Codecademy Monetizing a Movement 815-093 815-093 Codecademy.docx

Codecademy: Monetizing a Movement? 815-093
815-093 Codecademy: Monetizing a Movement?
9-815-093
RE V : OCT OB E R 1 4 , 2 0 1 5
JEFFREY J. BU SSGANG
LISA C. MA ZZANTI
Codecademy: Monetizing a Movement?
We’re a movement to make education more of a commodity.
We’re not just a for-profit company. Our mission would get
tainted if we charged consumers for content. We need to be
authentic.
— Zach Sims, Cofounder and CEO
Zach Sims and Ryan Bubinski sat in the Codecademy
headquarters, an exposed-brick fourth-floor office near Madison
Square Park in New York City. In 2011, while in their early
twenties, the two had founded Codecademy, an open-platform,
online community to teach users to code. By 2014, they had a
total of 24 million unique users and a library of over 100,000
lessons. The company had raised a total of $12.5 million in
funding and was, on many fronts, an overwhelming success.
However, there were still no revenues. The company’s website
stated, “Codecademy is free and always will be.”1
The founders, along with the board, had decided that 2014
would be a year of experimentation with different monetization
strategies. By June, the cofounders had preliminarily tested two
monetization models. The first charged companies for training
employees offline on coding skills, a service that the training
departments of these companies paid an annual fee to receive.

The second monetization model focused on a labor marketplace
to match Codecademy users with jobs that corporations and
recruiters were seeking to fill.
But 2014 had also been busy in other arenas for the 25-
employee company. In April, the company launched a redesign
of its website, because, as the Codecademy blog announced, “it
quickly became apparent that if we wanted to grow and mature
as a brand, we required a thorough redesign of our entire
product.”2 The next month, the company announced that they
were opening an office in London to work with the British
education system and also had forged partnerships with
foundations and government bodies in Estonia, Argentina, and
France.
As Sims and Bubinski huddled in their glass-walled conference
room, they tried to focus on the task at hand—to narrow down
their ideas and eventually decide on a viable business model.
The two reviewed early results from both experiments to
prepare for the upcoming board meeting where they planned to
present their findings and propose next steps. The employee-
training experiments had yielded promising initial results but
would require hiring a sales force, offline instructors, and some
content customization to scale. The labor marketplace model
promised less friction in scaling but represented a more
crowded market opportunity.
Senior Lecturer Jeffrey J. Bussgang and Case Researcher Lisa
C. Mazzanti (Case Research & Writing Group) prepared this
case. It was reviewed and approved before publication by a
company designate. Funding for the development of this case
was provided by Harvard Business School and not by the
company. Jeffrey Bussgang is a general partner at Flybridge
Capital, an investor in Codecademy. HBS cases are developed
solely as the basis for class discussion. Cases are not intended
to serve as endorsements, sources of primary data, or
illustrations of effective or ineffective management.

Copyright © 2015 President and Fellows of Harvard College. To
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reproduced, posted, or transmitted, without the permission of
Harvard Business School.
Sims and Bubinski were also aware that many other companies,
in the United States and abroad, were gaining ground in the
computer-coding education industry, including free massive
open online courses (MOOCs), websites that charged for
content, and offline coding boot camps. “We don’t want to get
beaten because of someone else’s defensive moats,” said
Bubinski. One Codecademy investor noted, “Codecademy has
played a leading role in the development of an online industry
to teach people to code, and a lot of companies have cashed in
on that industry. At some point, Codecademy has to capture
what it created.”
The cofounders wanted to avoid being pressured into decisions
that went against their open platform philosophy, but they also
knew that to keep the company alive and well, they had to
eventually position themselves to generate revenue. But Sims
had begun to question whether now was the right time to even
focus on monetization: “We can monetize by helping people
make use of the skills they learn on our platform. But, until we
have enough content and skilled users, there is no reason for
users to keep coming back or anyone to want to hire them.” The
company had plenty of cash relative to its modest burn rate, so
fundraising was not an immediate concern. Perhaps both
monetization experiments needed to be shelved in favor of a
greater focus on scaling content and engagement in the
community. The Big Idea: Teach the World to Code
Sims and Bubinski became friends while studying at Columbia
University when Sims was a freshman and Bubinski was a
sophomore. While in school, Bubinski founded a student

organization in 2009 that helped students learn to code outside
of class called the Application Development Initiative (ADI).3
Sims also showed an early interest in technology, and during
school he interned at GroupMe (later acquired by Skype),
drop.io (acquired by Facebook), and AOL Ventures. By 2011,
the two had begun to identify a set of issues that led to starting
a company. “We saw that, as our friends began looking for jobs,
there was a disconnect between college education and
marketable skills,” said Sims. Initially, they envisioned a
company that would help recent college graduates discover and
match their skills with job opportunities. In the summer of
2011, after Bubinski graduated with a
degree in computer science (CS) and Sims had completed his
junior year, they applied and got accepted to Y Combinator, a
three-month entrepreneurship and seed-funding program in
Mountain View, California. When Sims learned of their
acceptance, he told his parents he was going to drop out of
college in order to focus on the startup.
But while at Y Combinator, Sims struggled to learn how to code
to build the job website. He found that the educational books
and videos available were insufficient, much like Bubinksi had
felt with programming classes (which had caused him to start
ADI). The two decided they could build a service unaffiliated
with a university, yet valuable to users, to address the gap they
saw in codingskills education.
The cofounders pivoted their idea to one of offering a service to
teach the skills people needed to find jobs. They started
designing a free product that would help coders, initially
beginners, learn coding through interactive exercises. “We
wanted to build something that I would like learning from, and
that Ryan would like teaching through,” said Sims.4 The lessons
taught concepts by action—none included videos or books. The
exercises were set up in an in-browser terminal, and the user
was given simple directions and “chipper words of
encouragement”5 in order to execute a command.6 (See Exhibit
1 for an example of the interactive lessons.) As users finished

lessons, they accumulated points and badges. The website
tracked student progress, which users could share with friends
on Twitter and Facebook. Initially, website visitors could take
the first lesson without signing up. After the user completed
several lessons, a prompt appeared to create an account.7
2
Sims and Bubinski launched Codecademy on a Friday afternoon
in August 2011 with eight lessons on JavaScript, a coding
language used to create interactive applications (“apps”).
Within hours of posting a link to the lessons on Hacker News, Y
Combinator’s discussion board, the site had more than 1,000
concurrent users.8 Within the first four days, there were
250,000 visitors who spent approximately one hour on the site
and had done over 2.75 million exercises. Sims stated at the
time, “This is the first time programming has been truly
democratized. It’s available to anyone with a computer and it’s
easy to follow. We think creating a new generation of
programmers will help to raise employment and the standard of
living for those individuals. It’s preparing the world for the
future.”9 Sims and Bubinksi now knew their venture could have
a large impact, as Sims described: “We’re closing the gap
between education and labor to make sure anyone, anywhere has
access to a
free education that can help them make a living.” Although
Sims estimated that the age range of the users was
predominantly 13–30 years old, he felt that the site could have a
wider target audience of 12–50 years old.10
The market’s reaction to the simple website attracted investors.
Shortly after completing the Y Combinator program, the
company closed a $2.5 million round of funding led by Union
Square Ventures (USV) along with AlphaTech, CrunchFund,
Founder Collective, SV Angel, Yuri Milner, and others.11
“What really intrigued us about Codecademy was the
engagement it fostered with users— this isn’t just a teacher
lecturing. It’s learning by doing,” said Andy Weissman, a
partner at USV. He continued, “It’s designed to have millions of

people use it. It’s transformative because it unbundles coding
from college education. And lastly,” Weissman added, “We just
really like these guys.” USV was not concerned with the
specifics of a monetization strategy right away. “Sometimes, if
you decide on and pursue a monetization strategy too soon, you
can get in your own way. We believe you build a barrier to
entry first with a large network and then monetize. You want to
retain flexibility to make sure your strategy fits with the fabric
of the product,” said Weissman.
By November 2011, Codecademy had more than 800,000
users.12 Sims said of the site’s success, “We started working on
Codecademy simply as a product and it quickly became a
company. We threw the original site together in about three
weeks.”13 Code Year: Scaling Content and Community
The buzz that ensued from the announcement of the series A
funding faded quickly. By the end of 2011, Sims recalled,
“There was a plunge in usage, because we barely had any
content.” Acting quickly, the company launched an initiative
called Code Year on January 1, 2012, to take advantage of New
Year’s resolutions. Code Year offered a simple e-mail service
that would notify users of at least one new lesson a week. Sims
sought the pressure the weekly service would provide in forcing
the company to create enough content to fulfill the weekly
demand. Within 48 hours of the launch, 100,000 users had
registered for Code Year. “People got excited about the weekly
cadence,” said Sims. New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg
tweeted: “My New Year’s resolution is to learn to code with
Codecademy in 2012!”14
The founders focused on creating a viral-friendly design of the
site to fuel rapid growth—users could “tweet” and “like” the
Code Year page on social media even before they joined. “We
built in a super tight viral loop,” said Sims. Twitter drove one-
third of the traffic and Facebook over 16%.15
Two weeks later, Codecademy and the White House announced
a joint initiative called Code Summer+ to educate youth as part
of the White House’s larger initiative, Summer Jobs+.16 Sims

explained that Code Summer+ provided a “condensed version of
our curriculum to get [youth] on track to become engineers.”17
By the Code Summer+ launch, Codecademy had 1 million users.
3
Simultaneously to the Code Summer+ announcement,
Codecademy announced that they had launched a question-and-
answer forum for users to communicate about lessons.18 They
also designed a part of their website for students to organize in-
person meet-ups to discuss their programming progress and
roadblocks face-to-face. Within a week, 171 Codecademy meet-
up groups formed worldwide.19 A tech blogger at Gigaom
wrote, “Codecademy is on fire right now.”
New Functionality
Although Codecademy had achieved early market acceptance, it
was soon criticized for oversimplifying coding complexities
(see Exhibit 2 for a discussion thread’s critique). Sims
explained, “We wanted to focus on the essence of programming,
the terminal.[footnoteRef:1] We wanted to bring the magic of
programming back to people and to take away everything else,
like the process of choosing a text editor, a language to learn, or
a place to store your code.”20 Sims felt that the company had
removed many of the barriers to coding. “We made this so
simple for users. But coding is hard. I think some people
thought, ‘Oh, I’ll just do this for a few weeks and then be able
to get a job at Google,” noted Sims. [1: A terminal was the on-
screen display where code could be entered and edited. ]
The shortage of lesson content continued to be a point of
friction for the company. By the end of 2011, the cofounders
were managing a dozen lessons. Users complained about only
having tutorials in JavaScript and a lack of lessons in general.
In January 2012, TechCrunch reported, “Codecademy has had
one big problem: there just aren’t that many lessons available.
And the ones that are on there sometimes seem to be moving too
quickly, without many practice exercises to explore and

reinforce what you’ve just learned.”21
In an attempt to radically increase the number of courses
available, Sims and Bubinski decided to launch a beta test for
peer-to-peer course creation to help fill the instruction gaps.
Coders had already been e-mailing the company offering their
know-how, so the cofounders wanted to formalize the
community’s involvement. The response to the beta test was
positive—2,000 users signed up to design lessons across a range
of subject areas and convinced the founders to go ahead with a
new peer-to-peer course-creation platform.22 On January 30,
Codecademy launched Course Creator, allowing anyone to
create and post lessons, and provided a “Creation Guide,” which
outlined the process, tools, and tips for lesson development.23
The company incorporated a submission test function into
Course Creator and posted steps for testing submission
correctness for quality-control purposes.
Course Creator could be used to create a course of general
interest or for a user’s own specific purposes—whether it was a
teacher using the Codecademy platform to teach their own class
or a professional demonstrating a company’s proprietary tool.
Publishing a lesson required no approval. Once someone created
a lesson, they could send out the link to the lesson to anyone.
However, Codecademy curated the lessons for users by
featuring the high-quality ones on its homepage.24 Sims
estimated that creating a course took 10–20 hours, and, though
contributors were unpaid, he believed prominently featuring
lessons incentivized programmers to post them.
A Marketplace Model
Course Creator moved the company toward a blended model for
content creation. Approximately one-third of Codecademy
lessons were created by third parties, and usage of third-party
lessons tended to be lower than lessons created in-house. “We
make sure we have content against curricula
4
or topics that we think interest our students by working with

content-creation partners and authors from the general public.
Through that curation, we try to create a cohesive learning
experience,” said Bubinski. He explained that a pure
marketplace experience around content is not effective for
beginners: “We realized you have to strike a balance. In an
ideal world, every student gets the perfect content for the skill
that’s most important for them to be learning at that time.
What’s tricky is that we don’t always know what the learner
should be learning, and the learner doesn’t know either. There’s
a huge discoverability problem.”
Though a marketplace suggested that a customer could sift
through myriad options to find the best fit based on value and
quality, Bubinski felt that, “for education, people pick by brand
or some notion of quality of the institution.” But new students
were not the best judges of education quality. He explained, “If
you want to start studying electrical engineering, you’re not
really qualified to say what a great curriculum is for that, since
you haven’t studied it yet. You have to be able to trust the
brand. The marketplace dynamics for education aren’t quite as
cut-and-dry as products on eBay yet.” Expanding and Refining
As the company expanded its course library, it was able to
expand its coding language offering. In April 2012, the
company unveiled tutorials for CSS and HTML,25 two coding
languages generally used in tandem to build websites. The same
month, Codecademy launched an interactive coding console,
Labs, an in-browser feature that allowed users to practice what
they had already learned without having to download an
integrated development environment (IDE) or code editor.26
(See Exhibit 3 for a screenshot of Labs.) The new setup placed
the text editor on the left side of the browser and a console to
the right to show what a user’s executed code would look like.
Sims noted, “Labs makes it really easy to continue along the
path of learning stuff without any of the complications that go
along with programming.”27
In June 2012, Codecademy raised $10 million, led by Index
Ventures, bringing total funding to $12.5 million.28 The

founders planned to use the new funds to grow their base of
nine employees and scale globally. Already the company was
working to launch sites in Chinese, German, Japanese, Russian,
and Spanish. Once again, the company reached out to its
network: the translations into other languages were being done
by Codecademy users for free. Sims described the users’ desire
to lend a hand: “The day we launched, someone downloaded the
site and translated it into Japanese and then sent it back to us.
Unfortunately we had no way of hosting a Japanese site
then.”29
User Community Dynamics
Codecademy’s user community was diverse, with both skilled
and unskilled learners. Bubinski explained, “We don’t see
Codecademy as a product that has fixed teachers and fixed
students. Every student can be a teacher and vice versa. It’s
more of a dorm-room study-group mentality than having
professors who stand on a stage.” Instead of featuring industry
gurus as teachers on its website, the company depended on its
community network of experienced coders to create courses.
“Advanced students who create courses for us either become
evangelists or use Codecademy as a tool for distribution,” said
Bubinksi. He explained that advanced programmers wanted to
create courses to spread their knowledge. “Giveback is huge,”
Bubinski remarked.
The community also gave back in other ways. Community
moderators (generally users who had over 500 Q&A forum posts
and were invited to be moderators by Codecademy) were in
close contact with the company. Their help was multi-faceted:
moderators gave important feedback on frustrations or successes
of product launches, made edits to courses, and were also given
guidelines for what posts to delete from the site and in what
direction they should encourage conversations to go. Sims
5
said, “To us and our moderators, a community is more than just
responding to social media; you have to have a certain ethos of

making the world a better place.”
Moderators were unpaid, and as one put it, “There are no
benefits to becoming a moderator aside from the satisfaction
gained from the effort made while helping others. This may be
hard for some people to comprehend; however, this is a trait all
moderators have in common.”30 Approximately 100 moderators
spent three hours a day on the site to service the community.
To keep a pulse on community reactions and news, all
Codecademy staff was copied on the moderators’ e-mails.
Originally, Codecademy had a community manager to engage
with the moderators and the larger user base. “But when our
community manager left, we wanted to see if we could spread
out the responsibility and also build community into the
product,” Sims recalled. “Instead of a squadron of community
managers, could we build amazing features that would be
mostly intuitive in regard to how users should act and what the
norms should be?” However, without a community manager, the
moderators had felt that Codecademy was being unresponsive.
“Now we’re back to hiring a community manager,” explained
Sims. “We’re trying to expand the definition of community. We
started with Q&A forums, and now we also have groups, which
allow users to be grouped into subsets based on languages,
interests, and skills. We don’t just want islands of learners off
to the side. We’re trying to figure out how to build a more
inclusive and intuitive learning community.” Demand for Tech
Talent
By 2012, demand for computer engineers to build and maintain
website interfaces, mobile apps, and other web services
continued to grow. The Bureau of Labor Statistics estimated
that in 2020, there would be 1.4 million new CS jobs, but only
400,000 CS students.31 Software developer employment was
projected to grow by 22% from 2012 to 2022.32 Typical full-
time software developers in technology hubs such as Boston,
New York City, and Silicon Valley were paid $100,000–
$150,000 per year. Because of fierce competition for talent,
some major employers were offering college juniors sixfigure

starting salaries if they committed to joining the employer after
graduation. Technology recruiters were often employed to assist
with hiring and were paid as much as 20%–30% of the salary of
successful hires.
Companies looking to address their coding needs with
freelancers, on the other hand, looked to websites like Elance-
oDesk,[footnoteRef:2] guru.com, and others. Employers posted
descriptions of coding tasks they needed, and freelancers from
around the world would sift through posts and bid on work that
corresponded to their skill sets. Employers who hired freelance
coders typically paid roughly $80 per hour, but rates could be
much lower depending on factors such as the particular skills
required, the cost of living for the freelancer (many lived
outside the U.S.), and the brand name of the company searching
for freelance talent. Both oDesk and Elance had tens of
thousands of posts at a time for web and software development,
while guru.com had roughly 1 million at a time.33 [2: Elance
and oDesk merged in 2013 but maintained separate brands. ]
To address the growing need for coders, governments around
the world were evaluating their CS curricula and making
changes to public education programs. The New York Times
reported, “From Singapore to Tallinn, governments, educators
and advocates from the tech industry argue that it has become
crucial to hold at least a basic understanding of how the devices
that play such a large role in modern life actually work.”34 In
2012, the United Kingdom’s education secretary announced a
bold
6
initiative focused on coding by “scrapping the existing
[information and communications technology] curriculum. In its
place, [the U.K.] will introduce new courses of study in
Computer Science. . . . [to] equip pupils with the skills
employers want.”35 The same year, Estonia announced that its
public schools would teach students to write code from first
grade on.36

In the U.S., the dissemination of coding education was being
spearheaded by private companies and individuals. Tech
investor Hadi Partovi started the nonprofit organization
Code.org to help bring CS education to K-12 schools in the U.S.
and advocated for CS as a core academic subject.37 Large tech
companies such as Amazon, Apple, Google, and Microsoft, as
well as President Obama, threw their support behind Code.org’s
campaign “Hour of Code,” where “33,000 classrooms in 167
countries, amounting to more than five million students”
participated to learn one hour of CS.38 In December 2012,
Codecademy launched its first mobile app for Hour of Code, a
“minimum viable product” to experiment with teaching coding
on a mobile phone in a one-hour module. Sims explained, “The
app was designed fresh . . . to take advantage of the iPhone
while still preserving all the design tenets from our web app. . .
. It gives anyone all they need to get started anywhere at any
time with the basics of programming.”39 (See Exhibit 4 for a
screenshot of the mobile app.) Online Education: A Movement
When first founded, Codecademy was a pioneer in offering free
coding-specific online education. However, the market
opportunity to help close the skills gap was not lost on other
companies. Thus, by 2014, competitors had emerged from many
segments of the online education market.
University-Affiliated Online Education
By 2013, MOOCs were attracting much attention by expanding
access to education and prompting educators to revisit how
people learned.40 While the MOOCs offered a broad catalog of
courses outside of CS, their CS subject matter overlapped with
Codecademy’s. Three major MOOCs (EdX, Coursera, and
Udacity) offered free classes to anyone with an Internet
connection.
EdX A nonprofit partnership between Harvard University and
the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), EdX was
created in 2012 and expanded to a consortium of schools that
contributed courses, such as the University of Texas and the

University of California, Berkeley. EdX featured over 175 free
courses that ranged from biology to literature; approximately 40
of the courses were CS. Over 400 faculty contributed. Students
could earn certificates for completing courses, which required
roughly 50–100 hours of work. One EdX principle was financial
sustainability, although revenue generation was still being
worked out. Harvard and MIT had each made an initial
investment of $30 million.41 Potential monetization models
included third parties paying to access users or recruiting
schemes with employers who would pay for the identification of
successful students.42
Coursera Coursera was a for-profit company started in 2012 by
two Stanford University CS professors. By 2013, it offered over
200 courses from 33 institutions from around the world and
served more than 2 million users.43 Each course called for
about 40–60 hours of work and ranged from medicine to the
arts; roughly one-third were in CS.44 In 2013, Coursera
launched career services, which students could opt into for free.
Companies paid a flat fee for each introduction to a student.
The same year, Coursera introduced the “Signature Track,”
which provided verification of a student’s work and allowed
students to receive certifications. Course admission through the
Signature Track was limited to certain courses, and students
were charged $30–$100 per course.45
7
Udacity Although not officially Stanford-affiliated, Udacity was
founded by former Stanford professor and Google employee
Sebastian Thrun. A for-profit venture started in 2012, it focused
on math and science, including CS. The courses were self-paced
and included data science, web development, software
engineering, and classes for an online master’s program with
Georgia Tech. By the end of 2012, Udacity had raised over $21
million.46 By 2013, it was testing various business models:
“matching students with employers, licensing content to schools
and charging for proctored exams.”47 In 2013, Fast Company
reported that Thrun was considering pivoting the company to

charge a fee for classes and become more vocationally
focused.48
Unaffiliated Online Education
Online education companies unaffiliated with higher education
institutions (Lynda.com, Khan Academy, and Udemy) were
gaining ground, benefiting from the network effects of larger
MOOCs.
Lynda.com Lynda.com started in 1995 and was profitable by
1997. It offered what Wired called “high-end how-to content . .
. including tutorials on the Ruby on Rails programming
language, search engine optimization, basic business software
like Excel, and digital photography.”49 The company adopted
the contributor model early on: experts were screened and flown
to the company’s studios to shoot instructional videos.50 By
2013, it had a staff of 400, 550 courses, 1,400 hours of content,
and 3 million clients (including individual subscribers and
enterprise clients from government, corporate, and academic
institutions).51 The Lynda.com business model was freemium-
based. After gaining access to a few free lectures, subscribers
paid $25 monthly or $250 yearly, and Lynda.com in turn paid
content creators based on traffic.52 In 2013, it raised $103
million in series A funding to grow internationally and build
into more content areas. Cofounder Lynda Weinman said the
company would never offer accreditation, because the company
simply promoted the joy of learning.53
Khan Academy A nonprofit started in 2004 that initially posted
its 10-minute videos on YouTube before having its own website,
Kahn Academy was known for tutorials on middle school and
high school math concepts. However, by 2014, it also offered
tutorials on humanities, computing, and standardized test
preparation. The lessons were self-paced, combined videos and
exercises, and tracked users’ progress. Khan Academy had
roughly 6 million users per month and 4,000 lessons.54 It had
successfully piloted programs with school districts, and in 2013
Mexican multibillionaire Carlos Slim pledged to fund

translation of the lessons into Spanish.55 Its homepage boasted,
“Completely free, forever,” and founder Sal Khan had claimed,
“I don’t have a business model.”56
Udemy Udemy was founded in 2010 with a marketplace model
that “skewed towards the skills workers need to remain
employable, rather than the academic course content offered by
many MOOCs.”57 Instructors could create and upload courses
to the platform and decide how much to charge for their course,
if at all.58 By 2014, Udemy had raised $48 million and had
16,000 courses, and 8,000 instructors had published on its
platform.59 Udemy’s courses were available in 10 languages,
and 60% of its students were from abroad.60
Online Education for Coding
Online education companies focused on teaching coding had
emerged by 2013 with freemium and fee models.
8
Treehouse Treehouse, which TechCrunchcalled “essentially the
lovechild of Lynda.com and Codecademy”61 because of its mix
of video instruction and project-based learning, launched in
2011[footnoteRef:3] and was backed by LinkedIn cofounder
Reid Hoffman. In its first year, the site generated $3.6 million
in revenues from 19,000 users who had completed 380,000
quizzes and watched 330,000 hours of videos.62 The website
charged $25 per month for a basic subscription, which included
access to more than 100 lessons, 1,000 videos, a coding console
and text-based interface called Code Challenge Engine, and
access to forums. The “Pro” subscription ($49 per month)
included videos of talks by industry professionals and
workshops. The website advertised that for every new Pro
account, the company donated one to a public school student. In
2012, the company committed $3 million worth of scholarships
to give college students two years of its Pro subscription.63
[3: Treehouse’s predecessor, Think Vitamin, started in 2006. ]
Code School Code School offered 30 courses and nearly 2,000

“coding challenges” to “learn by doing” on a freemium model
that charged $29 per month for access to the full range of
courses. Its five paths covered HTML/CSS, iOS, JavaScript,
Ruby, and others. It partnered with Google in 2013 to launch an
online course, Discover DevTools, to teach the developer tools
available in Google’s web browser, Chrome.
Other online resources for those interested in learning to code
were HTML5Rocks, a free, open project by Google to give
developers a resource for learning about HTML5 coding
capabilities with presentations and tutorials, and HTML5
Playground, an in-browser platform to practice coding. Another
free online resource was the Mozilla Developer Network, which
provided information about open web technologies such as
APIs, CSS, and HTML. TheCodePlayer was a free website to
watch videos of programmers’ screens while writing code to
create certain projects, such as logos. Coding Boot Camps
Coding boot camps or “hack schools” were an offline option for
those eager to learn the skill. These 8- to 16-week programs
were in-person and cost thousands of dollars. Hack schools
publicized stories of high-earning job offers extended to those
who had finished their programs. Dev Bootcamp was a nine-
week program with locations in San Francisco, New York, and
Chicago that charged $12,200 and maintained a ratio of 1
instructor per 10 students.64 Hackbright Academy, also of San
Francisco, was an all-female boot camp that charged $15,000
for its 10-week program.65 Coding Dojo offered a 12-week
program that charged just under $11,000 and operated in
Mountain View and Seattle.66 The Flatiron School in New York
City charged $12,000 for 16 weeks,67 while Hack Reactor of
San Francisco charged $17,780 for a 12-week program and
advertised that its graduates landed jobs that paid an average
salary of $105,000.68 Hackbright and the Flatiron School
refunded several thousand dollars to graduates who landed jobs
through their career-matching programs, and many of the hack
schools provided some form of fellowship or scholarship. One
2014survey polled “39 unaccredited U.S. programming schools

offering 40 or more hours of instruction per week” and found
that the schools would graduate nearly 6,000 students in 2014, a
175% increase over 2013.69 Codecademy in 2014
If 2013 was the year to focus on content and rolling out a
marketplace model, Sims and Bubinski were determined to have
2014 be a year of continued growth and experimentation with
viable business models. In April 2014, Codecademy unveiled a
“reimagined” website that “redefined every component under
our brand, from a single button on our dashboard to our email
template, business
9
cards, slides and even apparel.”70 TechCrunchreported that the
redesign was “the first step toward Codecademy’s broader
vision that will bring in universities, business clients and
employers and employment networks, to help Codecademy
students move toward actual careers through the site.”71
By the time of the relaunch, Codecademy had more users than
the next-largest education website by three-fold (see Figure 1)
and roughly 70% of Codecademy’s 24 million users were
international, up from half in 2012.72 Registered users spanned
190 countries.73
Figure 1 Education Website Users (Total, Cumulative)
Codecademy
Coursera
Udacity
Treehouse
Users
24,000,000

7,400,000
1,600,000
100,000
Source: Ingrid Lunden, “Codecademy Takes Its Online Learning
Portal To The UK, France, Brazil, Estonia And Argentina,”
TechCrunch, May 22, 2014,
http://techcrunch.com/2014/05/22/codecademy-takes-its-online-
learning-portalglobal-partners-in-uk-france-brazil-estonia-
argentina/, accessed June 2014.
As another phase of the reimagined website, Codecademy’s
dashboard was redesigned to help increase the ease of
discoverability of content for users. The company simplified the
user’s experience of browsing content “by putting all the skills
you can learn in a single page, and secondly, to make it easier
to gauge your overall progress on the site.”74 (See Exhibit 5 for
an image of the dashboard.)
Going Global
In the U.S., thousands of after-school programs used
Codecademy. However, incorporation of computer programming
into public education standards was more complex due to the
state- and district-run education system. Sims said the
complications of convincing U.S. school systems to incorporate
computer programming into state standards were “like a street
war.”75
In May 2014, Codecademy announced it was opening an office
in London, where the education system was mandated by the
central government. The U.K. was officially adding computing
to the national curriculum in September (the first G8 country to
do so) and looked to Codecademy for help. Codecademy was
being used not only to teach students but also to teach the
teachers (in conjunction with more formal training) free of
charge.76 Over 1,000 British schools were using the website to
prepare for the new curriculum.77 Sims explained, “We have a
curriculum that works along with the standards that were set by
the government. . . . It made it easy to shift a lot of the burden

of teaching the material onto a platform that’s already been
vetted.”78 Although Codecademy was not generating any
revenue through the agreement, Sims felt that it was an
important initiative: “We look at this as a really good
opportunity to look at learning at scale . . . . It promotes the
work of people who have already created content on the site.”79
Meanwhile, Codecademy was establishing noncommercial
partnerships with other non-Englishspeaking countries and their
education systems. Although Codecademy had announced that
they would concentrate on internationalization back when the
company got its second round of funding, Sims and the team
soon found out that launching foreign-language sites was
complicated from the perspective of back-end technology. He
explained, “At first we thought, ‘Oh, we’ll just take our website
and translate it to different languages.’ But it’s not that easy.”
Codecademy forged partnerships in Argentina, Estonia, France,
and Brazil. Argentina’s capital city of Buenos Aires had
committed to incorporating programming into all city schools
with Codecademy’s help, the first South American city to do so.
In Estonia, the company would work with Tiger Leap
Foundation, a public-private partnership created in the mid-
1990s to promote technology in Estonian schools. In France,
Libraries without Borders (Bibliothèques Sans Frontières), a
nongovernmental organization (NGO) that spread knowledge
throughout French-speaking nations, would do translations into
French. In Brazil, Codecademy partnered with Lemann
Foundation, the largest education foundation in the country, to
do Portuguese translations and pilot Portuguese programs on the
website.
Still No Revenues
Sims and Bubinksi agreed that they had been successful at
creating a high-quality learning experience and brand, achieving
scale, and building a large community of users. Even though the
company still had much opportunity for user growth, the
founders felt they needed to begin focusing on monetization to

ensure sustainability. Although they had a range of
monetization ideas to test, they were in agreement that the site
could not charge users for content. “We fundamentally believe
educational content is a commodity. There’s a strong movement
towards open and free education, and if you charge the
consumer directly for content, then you’re going against that
and you can’t lead the movement,” Sims asserted. “Offering a
free product is sometimes a great business strategy,” said
Weissman, “Codecademy’s cost of delivery is getting lower, no
one can undercut on price, and being free allows you to reach
the greatest audience.” He added, “User engagement is so high
right now that it seems like the right time to experiment with
monetization. But the strategy has to be one that doesn’t mess
up the user experience for millions and millions of people.”
Before testing monetization strategies, the founders thought
hard about the company’s strengths. Bubinski recalled, “We
asked ourselves, ‘What are our qualifying criteria for
monetization?’ We had volume and we believed we could teach
valuable skills.” Bubinski separated coding skills into three
tiers. At the top were what Bubinski called “highly paid Google
software engineers.” In the middle were “technical non-techs,”
white collar workers that dealt with data and/or digital products
but needed technical skill complements. He believed that
“technical non-tech” employees worked at companies that would
value a Codecademy enterprise training program. The last tier
of skills were those held by freelancers who could find projects
posted to digital temp sites, a space that some experts predicted
would be $2.7 billion in 2014. These included sites like Elance
or oDesk.80
Sims and Bubinski decided to test monetization strategies for
helping students enter the bottom or second tiers. “We were
pretty comfortable that we could already qualify people for the
bottom tier— to do freelance work. But we were unsure of
enterprise training at the middle tier.” The cofounders decided
to run two tests simultaneously: one on a labor marketplace and
one on an enterprise service.

Labor marketplace model To understand Codecademy’s best
approach to entering the labor marketplace, the cofounders felt
that the company had to determine its inventory of skills and
how best to match those skills to jobs. The company set up a
test to run on users, putting dozens of groups into 10 cohorts of
40 people, each cohort testing a different skill. To quickly
access a supply of job opportunities, Bubinski and his team
sifted through job postings on Elance and mimicked their
specifications in an e-mail to test groups made up of users who
had completed the corresponding curricula on Codecademy. The
test group was told that the tasks were to test their skills and
gain more practice using the knowledge they had acquired. The
tasks were unpaid. “We wanted to see completion rates first
without pay,” Sims explained.
Codecademy offered support services for the projects so they
could see where users were running into problems and gauge
whether Codecademy was failing to teach certain necessary
skills. The company collected the responses internally and
graded the users’ output to make assumptions about whether
Codecademy’s base of users could qualify for Elance-type tasks.
Depending on the cohort, a handful of the 40 users in a cohort
completed the jobs proficiently. “The experiment wasn’t meant
to maximize completion. We were simply testing if our users
who had completed corresponding curricula on Codecademy
qualified to do the work. We wanted to see if we could take a
project on Elance without any post processing and give it to
users to complete,” said Bubinski. “The interesting thing is that
people were doing unpaid projects like this just to improve their
skills,” Sims noted.
The cofounders agreed that the next stage of experimentation
would pay the users for their work to test the impact of
completion incentives. They also wanted to test what kind of
additional support services might be needed to increase the
ability and motivation for the users to complete freelance tasks
and to test what Bubinski called the “flow”—setting up systems
to get the finished projects from the user to the party that had

requested the task. “We can solve the flow process to improve
our conversion rates,” said Bubinski, “That’s just engineering.”
The other challenge with expanding the labor marketplace
model would be content development. Codecademy would need
to create a library of learning modules (“Learning Prototypes”)
that would allow the user to build skills that directly matched
the skills employers were seeking in job candidates. This would
require a substantial investment in content development and an
exhaustive research effort with employers to match skills to the
open jobs.
Enterprise model To test an enterprise model where
Codecademy would offer a custom curriculum to company
clients for their employees, Codecademy ran several pilot
programs with a handful of Fortune 500 companies. Each
company commissioned the programs and worked with Sims and
Bubinski to tailor the content for their learning objectives. The
companies all paid for programs. “We wanted money to be
involved, because we wanted to get good information. If you
give a company something for free, the information you collect
from them isn’t necessarily information you can depend on. We
wanted their expectations of quality to match the dollars they
were spending,” explained Bubinski.
The company developed one enterprise curriculum targeted not
at programmers, but rather at technical non-techs, which was
shared across all pilot programs. “The curriculum basically
breaks up into helping people use digital tools to build digital
products, communicate data, or process information,” noted
Bubinksi. To implement the pilots, Codecademy sent an
instructor to each company to teach classes on Codecademy to
the employees for a day. For the next three months,
Codecademy sent the company data on employee performance
and online course completions.
After completing the enterprise pilot programs, each of the four
companies requested companywide training programs. Demand
for those training programs emerged across all the departments
of the companies who wanted to make sure their staff was

technically proficient. Sims commented, “When a company
comes to us and says that they want to roll out our platform to
their entire company, we look at it as we’re getting paid to
acquire more customers and grow our network.”
After the pilot programs, Codecademy gathered data on the
perceived value of the program. They asked enterprise
employees if they learned skills they could apply to their job
and how well they felt they were taught. “We also surveyed the
companies to see where they found the value,” said Bubinski.
The client surveys showed favorable results and that companies
were willing to pay for Codecademy services and its platform,
as much as six to seven figures in annual contracts. It was not
completely clear where the budgets would come from. On the
one hand, training budgets were available if there was a direct
link to a return on the investment in terms of hard skills
development. But the original courses were more focused on
softer skills, such as technical literacy for nontechnical
employees, and Codecademy would need to adjust the content
and the sales efforts to better fit the training department buyer.
In 2013, total spending for employee learning in the U.S. was
$164 billion, or $1,195 per employee.81 Many platforms were
competing for training employees, such as Lynda.com,
OpenSesame, or publishing company Wiley’s Digital
Classroom. Coursera, Udacity, and Udemy were also piloting
and launching new programs for an enterprise audience.82
Program pricing typically ranged from $20–$40 per employee
per month. Conclusion
As the board meeting neared, Sims and Bubinski were still
debating which experiment they should focus on: a labor
marketplace or the enterprise model. Either choice would put
Codecademy up against some formidable competitors.
Sims pointed out that a labor marketplace model would not
require a large human capital investment and could scale
relatively easily, while an enterprise model would require hiring
full-time instructors to teach enterprise clients’ employees and a
large sales staff to call on training departments to sell the

programs. Weissman had also reminded them that delivering a
product to the enterprise market would mean Codecademy
would have to deliver it at an enterprise level of service, which
had not been a primary focus of the startup.
On the other hand, an enterprise model had a straightforward
go-to-market strategy with clear demand. The labor marketplace
model’s go-to-market strategy was less certain, which would
lead to a less concrete valuation outcome. Having an uncertain
go-to-market path did not prevent them from building the
largest learning community of coders, but the Codecademy team
was concerned that the recruiting market was already trained to
tap other communities, such as LinkedIn, and might not initially
pay to access the Codecademy community.
The cofounders knew that either monetization route would pose
its own set of challenges but that they had to make a decision.
“As a 25-person company trying to create a movement, we have
to be very focused,” Sims acknowledged. “We have a long-term
vision to become the vocational school for the 21st century, but
what’s the right next step to take us there?”
10
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additional copies.
14
1 Codecademy’s Early Console
Source: Jason Kincaid, “Codecademy: A Slick, Fun Way To
Teach Yourself How To Program,” TechCrunch, August 18,

2011, http://techcrunch.com/2011/08/18/codecademy-a-slick-
fun-way-to-teach-yourself-how-to-program/, accessed June
2014.
Exhibit 2 Discussion Board Critique of Codecademy in early
2012: An Excerpt from User “joblessjunkie”
This online tutorial grossly overestimates how much the
layperson understands about computer languages. For the
complete beginner, far too much is left unexplained.
No one actually codes using a REPL in a browser. Yet the site
makes no attempt to explain why or how this REPL exists, or
how it works.
It doesn’t explain why I can only type in certain places on the
screen.
It doesn’t explain how to try again, or undo mistakes.
It doesn’t explain why a string must be surrounded by quotes,
but numbers must not be.
It doesn’t explain why suffixing `.length` to a string (but not a
number) does anything, versus any of 50,000 other English
words I might have put in its place.
It’s confusing that there are three sources of errors: those from
the language, those from the tutorial, and those from the
browser/internet. Where is this program running? Where does
the code live? How does this code turn into action? How does
the tutorial know what I’m doing?
Codeacademy doesn’t explain how any of this magic happens. It
just plops you down in front of a REPL and tells you to echo
specific things.
Coding is not about learning the syntax that lets you type
“Ryan”.length. It’s about learning the underlying concepts: the
“why”, not the “what”.
Coding is best learned “the hard way”.
Source: “On the Usability of Codecademy,” Hacker News,
January 15, 2012,
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3470900, accessed June
2014.

Note: REPL was a coding environment that executed code
one piece at a time.
3 Codecademy’s Labs
Source: Alexia Tsotsis, “Codecademy Builds ‘Labs,’ A Web-
Based Code Editor,” TechCrunch, December 22, 2011,
http://techcrunch.com/2011/12/22/codecademy-launches-labs-a-
web-based-code-editor/, accessed June 2014.
Exhibit 4 Screenshot of Codecademy’s “Hour of Code” Mobile
App
Source: Lauren Hockenson, “Codecademy’s new mobile app
gets users into the ‘hour of code,’” Gigaom, December 9, 2013,
http://gigaom.com/2013/12/09/codecademys-new-mobile-app-
gets-users-into-the-hour-of-code/, accessed July 2014.
5 Codecademy User Dashboard
Source: Andres Iga, “The New Dashboard,” Codecademy
Blog, July 22, 2014, http://www.codecademy.com/blog/146-the-
new-dashboard, accessed August 2014.
Exhibit
Exhibit
Exhibit
10
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([email protected]). Copying or posting is an infringement of
copyright. Please contact [email protected] or 800-988-0886 for
additional copies.

16
17
Endnotes
1 Codecademy company website, “Help Center,”
http://help.codecademy.com/customer/portal/articles/1394080-
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2 Manuel Lima, “Codecademy Reimagined,” Codecademy Blog,
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3 Asif Shah, “Application Development Initiative expands
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4 Christine Lagorio-Chafkin, “2 Guys Who Want to Teach the
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5 John Pavlus, “Codecademy.com: Finally, An Interactive
Coding Class That’s Fun,” Fast Company, October 4, 2011,
http://www.fastcodesign.com/1665136/codecademycom-finally-
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6 Jason Kincaid, “Codecademy: A Slick, Fun Way To Teach
Yourself How To Program,” TechCrunch, August 18, 2011,
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Yourself How To Program.”
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9 J. O’Dell, “Codecademy is web development education for the
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10 J. O’Dell, “Codecademy is web development education for
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11 Alexia Tsotsis, “Codecademy Builds ‘Labs,’ A Web-Based
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12 Chikodi Chima, “Codecademy adds jQuery lessons and
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13 Linsey Fryatt, “Zach Sims from Codecademy—the 22-year-
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17 Josh Constine, “Codecademy and The White House
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18 Colleen Taylor, “How Codecademy got so hot, so fast,”
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19 Colleen Taylor, “How Codecademy got so hot, so fast.”
20 John Pavlus, “Codecademy.com: Finally, An Interactive
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21 Jason Kincaid, “Codecademy Becomes A Platform: Now
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Anyone Can Write Programming Tutorials.”
17
25 Sarah Kessler, “Learning to Code? Codecademy Adds
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27 Alexia Tsotsis, “Codecademy Builds ‘Labs,’ A Web-Based
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28 J.J. Colao, “Codecademy Raises $10 Million To Conquer The
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29 Ben Rooney, “Codecademy Closes $10 Million Round,” Wall
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31 Allie Bidwell, “Tech Companies Work to Combat Computer

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