aware of? And what are some of the secrets behind successfully
learning how to code?
Well, I tell everybody who's learning to code, there are two things that you should start
doing immediately. One, you should try to carve out at least 30 minutes a day to just
sit down and code. And that's every day, try not to take any days off. The reason for that
is the speed of forgetting is quite rapid. And you definitely don't want to backslide
by taking a day off. So even 30 minutes a day can make a huge difference.
The second thing is to hang out with other people who code. You can go to hackathons,
hang out at hackerspaces, go to tech talks in your city after work, anything you can
do to meet other people. There are free code camp communities in most major cities around
the world. You can go and hang out with them and code. That'll give you the positive social
peer pressure to keep moving forward and also help you build your network so that when you
go out to try to get a job, you'll already know a whole lot of people and they may be
able to say, Hey, my company's looking to hire somebody. Why don't you come interview
here?
I love that advice about creating positive social pressure. And I think the same applies
to entrepreneurs, actually. It's so tough to build a business completely on your own.
So ideally, you can meet and surround yourself with other founders and like minded entrepreneurs
who can help you stay motivated and accountable and create some sort of positive feedback
loop that you can get from your environment.
Let's talk about free code camp. Because you're teaching people to code at a scale that I've
never seen before. Just how big is free code camp and how does it all work?
Free code camp is freecodecamp.org, the core learning platform. Almost a million people
use it every month. And then we also have several other places where we publish helpful
learning content, publish video tutorials on YouTube. We publish lots of technical articles
and how-to articles on the free code camp medium publication. And then we have a free
code camp podcast as well. And basically, it's just a large open source community, where
we have tons of contributors, more than 1000 that are creating different resources and
sharing them with one another.
That's a ton of stuff. And I can't wait to get into the story behind how you actually
start and where you actually start if you want to build an organization that does so
many things. But before that, can you share with us a little bit about your business model?
How do you make money and how much money do you make?
Free code camp is a 501c3 nonprofit. We're classified as a public charity in the United
States. And what that means is basically anybody who donates to free code camp, their donations
are tax deductible. So we have a lot of people within the free code camp community who set
up recurring monthly donations. We have almost 4,000 people who are donating $4 or $5 a month.
I think the average donation is about $4.50. So if you do the math, that's about $20,000
a month that we have for a budget.
That's going to be interesting to talk about because I tried donations when I first started
Indie Hackers. And it did not go over well. I made hardly any money at all. So I'd love
to pick your brain about how you actually got that to work.
Before we get into that, let's talk about how you started free code camp. What gave
you the impetus to even create your own company like this?
Well, I was working as a teacher and a school director for the first 10 years of my career
here in the US and in China. And I didn't know how to code. I wasn't technical at all.
My wife would set up the Wi-Fi router every time we moved, so I just couldn't figure it
out. And I just didn't have the patience or the desire to really dig deep. I was very
much just a consumer of technology like everyone else is and not really a producer of technology,
if you think of developers as that. And we were at the school and I had a staff of a
dozen or so teachers and a bunch of admin and they would spend a big chunk of the day
chained to their desk doing paperwork, doing various back office workflows.
And I thought, this isn't really helping the students that much. I bet the students would
be a lot happier if they were able to get in more FaceTime with these teachers and administrators.
So I just started Googling around and figured out a few basic ways that I could automate
a lot of these processes, just using basic scripts that run in Microsoft Excel, using
a tool called auto hotkey on Windows to programmatically click on different form fields and fill in
different forms. And just by doing that with my very cursory understanding of even the
most fundamental programming, I was able to save a considerable amount of time for my
admin staff and my teachers. And they were able to spend a lot more time with students
and our school became basically the most popular in the entire school system. A bunch of people
were transferring in because they just had a much better experience there. So that was
really when I realized, wow, just a little bit of technical skill can make such a huge
difference. And that set me on the journey to, at first, I was just going to build like
a school management system that would automate a lot of these things. And it'd be like a
formal software tool that you could deploy. But I decided that instead of doing that,
I really needed to learn to code first. And then I'd be able to build a better tool. And
along that journey, I realized how hard it was to learn to code and how there wasn't
a lot of clarity. It was a very ambiguous process. And it wasn't really clear what should
be learned in what sequence and what should be learned at all. And slowly, the idea of
creating like a curriculum emerged.
It's interesting to hear how you stumbled onto this problem and came up with a solution
because entrepreneurs are always in search of valuable problems that are worth solving.
And it's also interesting to hear that you described yourself as not really being a technologist
and yet you had such a systematic and engineering minded way of making your school more efficient.
What do you think it was about you that allowed you to see this problem that others weren't
solving and where others were just accepting the status quo?
I was really passionate about our school. And I just was very bent on making it the
best school it could be. I felt that the students really deserved for the school to be amazing.
And that we weren't as amazing as we could be. And so I guess if I had to point to one
thing and just be that I wanted good outcome for my students, just like every teacher.
And that was what drove me down that path.
Yeah, being passionate about something and actually caring about the outcomes gives you
such an advantage in discovering impactful problems that are worth solving. And what's
interesting about your path is that you ended up, as you said, discovering another problem,
which is that it's very hard and confusing to learn how to code. Between both of these
problems, how did you decide which one you wanted to work on?
Along the path, again, there was just, it was such a nebulous process trying to learn
to code. It really drove home to me that, sure, I could write this tool that would help
schools operate more efficiently, or I could create a tool that would help people create
other tools. And it was that kind of revelation where I could have a lot of impact just by
teaching people technology rather than trying to build software for teachers. That's when
I decided this is something I should pursue.
So let's talk about you learning to code, because I'm sure that the process of you deciding
what to do with free code camp and how to teach other people to code was heavily influenced
by your own experiences. So what was that process like for you? How did you decide where
to learn from, what to learn first, etc?
Well, I was in a very fortuitous position because I'd been saving compulsively throughout
my career. And I'd been doing side hustles where I'd buy a bunch of stuff on eBay, or
I'd buy stuff on Craigslist and then sell it on eBay. And I made like tens of thousands
of dollars a year just doing that. So I was saving all that money. And I wasn't sure exactly
what I was saving for maybe to buy a house in California, which in California, I think
they just released the number in order to be able to afford a median house in San Francisco,
you need to be making $330,000 a year. So I was saving, I wasn't sure exactly what for
but I had this, this war chest. And so I sat down with my wife and said, could I quit my
job? Could I leave being a school director? And she had a job. So we had benefits through
that. And I was able to convince her and you know, she's an amazing woman. And I'm eternally
grateful that she allowed me to go forward with this, because it was years of me not
having any stable income. Basically, I just, I was convinced that I needed to learn to
code and I needed to go deep. And I wouldn't be able to do that while I was working full
time. Now, at the time, there weren't resources that would allow you to do this. But I would
definitely argue that with free code camp and a lot of the other great resources out
there, it's now possible to learn to code while you're working full time. And in fact,
I would encourage people not to quit their day job if they need the money. So I sat down
at my kitchen table. And basically, I took a photo, I dressed in a suit just to convey
the seriousness of this endeavor, I was going to learn to code. And this was the first day
the first Monday after I'd left my job. And I just bought this, you know, old netbook
and installed Linux on it and started learning Emacs and all these additional tools like
I learned both vim and Emacs, I learned all these Linux related technologies that I don't
ever use, I spent an inordinate amount of time, just thrashing, basically. And it wasn't
until like seven months into the process that I actually, you know, built something that
I was proud of, because I spent so much time just on tooling. And there was just so much
angst about what I should focus my energy on. I went to a whole lot of free online courses
through edX and Coursera. And I read a whole bunch of books on programming. And I would
just work through those books, work through those courses. And I there was a hackerspace
in Santa Barbara, California, where I was living at the time. And I just hop on the
bus and go to the hackerspace, sit down and basically work from eight to six every day
in the hackerspace alone, while everybody else is at work. And just being surrounded
by those dead Roombas and those Arduino boards and all that stuff kind of like got me excited.
So I would also go to a hackathon every single weekend, I would take buses down to San Diego,
up to San Francisco, wherever, and I would just sit down and try to build a team and
build a product. And after you know, a dozen or so of these, I started actually winning
some. And that was really positive feedback. But on a whole, I'd describe the entire experience
the first seven months of me coding as just being very ambiguous. And I wasted a tremendous
amount of time, there was a happy ending, you know, I got a job as a developer. And
once I got that job, so much stuff started making more sense when I was working with
a team. So working with a team using version control, all these technologies, that really
helped me solidify my understanding of software development and a lot of the best practices.
And I think a lot of that you can learn from contributing to open source software, which
is why it's such a critical part of the free code camp curriculum. But at the time, it
just hadn't even occurred to me that that was an option.
Let's rewind for a second and talk about some of these side businesses you started where
you were selling things off of Craigslist and eBay in order to help build up your war
chest because I had no idea about any of this stuff. What are some of the other businesses
you started? And what did you learn from doing that?
I learned a lot along the way, like at one point, I bought, I don't know, like 10 vending
machines and put them around town. And I didn't make any money. But fortunately, the guy who
I bought them from like took pity on me and like bought them back from me. I didn't lose
too much money on that. But I learned that if it's easy to do, there's going to be a
ton of competition. And you want to definitely go upmarket and put in the time and energy
because a vast majority of people won't put in that time and energy to develop advanced
skills. They won't put in that time and energy to build a reputation for themselves. They're
just going for the quick money. So that was one big takeaway from my very, very early
experience with entrepreneurship.
What was the most successful thing that you did as an entrepreneur?
Nothing. Everything was a catastrophic failure. Not catastrophic in the sense that I went
bankrupt or anything, because I was always very careful not to invest too heavily. And
maybe that's why none of those projects succeeded. With Free Code Camp, I think I invested something
like $120,000 during the first couple of years just on server costs and other expenses. So
I definitely had a lot of skin in that game. Now it all worked out and Free Code Camp were
basically break even. And we have a board of directors and they've voted to give me
some compensation. So my wife is not angry at me anymore. And things are going well.
Let's talk about these first few years of Free Code Camp. When did you actually start
writing the first lines of code, start coming up with some sort of a plan for what you're
going to create and get to work on Free Code Camp as a real idea rather than just a dream?
I started with Free Code Camp. It was born out of another aborted project, which was
called Course Forward. And me and several of my friends tried to build this platform
that was basically a recommendation engine for learning new skills, whatever technical
skills you needed to learn. So it would pull in your LinkedIn profile and figure out what
your current skills were based on your work experience and things like that. And then
you would say what field you wanted to go into. Let's say you were hypothetically in
business development and you wanted to move into machine learning. Then it would figure
out based on millions of job postings that I'd pulled out and mined, it would figure
out what the skills you needed to know to move into machine learning were. I'd also
pulled down tens of thousands of online courses and books and it would build a curriculum
for you to advance from where you are now to where you need to be to start applying
for jobs.
That's pretty cool.
Well, that project, it turns out people don't want to commit thousands of hours of studying
to a curriculum that an algorithm generates within less than a second. So it was a non-starter
and nobody ever really cared about it. That was one lesson I learned. I spent 18 months
building out all the different features of this and ultimately threw 100% of that code
away. None of that code is being used for anything. And then one day I said, oh man,
this was a disaster and I can go get a job. I had some job offers at the time, just people
who'd noticed me and wanted to hire me as a developer. And I was like, I could go get
a job or I could try this one thing. So I sat down and I said, what if I took away everything
except for the one skill that everybody should really learn, the one killer skill of the
early 21st century that people need to know, JavaScript.
So I just started building up a curriculum that would teach you basic JavaScript and
web development. And it was just this list of maybe 15 different online courses that
people would take. And then I deployed a chat room, got the website live, it all took about
three days and I had a prototype up and then I started blogging and tweeting. And gradually
people started hanging out in the chat room and working through it together. And it sort
of took off from there.
The first project you worked on with the algorithmically generated curriculum follows such a typical
pattern that developers sometimes stumble into, which is that we get overly excited about
what can be done, what we can use technology to do, how fun it will be to build it. And
we don't focus enough on whether or not it should be done. We don't talk to people to
see if they're actually going to use it or if they trust it or if they'll pay for it
or if it's valuable. And so we can end up spending months if not years working on things
that turn out just to be duds in the end. And it's such a painful lesson to learn the
hard way.
Yeah. And to be fair, I had plenty of people around me. I was in San Francisco at the time
and I was surrounded by entrepreneurs and developers and people were like, oh, you should
really test this with a bunch of users. Or how are you verifying that you have product
market fit? Do you have any traction? Asking those kinds of questions. They weren't asking
me like, how fast is your recommendation engine? How accurate is it? How many resources do
you have in the total set?
People weren't asking things like that. People were asking about traction. And I totally
had read all these books on Agile and things like that. And I just dismissed myself as
like, oh, this is special. This is an exception to that because this isn't something that
people know they want yet. And yeah, all the signs were there, but I was too naive to admit
that I was going down the wrong path.
It's tough. It's psychological. And you get really excited about what you're working on.
You've already put so much time into it. So there's a cost aspect of it as well. And it's
always easy to convince yourself, oh, just a few more features. And then I'll start testing
on users, just a few more steps down my roadmap. And then I'll be able to really show it to
people and then they'll really like it.
Yeah. And with Free Code Camp, I did a full reversal. I said, learn to code for free. That's
what Free Code Camp is. It's learn to code. It's not learn what skills you need to be
able to become a machine learning engineer if you're already a business development engineer.
It was very clear by your proposition, easily communicated. The name Free Code Camp itself
is pretty on the nose. And so people knew pretty much what they were getting when they
came to the website. And that was profound. It just cleared so much of the communication
hurdles so that people could within a couple seconds, which is all most people will give
your website, determine whether this was something that it was worth their time.
How long did it take you to get up this like super minimal first version of Free Code Camp?
So I had a closet in my one bedroom apartment that my wife and I lived in the Bay Area.
And I would go in there because it was the only quiet place. And I just sit in there
microwave some burritos. And I think I spent three days just in there in that closet on
my little Ikea table, building up the prototype.
And how did you find your very first few users after you finished building this?
At the time, I think I had like 10,000 Twitter followers or so. So I was just tweeting maniacally
and messaging people like, hey, I was telling you about this other project. Well, now I've
got an even cooler project. Check this out. And so I was getting like, just me personally
reaching out to people and doing that I was able to get a decent number of people to come
and try it. And the thing was, it was fairly sticky. That was the magic was people were
actually sticking around, they were creating accounts, they were working through the challenges
and marking them complete.
Because back then they weren't interactive with a test suite and everything that ran
against your code. It was just self-reported like, yeah, I just completed this course over
on Stanford's online course page. And now I'm back here and I'm going to tackle this
next one, the CS50 course from Harvard or whatever. So people would report that and
then the chat room started buzzing. And people were tweeting about it and stuff like that.
And that's kind of how I knew, okay, this is different from last time. This isn't crickets.
This is actually people who seem to care. Then I wrote some articles just about my own
coding journey and other ideological stuff about why people should learn to code and
several times I was on the top of Hacker News and Reddit and places like that. And that
just drove even more traffic and of that huge influx of traffic, a lot of those people stuck
around. So that's kind of how we got the early critical mass.
Those are two things that a lot of entrepreneurs really struggle with. First, driving that
initial traffic and getting your first few users or customers in the door can be difficult
if you don't already have an audience and you don't know how to reach somebody else's.
Second, building a sticky product that users actually want to come back to is so difficult.
And I think the typical story is that somebody will launch, things might go well, three weeks
later they look up and nobody is using their product.
What was it about Free Code Camp that kept people coming back? I mean, in part, learning
how to code is a long journey. So you really have to come back and be a repeat user if
you want to be serious. But do you also think it was crucial to have specific features like
the chat room and the social aspect that that provided?
I think the chat definitely helped. And now we're more emphasizing our forum than we are
a chat just because people are busy and they don't necessarily have time to sit around
and chat all day. They just want to get their answers and move back into coding. But that
chat room was absolutely critical early on. And there was a community that formed up there.
And we would hang out and spend all day in there just greeting every single person who
came in asking them about their goals and their aspirations. And a lot of people gradually
from within that chat room community started contributing to Free Code Camp because it
was open source. And as a result, it kept getting better.
So early on, I realized that there was this relationship like the resources help train
people in the community. And then they turn around and they improve those resources. So
it's a virtuous circle of Free Code Camp getting better. And the better it gets, the more people
come and the more people want to contribute.
It seems like you got a lot of things right out of the gate. You had a great content strategy.
You pretty much nailed down your messaging that was appealing to people. You had a way
for your product to be sticky. You even had a way to ensure that your product could grow
and improve without all that work falling onto your shoulders because you were capitalizing
on efforts and help from your users.
How much of this was stuff that you planned out in advance based on your learning some
earlier failures? And how much of this just kind of went right incidentally?
Well, reality is very complicated. I think that luck plays a massive factor in pretty
much anything. And I attribute most of my success just luck. I definitely was able to
capitalize on that luck when I saw a huge community forming and like, hey, everybody,
let's really clarify the contributing.md file on GitHub. Let's really spend a lot of time
getting on at the time we were using a tool called ScreenHero, getting on ScreenHero sessions
so I can help people get set up and hey, why don't you work on this? What are you interested
in?
I would always ask people, what are you interested in? And then based on that, then they would
say, oh, then they would respond. And I would turn around and say, well, we've got this
that you can work on. So matching people's work to their interests was a critical thing
that I think I got right. And the fact that it was clear that this was always going to
be free because I said publicly, repeatedly, this will always be free. This is open source.
The genie is out of the bottle. We're not going to turn around and profit at your expense
or anything like that. And I think because of that, the interests were aligned. Everybody
wanted to be a part of building this. What I like to look at is kind of the Wikipedia
for structured learning as opposed to Wikipedia for facts, which is what Wikipedia is. We're
hoping that Free Code Camp can gradually become that place where you learn specific skills.
Let's talk more about this open source community that you've got going on. You're very involved
in actually interacting with the members of your community and recognizing their skills
and directing them to contribute the most effectively to Free Code Camp's development.
How can other people do what you've done and grow their own communities full of people
who help them build their product?
Well, a lot of it is just people like helping one another. And I think that it's great. And
I like helping people. And that's why I created Free Code Camp. And you can harness that desire
to help one another, especially that non reciprocated like, no strings attached, here you go, this
is what you're looking for, right? This answers your questions. Does this get you unstuck?
That sort of interaction, you can put it on our forum, for example, or in chat, people
can ask for help with different things. And suddenly you have this huge community of people
who are turning around and helping one another. And it helps a lot that Free Code Camp is
a single linear curriculum, because it's kind of like the Appalachian Trail, like people
have been down that trail before and they can tell you what's up ahead.
So it's easy to turn around and pass knowledge back to people that are right behind you.
And so that progression, I would say was an unintentional structure, like I didn't design
it to be optimal for helping other people. But it just that that was an emergent property
of the curriculum.
Yeah, that's fascinating. And I think another benefit of this linear progression is recency.
If you're sort of helping to improve these lessons that you just now finished, then it's
fresh in your mind where you got stuck and how the lesson can be improved. And it's not
like something you're coming back to months later, you can really do a better job contributing.
So I think your system is naturally set up to be pretty advantageous for contributors.
Let's talk for a bit about the content behind Free Code Camp, because you've been able to
get numerous stories to the top of these highly trafficked distribution channels like Hacker
News and Reddit, and drive a lot more traffic to Free Code Camp. What's your strategy here?
And how do you do this so successfully?
Well, I'll tell you that anybody who says they have like some foolproof way of getting
on the front of Hacker News or Reddit, they're probably going to get flagged by the mods.
The mods aren't asleep at the wheel. Mods are very aggressive, especially on Reddit.
And my humble suggestion is do what I did, just follow the rules and try to come up with
compelling content and post it. And if it's compelling enough, other people will see it,
they'll bother upvoting it, they'll bother sharing it, and it'll start to build critical
mass. But it all comes back to substance. Are you saying something of substance or are
you just creating like a 600 word like LinkedIn style post about some platitude, right? Because
you just want to get people to look at it.
What in your mind constitutes substance, especially in the early days of Free Code Camp, because
I know that you've produced a ton of content since then. Were you thinking about what you
wrote differently back then? Or is it your opinion more or less been unchanged?
For the Free Code Camp community, there are two types of articles or videos that really
do well and really resonate with our readers and our viewers on YouTube. And that is one,
the really strong technical article that is written to be as understandable as possible.
The author is not trying to showcase that they're a quote unquote real developer, they're
taking time to break down things and they don't assume too much of your current knowledge.
And then the other type of content that works really well with our community is just anecdotal
stories where somebody talks about how they encountered a certain situation and how they
progressed like somebody's first hackathon experience or somebody's first open source
project or somebody who just got a job or somebody who had a failed interview at Amazon
or Google or something like that and then went on and got a job at Microsoft. So those
kinds of stories do really well.
How do you envision these stories and content in general fitting into the overall strategy
for Free Code Camp? Is this all stuff that you do to drive traffic and get more people
taking your courses? Or does it also fit into what you're doing in other ways?
Yeah, it's primarily it's a way that people hear about Free Code Camp and see it repeatedly.
You can only get to the front page of Hacker Noon or Reddit so many times with just your
core product, but if you are creating a whole lot of relevant content around that central
problem that you're addressing, in our case, helping people learn to code and get developer
jobs, then there are so many different angles you can take and people are going to read
it over and over. They're going to read stories in your publication or on your blog or they're
going to watch YouTube videos repeatedly. And each time they're going to see your logo
and they're going to understand that it's associated with a greater organization. And
over time, they're going to think, what's this Free Code Camp thing about? I keep seeing
it everywhere. Maybe I should check it out.
And that fundamental interaction of it's the 50th time you've encountered the word Free
Code Camp written on something and you're finally curious enough to actually go check
it out. That's exactly why content is so important for not just for keeping the current people
who are already in your community engaged in learning and benefiting, but also for bringing
in new people.
That makes so much sense. And I think a lot of founders get overly obsessed with launch.
This one big day right at the beginning, but they're not really aware of how they can use
content and storytelling to sort of get their app or their product back in front of the
same audiences over and over again in the future. One thing that's challenging is that
there's a huge variety of distribution channels and audiences and influencers you can use
to reach the people that you really want to reach with your content. How have you decided
with Free Code Camp what channels to target and how it has changed over time?
Well, for the most part, we don't do any spreading proactively. We just create the content and
it gets distributed through Medium. It gets distributed and we have about 420,000 followers
on Medium. On YouTube, we have like 270,000 subscribers. So we just publish the content
and people see it and then they go to Twitter, they go to Facebook and they submit it to
Reddit, they submit it to Hacker News. So basically, you create the content and if you
have impressed people in the past with them seeing relevant content and subscribing, they're
going to see it and they're going to go out and share it for you. And that's much healthier
because that's how it's supposed to work. You're not corrupting a system where you're
creating like sock-hopping accounts and trying to like get something uploaded on Reddit.
You're not just taking a link and spamming it to your friends saying, hey, go to Hacker
News and upvote my post that I just made there. Instead, what you're doing is you've got like
a genuine... You're playing by the rules and you genuinely have something that people actually
care about and it's not just going to get thrust up there and somebody's going to be
like, what the heck is this doing on the front page of Hacker News? This is lame. You know
what I'm saying? It's kind of like by playing by the rules and understanding how these platforms
are supposed to work, then you can just create content that will genuinely resonate with
the people on those platforms. And Reddit is very different from Hacker News.
The sort of things that we publish that do really well in Hacker News are often much
more technical. The sort of things that we publish that do really well on Reddit are
often much more motivational or just really cool like security exploits and things like
that all responsibly disclosed, of course. But those kinds of things grab a lot of attention
because they're compelling, not because we're trying to manufacture social proof.
I think one of the challenges that a lot of especially early stage founders face is they
don't have a lot of time. And they've got a lot of responsibilities besides telling stories
and writing blog posts, they need to write code, etc. How do you scale up a content operation
and how do you increase the number of stories that you're telling without taking up all
of your time personally as a founder?
Number two, how do you decide what's worth writing? I mean, you mentioned earlier that
you've kind of honed in on two different story formats that are really effective for you,
but how much time did it take you to narrow it down to those two?
Well, if you're truly in love with your problem that you're trying to solve, like I've been
for the last six or seven years, tinkering towards something that would ultimately become
free code camp, and then running free code camp, you'll have like so many ideas. Like
I've got a list of like, dozens of articles that I want to sit down and write that I just
don't have time yet. So you'll just get this rush of ideas for different angles, you can
explore things that are potentially interesting. So my first advice would just be, know your
domain really well and be in love with it and be constantly thinking about it when you're
in the shower, when you're brushing your teeth, and questions will pop into your mind. I mean,
you could go to Quora and you can just see what people are asking questions about. That's
a quick and easy kind of shortcut to thinking of your own ideas. Because if people are asking
a lot of questions about a specific topic, there's a very good chance that that would
be a good blog topic because people are obviously curious about that and interested in that.
Same thing if you go to a category on Reddit and see what people are talking about on a
subreddit or if you go to Medium and you just click through their tags and see what articles
are doing well, there are all kinds of little things you can do like that to give you some
ideas. And that can also show you what kind of content is working. Now you want to be
careful because when you imitate something that's working, you don't know why it's working.
You don't know the rationale behind why it was designed the way it was, you're just imitating
it. So that's a little bit dangerous and your results may vary dramatically if you do that.
But for me, it was very much just thinking about my domain, figuring out what was interesting
about it, what all the different interesting angles were, and then sitting down and writing
it. And I wrote a vast majority of the early blog posts myself. I don't think we've ever
paid any contributors or writers or anything. We've just given them a platform to reach
a whole lot of like-minded people.
I'm curious how impactful it's been for you to open up your platform to allow other people
to contribute. What percentage of stories are written by you versus people and your
community?
I think FreeCoCamp has published a total of 2,500 articles on Medium over the past three
years.
Wow.
And I've written about 500 of them.
So...
Really? That's so many.
Yeah, I was writing one a day. I was writing these daily digests that Medium had a mechanism
that I could email them out to all our Medium followers for a long time. And that was one
of the reasons that number went up so high.
But don't be afraid of sitting down and getting your proverbial hands dirty and writing stuff
yourself and being accessible in general. All these things, I try to live like... I
think the contributors want to see me live in terms of I'm always answering their emails
and I'm always available if they want to hop on a call or something and just hash out the
ideas of their article.
Then we have the big volunteer editorial team. And we've built that up over the past year
or so. And they help edit all the articles and make sure that everything is as strong
as it can be. So we put the writer's work in the best possible light while being careful
not to butcher their voice in the editing process.
And that is a big value add for people who want to get published in Free Code Camp is
that they're going to have a second pair of eyes on this and we're going to help strengthen
their article. And of course, that they're going to get distribution through Free Code
Camp's Medium publication.
That's a big deal because pretty much... I think the average number of views that an
article we publish on there, it's like 5 or 6,000. So if you get published in the Free
Code Camp publication, on average, you can expect to get about 5 or 6,000. That's actually
the median. The median is much higher because we've had several articles that have gotten
millions of views.
Yeah, I'd say that's a pretty strong argument for why people should write for Free Code
Camp. Aside from content, what are some of the things you've kept top of mind while trying
to grow Free Code Camp over the years?
Well, Free Code Camp's mission is to help as many people learn to code as possible.
And a lot of that involves going out into places where they don't have access to really
nice universities. They may not even have great access to the internet or to stable
electricity throughout the day.
So one of the biggest challenges for us is trying to make Free Code Camp as accessible
to people as possible. Now, we're already socioeconomically accessible in the sense
that we don't ever charge anything. You can access every aspect of Free Code Camp without
even creating an account. It's all public. You can clone the GitHub repo and you can
run Free Code Camp locally on a local network in prisons. And other places that don't have
internet access will often do that so that people can learn to code without access to
the internet, which sounds like it'd be very difficult, but people are doing it.
So we're trying to continually make Free Code Camp more accessible. We're building a big
open API where people will be able to pull the challenges down and be able to build mobile
apps around Free Code Camp's core curriculum. And we just want to empower the developer
community to go out and build these things.
We'd love to be able to put Free Code Camp and a whole bunch of Creative Commons licensed
books on a Raspberry Pi, for example, and send it to our friends in Bangladesh and other
countries that may have a lot of power outages so they can run a Raspberry Pi with a low
wattage monitor off of batteries and be able to work throughout the day, regardless of
power availability, then just making sure Free Code Camp runs really well on all these
different models of smartphones, making sure that it doesn't use a lot of data for people
that it's prohibitively expensive to download large amounts of data.
The main thing to remember is, as of 2018, half of the people in the world live off like
$2 a day. I mean, it's unfathomable for us here in the US what that means. But there's
considerable challenges that a lot of these people face in learning to code and improving
themselves and certainly launching their own companies or getting jobs at big multinationals
where they can provide for their families. So we want to help as many people as possible
do that.
That's a lot to take on. I mean, in addition to the fact that you're producing all this
content and editing it, in addition to the fact that you're trying to improve the curriculum
itself and build a successful business, what's a typical day like for Quincy Larson? What
do you do when you wake up? And also, what's the typical week like for you? How do you
divide your responsibilities up over the course of a week?
So a typical day, I have two young children, one's seven months old, one's two and a half,
and they wake me up around seven. And I get up and get them dressed and get them fed and
hop in the car and drop my daughter off at school. And then I just go to either the public
library or I go to my parents' house. We recently moved from San Francisco back to
Oklahoma City. So my kids could be closer to my parents. And one of the benefits of
that is my parents are empty nesters and I can just come up here and into their attic
area and record podcasts and write and code and do things like that in relative quiet.
So I'll just come over here and then I generally... Any meetings I have, I try to book them all
on one day. So the rest of the days, I don't have any obligations whatsoever. And then
I can just sit down and work on whatever seems to be the highest priority at the moment.
And I just have... I use Sublime Text as my editor and I just pop it open and type out
things that need to be done. And then I just sort it based on priority and worked on the
list and I constantly just resort that list and delete things as I finish them.
So yeah, I basically live by that little to-do list. And then I spend an inordinate amount
of time answering emails because I get, I don't know, hundreds a day. I send 1.3 million
emails every week out to people who have signed up with Free Code Camp and opted into our
email blasts. And a lot of those people reply and ask questions and stuff. So I answer their
questions as well. And yeah, I mean, it's pretty much just fluid other than having the
various meetings. And we have a staff of five people working full-time on Free Code Camp
now, including myself. And we just coordinate as needed through Signal. We love Signal because
it's encrypted and it's convenient and they've got a good mobile client for major mobile
devices. And we just correspond through Signal. And if anything comes up, we just message
one another and whenever time comes up. But there's the assumption that if it's a true
emergency, you call. Everything else is async. And of course, Free Code Camp is completely
remote. We have people in Europe and Asia and here in the US. So a lot of time zone
differences.
1.3 million emails a week. Do you ever get nervous to press send?
Oh, yeah. And I've made some mistakes. And yeah, it's been embarrassing. But we built
our own tool just so I can send these emails pretty efficiently using Amazon SES. And it's
open for any nonprofits or for-profit companies that just want to have high deliverability,
extremely inexpensive emails. It's called Mail for Good. If you just Google Mail for
Good, you'll probably pull it up. And it's $100 to send a million emails.
That's super cheap. You mentioned sort of working down this to-do list. And you're very
busy. It's very fluid, very in the moment. And you just prioritize things at the top.
How do you juggle sort of the short-term focus? What am I going to do today with the long-term
focus of where do I want Free Code Camp to be six months from now or two years from now?
So there's a great quote from Linus Torvald that I don't think is quoted anywhere. He
just said it during a talk I was watching. Linus Torvald, of course, the creator of Linux.
And I have a ton of respect for him, even though I don't particularly like his managerial
style. And I think he could be more professional with his contributors. But he said, so many
people are distracted looking up at the stars, pointing up there and saying, I want to go
there. And I'm just looking down at my feet, trying not to fall into the pothole right
in front of me. So he's been working on Linux for 20 years. And it's just this massive software
ecosystem has emerged around it. And something like 90% of the world's servers are now running
Linux. And if you consider Android to be Linux, then something like 50% or 60% of the devices
out there, including laptops and stuff that are used today are running Linux. So it's
really incredible what he's accomplished. And he's done this, basically just taking
things step by step and focusing on whatever's in front of him. Now, Free Code Camp does
have some high level objectives. We'd like to be Wikipedia for structured learning. Wikipedia
is about 18 years into their mission and Free Code Camp is about three. And so far, I think
we're tracking pretty well with what Wikipedia was able to accomplish. But we have that long
term goal. And we have just general heuristics or rules of thumb that dictate what we do.
We want Free Code Camp to be as accessible as possible. So whenever a situation comes
up and we're trying to just make a decision, will this slow Free Code Camp down? Will this
make it harder for people in China to be able to access different aspects of it? Those kinds
of questions, then we resort to, you know, evaluating them based on our rules of thumb.
But in general, I just focus on whatever's in front of me. And that seems to have served
me pretty well so far. Are there any ideas that you're, you've always sort of been interested
in pursuing, but either never tried them, or you did try them and they didn't go as planned?
Well, the career recommendation is in, I have a vision of a future where instead of people
going to a four year degree immediately after they get out of high school or before they
even go to high school, you know, they just decide what they're interested in doing and
they can gradually kind of spider through their career picking up new skills just in
time so that they can do whatever they're interested in. And I think that such a tool
could emerge, but there are a lot of societal structures, like university degrees are very
entrenched. And I recommend everybody get a university degree if you can afford it,
just because it's so, so societally entrenched. But if you're later in your career and you've
made it this far without one, I wouldn't recommend necessarily going back. I just recommend learning
some skills on the way. But I think we can move toward a society. And when I say society,
I mean the world, I'm always thinking in terms of the world and not just here in the US,
because 95% of people are outside of the US and we shouldn't just discount those people.
The global society could move toward, Hey, I want to learn the skill real quick. Hey,
there's this position here. How can I learn this skill? You know, until we've got the
matrix where you're like, I need to learn how to fly this helicopter, you just upload
it. I mean, people are capable, people are flexible. If you think about it, that's the
core competency of human beings is adaptability. And unfortunately, the way that our education
and labor markets work is very rigid. And it doesn't have to be that way. So I'm optimistic
that we can gradually move in that direction. And free code camp will hopefully be the tool
toward moving toward that vision of just general mobility within the workforce.
So one of the cool things that I think makes education sort of an attractive business to
be in is that there's so many different learning styles, right? Some people really do like
sitting down at a lecture and having somebody talk to them and are studying from a textbook
because some people want a curriculum to be personalized. Some people like videos, some
people like audio, some people like reading, some people take notes who don't take notes,
etc. Some people like hands on projects, some people don't. And as a result, there's always
an opportunity for you to wedge your way in and create a method of learning something
that will appeal to some segment of the population. But the downside is that you probably got
a ton of competitors. And for everything that you strongly believe about how people learn
how to code, there's someone else who believes a different thing that appeals to some subset
of people. So how do you think about the competitive landscape for programming education? And does
what other people are doing really affect your roadmap at all?
That's a great question. And I would say that competition on a whole is completely overrated
as a topic of importance. Free Code Camp's competition is Netflix and League of Legends.
Doing stuff that is not advancing your career and advancing your skills and advancing your
goals. So I would say any organization that's trying to help people learn to code, they're
not our competitors, they're our allies. Because our goal is to help as many people learn to
code as possible. And people aren't going to find some one size fits all solution. There
are no one stop shops. People are going to cobble together a ton of different resources.
They're going to use everything at their disposal to advance their careers and to build out
their skill sets so they can get whatever job they're looking for.
Yeah, it's great when you can join a market that's not winner take all. You're not trying
to build a social network to compete with Facebook where even if you do something great,
you're probably going to get squashed. You can succeed alongside everybody else. And
it takes some discipline to be aware that this is the case and not obsessed over the
competition.
Yeah. And one thing that a lot of these organizations do is they're out there like code.org, for
example, or Khan Academy. These are organizations, they're nonprofits that have hundreds of millions
of dollars in total funding probably at this point. And Free Code Camp, as I said, we're
making around less than a quarter million dollars a year in donations. So these organizations
are going out and they're really advocating for technology education. And they're doing
so much for us so that we can focus on the actual teaching part, the interactive coding
curriculum with all the tests and all the certifications and all that stuff.
And so a lot of the advocacy, certainly like the lobbying and going and meeting with President
Obama, which is something that code.org did, they were able to get President Obama to participate
in one of their Hour of Code events. So they're helping the overall education field and to
not have them would be a huge loss to Free Code Camp. And I feel the same way about everybody
who's creating advanced content too, because Free Code Camp is very much focused on fundamental
programming stuff. And there are so many great advanced resources that people can use after
they've completed the Free Code Camp certifications or use in tandem with Free Code Camp certifications
that we won't have the resources or the time to build any time soon. So I definitely view
all of these different players in the technology education ecosystem as beneficial overall
for both us and for people who are learning to code.
Let's talk about your business model, because it's really interesting to hear that your
competitors, so to speak, many of them have raised millions of dollars and many of them
charge money for different products, but you are relying on donations. How do you get so
many people to donate to your business? What have you learned during this process? And
have you ever considered any alternative business models?
We considered a lot of alternative business models, such as helping place Free Code Camp
graduates with different companies and being kind of like a hired.com or a zip recruiter
type website, in addition to being a training website. Ultimately, it would have involved
taking a lot of additional risk because we would have had to hire people who are experts
in that space. And it wouldn't have necessarily helped Free Code Camp learners anyway, because
then we'd be like, hey, you know, you could use these resources, but use our first party
recruiting service and we'll help you. It would have introduced kind of a conflict in
terms of serving campers and we'd prefer for them to just use somebody else who's specialized
in that sort of stuff. So we looked at affiliate models and a lot of my articles that I wrote
on Medium, I would recommend books at the end of them and those would be affiliate links
and one day Mark Cuban tweeted one of my articles that I wrote and the next day I had like $3,000
affiliate money from that link. So, you know, things like that happen and that was affiliate
money and then selling merchandise. We sold Free Code Camp t-shirts and stickers and things
like that. And now we sell all of those at cost. So essentially, 100% of the money you
spend on a sticker or a t-shirt is just going to the manufacturer of that thing. And none
of it goes to us because we'd rather you just donate to us and be able to, like if you don't
have the money to buy a shirt, just get it as inexpensive as possible.
So we looked at a lot of different models but recurring donations especially seem promising.
If you look at Netflix, if you look at a lot of these other subscription services, Spotify,
they're able to take small amounts of money from a whole lot of people who give them that
money and then turn it into this giant service that everybody benefits from. So like, do
you get $12 worth of value out of Netflix every month? Well, if you've got like a toddler
who loves watching little kid shows, heck yeah, I probably get hundreds of dollars worth
of value out of Netflix every month and I'm paying them 10 or 12 bucks. I don't remember
what it is even. So by having a whole lot of people pay a small recurring fee, you can
suddenly provide like a massively better service and what economists call consumer surplus
just goes up through the roof. And Free Code Camp of course is already 100% free. Like
I said, you don't even have to create an account and you can still access every aspect of Free
Code Camp. But if you do want to donate, thanks. We don't give you anything for donating. There's
no benefit whatsoever to donating except that you're helping the community. And we intentionally
decided we didn't want to have any sort of weird donation tiers or anything like that.
We're working on a feature that'll recognize like how many server hours your donations
are paid for. But aside from that, telling you like, hey, your donations so far have
paid for 22 hours of server time or something like that, aside from telling people that
we don't really have any intention of giving any sort of premium benefits at all. Because
Free Code Camp really is about being 100% free. And this was a way that we could do
that where 99% of people who use Free Code Camp never pay anything. But 1% of people
who are of means, or who've gotten a great developer job can turn around and donate five
bucks a month, 10 bucks a month.
How much effort have you put into maximizing the amount of money that you make from donations?
Have you iterated on how you ask for donations or when you ask or how much money you ask
for? Or has this been sort of a secondary focus for you?
I am embarrassed to admit that we have not put any time or energy really into this. We
haven't done any A-B testing. We haven't done really much at all. I looked at what Wikipedia
was doing. I looked at what Khan Academy was doing and some other nonprofits that I have
a lot of respect for. And I modeled our donation page after that. And in terms of the donation
amounts, $5 seems to be a good round figure that people are willing to donate each month.
So yeah, not a lot of work at all has gone into the development of the donations thing.
And I'm confident that we could significantly increase that conversion rate if we spent
time on it. And we probably will, but we just had really high priorities in terms of getting
curriculum out the door, things like that.
We have enough donations right now that we're not in some dire situation where I'm taking
$10,000 out of my bank account every month and wiring it for free.
Yeah, that's interesting because the number of people you have donating, 4,000 people
donating for $5 a month for literally nothing in return that doesn't unlock anything, as
you said, it's just because they like the site and they've gotten a lot of value from
it. It's really amazing. And I think for you not to have specifically focused on how you
can eke every extra dollar out of that business model is sort of a testament to how much people
almost love free code camp.
Yeah. And we didn't want to have to hire a full-time fundraiser. That's one of the reasons
we kept it really simple. I didn't want to be on the grant treadmill applying for grants
constantly and have... We didn't want to increase the team just so that we could be able to
sustain ourselves. We didn't want to bring in business development people and conversion
rate optimization people and all these other people that if you're a big nonprofit, like
if you're the Red Cross or something, you have so many people who are just working on
the administration and the money and all that stuff.
I just handle the finance. We have an accountant who helps us prepare our legal documents and
we have a lawyer and everybody on the team is focused on actually creating code or creating
content.
We started this interview by talking about learning to code. Let's end by also talking
about learning to code. How have your curriculum and your platform evolved throughout the lifetime
of free code camp and where do you see things going in the future?
Originally free code camp was just a list of resources and then we built interactive
coding challenges. We started off with just JavaScript and algorithms and then we built
like HTML, CSS and eventually we built a bunch of projects.
So the curriculum now has six different certifications you can earn and I'll just recite the names
of those. The responsive web development, JavaScript algorithms and data structures,
front end libraries, data visualization, APIs and microservices and then the last one is
quality assurance and information security.
So each of those has five required projects and then it also has hundreds of interactive
coding challenges that are completely optional.
If you already know a whole lot about InfoSec in QA, for example, you can just drop in and
build the five little API projects and make sure they're secure and have tests and everything
and then bam, you've got that certificate. You've got that certification and it only
takes a few hours maybe for you but for everybody else, it's going to take 300 hours or so to
earn each of those certifications.
How did you know that those are the right certifications to create? Because I'm sure
there's like a ton of options for how to divide things up, what to teach, what not to teach.
Tons of feedback from employers. I'm constantly talking to people who are hiring people out
of Frico Camp and we have thousands of people who are getting jobs every year, their first
developer jobs.
So we're learning a lot from what the labor market wants and also just talking to developers
and ourselves as developers thinking about what progression makes sense.
So for example, we focus very strongly on fundamentals, fundamental HTML and CSS, fundamental
JavaScript, algorithms, data structures, basic concepts that are going to be relevant regardless
of how much things change down the road, how the web works, things like that, how to build
APIs, basic security principles, accessibility, debugging, things like that.
So because we're focused on fundamentals, it's a very core curriculum that won't really
go out of style as fast as if we were just diving in and saying, hey, here's how to build
this really cool whizbag thing using the latest tools.
We do publish a lot of tutorials and like both video and text that walk you through
how to use Angular and Cordova or how to use React Native or React Storybook or some of
these other tools.
And we think that they're very helpful and that a lot of people are going to benefit
from using those immediately, they're going to be able to build things at their job.
But we don't want that to be our core curriculum because at the end of the day, if somebody
dives into the free cocaine community, we want them to get all the low hanging fruit
first and then to climb further up the tree and get the harder to reach stuff or the stuff
that's going to be of...
And they're diminishing returns to effort as you progress in any field.
It's the 80-20 rule, 20% of the content is 80% of the use in terms of what you learn
versus what you'll use in the wild.
And then the last 20%, that's what you spend 20 or 30 years mastering the field for.
So we want to make sure that people get that 80% of the value right off the bat as quickly
as possible.
A lot of people listening are founders, are there people who want to be entrepreneurs
and they don't add a code.
And they keep getting this message that, you know, you need to learn how to code to be
a founder, you want to start a tech company, it's just so much easier if you can write
the code yourself, sort of in the same way that you made free code camp, but they're
not sure where to start.
So how does somebody go about deciding, you know, should I use free code camp, should
I use a coding boot camp and how much time is it going to take?
Like what should somebody expect if they're sort of deciding to take this plunge to learn
how to code in order to become an entrepreneur?
My humble recommendation would be, first of all, more general entrepreneur advice if I
may inject, try to work for somebody else and make a lot of mistakes on their dime.
I worked as a teacher and as a school director in the education space for a decade before
I set out to try to build anything and build any company.
And of course the result is I'm some 37 year old dude, right?
I'm not like a fresh university graduate with like his entire career ahead of him.
But that's cool because I have a ton of insight and domain expertise and just practical world
knowledge as a result of having done that.
And also, you know, as a side benefit, I saved compulsively and was able to fund the entire
project without having to take out VC money or figure out some way to bootstrap right
off the bat because it's hard to bootstrap free products at scale.
But specifically about the learning the code issue, and I've written extensively on this,
I believe everybody should learn to code regardless of whether you even want to be a tech entrepreneur.
I just think it's the new literacy.
Like reading was, like writing was, like driving a car was, learning to code is that important
to your career.
And I will be happy to share a bunch of articles that I wrote, or I'll share one really important
article that I wrote, if you'd be willing to link to it in the show notes that argues
the reasoning behind that.
But if you think about how things get done today, machines do most of the work.
Machines don't do nearly as much work as machines do, because every time you get in your car
and you want to go somewhere, you pull up Google Maps, you drive to the airport, you've
already booked your ticket on like Expedia or Kayak, then you fly somewhere, you summon
an Uber using software or a Lyft using software, you booked your hotel somewhere, like all
that stuff is handled by software now.
And the actual humans involved are more managing the software than they are managing people.
Throughout most human history, people manage people, but now people are managing machines
as well as people.
And that's why coding is so important.
And how long should somebody expect this to take?
If I'm a founder, I've got an idea, I'm eager to get to work.
How long is going to take me to put together the particular skill set I need to throw up
a website and store user data and let people log in?
Or should I just hire somebody else to do it for me?
I would strongly recommend doing it yourself.
Because if you try to hire a developer, first of all, actually successfully hiring a developer
and spec'ing out the work that needs to be done and having that work be what you need,
that's a skill in itself.
I mean, do you want to become a technical project manager because you basically just
described their job.
If you sit down and spend about a year part-time while you're working, and again, this is one
thing that I always tell my friends who are interested in becoming entrepreneurs, like
just work somewhere else, learn how things work there.
And in the meantime, you can advance your skills while you're getting paid.
But I would say if you were to learn to code part-time for about a year, and you were serious
about it, like coding every day, going to tech events, participating in hackathons,
building the free code camp projects, like the curriculum, you'll build 30 different
projects.
If you've built all those, you'll be in a very good position to be able to just grab
some APIs off the shelf and wire together an MVP.
I don't think that you should wait.
I think you can go ahead and start building your passion project right now.
But I would not take money.
And I certainly wouldn't raise money with the intention of hiring developers and then
managing them to build your MVP.
Let's put it that way.
Quincy, thank you so much for coming on the show.
I really appreciate you being here.
Is there anything else you'd like to tell listeners?
Or would you like to let them know where they can go online to learn more about free code
camp and what you're up to personally?
Yeah, go to freecodecamp.org and create an account.
And you'll start getting my weekly emails with five helpful links that can help you
advance your skills, even if you don't have time to work through the curriculum and earn
a certification.
If you do have time, free code camp is a great place to start.
There are a ton of other great resources out there, many of which we discuss on the free
code camp forum, which is very active.
It's one of those active programming forums now.
And if you want to learn more about me personally, just Google Quincy Larson and a bunch of stuff
will come up.
Thanks again for having me on the show.
Yeah, no problem.
And I'm going to throw in a shout out of my own for the free code camp podcast, which
would be cool for people to listen to if they're interested in learning how to code or find
a programming job and they want to do that through audio and not just reading online.
Thanks for the shout out.
And yeah, if you just navigate over to whatever podcast player you're using and type in free
code camp and you should be able to pull up the podcast and subscribe.
We'd love to have your listenership.
And if you have any suggestions on it, of course, we're very new to podcasting and we
would love feedback.
All right.
Thanks so much, Quincy.
Cheers.
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If you're looking for inspiration, we've also got a huge directory full of hundreds
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As always, thanks so much for listening and I'll see you next time.
Bye.