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Since I am one of the crazy fools who started this thing (Mike McGee), I guess I'll chime in... July 2011 Our main focus was just trying to build the site. Since Neal and I hadn't really built a professional site before, we didn't really know what we were doing and it was pretty damn hard. Luckily we got a lot of help from our instructor and other advisors who were developers and designers to lighten the load a bit. Still the main product was ours and it was definitely an MVP - http://bit.ly/PZpoSt August 2011 By August I was down to about $200 in my account and we had still not received the funding we thought we would to market Code Academy to the masses. So we just decided to launch the site and see how many people we could get to apply by using Twitter, Facebook, sending emails, and going to meetups in Chicago. We launched Thursday, August 4th 2011 at 9am looking for 12 students to fill our inaugural class. While we had the benefit of having a lot of support within the Chicago community, the applications we were getting were from complete strangers. We were getting applications from realtors, retail workers, lawyers, accountants, journalists, teachers, etc. They were also coming from across the country. California, Texas, North Carolina, Florida, Wisconsin, New York, the list goes on. Even people from outside the country (Israel and The Philippines) applied to our inaugural class! By the end of August we had 88 quality applications from people all over the world without spending a single dollar on marketing. September-October 2011 From there, we decided to accept 35 students instead of 12 and we started our first class in October 2011 with two web development courses instead of one. I think the biggest reason why we were able to generate so much interest was the fact that we were addressing the right problem at the right time. There were so many people out there looking for a program like ours, but it just wasn't there yet. When our inaugural students heard about Code Academy, they jumped at the opportunity. |