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2M users but no money in the bank

• echelon 2y ago
  Why is this free? That's the problem here. They'll easily get 10-100x their donation amount if they make this freemium. They don't even have to degrade the core experience. Life takes energy. You need to make some of it back to survive. Asking for money isn't a dirty thing.
  • pjc50 2y ago
    It's free because all the competition is free and switching costs are zero. They claim that trying to upsell people causes them to quit.
  • OccamsMirror 2y ago
    it's that any profit made must be reinvested into the organization to further its mission, rather than being distributed to shareholders or owners. Non-profit organizations can and often do generate revenue that exceeds their expenses, in other words... profit. The key distinction is how that surplus is used. In a non-profit: - Profits are reinvested to support the organization's goals and activities. - There are no owners or shareholders who receive dividend payments. - Any surplus funds are typically used to expand services, improve operations, or build financial reserves for future needs. Non-profits still need to be financially secure.
  • ZephyrBlu 2y ago
    $7500/mo in donations is also already really, really good. It seems like they could easily turn this into a viable business with some small changes.
• deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
• Fokamul 2y ago
  Also internet is flooded with similar learning websites. First time I've heard about exercism though. Looks cool.
  • ainiriand 2y ago
    Completed the whole c++ and PHP paths there. It is by no means a way to learn those languages in my opinion.
    • atentaten 2y ago
      Then what was the value for you?
      • ainiriand 2y ago
        I really liked the gamification aspect of the site and I couldn't leave the course unfinished!
• h1fra 2y ago
  Kudos for being passionate and providing stuff for free. A lot of people will probably tell you to add a paywall, not sure it's breaking the "non-profit business model" if you keep the price really low. But at the same time, even a low price would deter some users (myself included) and it would also devalue your content :/
  • ihid 2y ago
    Thanks :)
• Joel_Mckay 2y ago
  Should offer some paid structured courses for $200, and offer a 90% discount for existing users. Without revenue any company will fail regardless of popularity. A firm may acquire the company for the customer/lead list, but I wouldn't count on that kind of valuation matching the work your team put into the projects. =3
• mef 2y ago
  out of money, final payroll, no alternative but to go into zombie mode, yet for the last few months the co-founder has been working on his next product which will launch in 2025. maybe everything that could have been tried was tried but this comes off like some of the effort spent working on the next company could have been spent keeping this one alive
  • vidyesh 2y ago
    They said they will be using the proceeds from that for-profile company to pay for a team member's salary and keep Exercism running as much as they can. So this next company could be considered to be an effort to keep this old one alive!
    • p3rls 2y ago
      It sucks being out of money and then you have to fend off the "why aren't you more dedicated" line of questioning when you had to find an alternative to keep the company alive
    • yieldcrv 2y ago
      Oooh contingent on the next unproven idea being economically viable. Amusing. I walk away from all business partners that think this way They hand waive away “who will pay what”
    • deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
  • dheera 2y ago
    > but this comes off like ... You don't know more about the company than them. Most likely they saw this coming months ahead of time, and needed to figure out how to pay their own rents after actual doomsday and needed to pre-emptively start figuring out what's next. Founders who don't start with a pre-existing financial cushion have very, very little job security if they underpay themselves and their businesses shut down without an exit. Also, founders tend to be generalists, and most big companies don't need more generalists, so it's not easy to get hired, doubly so if you have wasted a lot of your brain pitching to investors and having coffee chats with clients. The harsh reality is, the more you are forced to chat with investors and customers instead of working heads-down, the more you lose your hard technical abilities that other people would hire you for. As a founder of a shutting down company, if you want to pay your rent on time, you need to do one of 3 things: (a) pay higher salaries prior to shutdown to give you some time to figure yourself out (controversial), (b) start studying to be a specialist well ahead of shutdown and get on the interview treadmill, (c) start working on your next thing well ahead of shutdown. If you do none of those things, things can get really dangerous to your personal finances.
• Laaas 2y ago
  How are they managing to spend 7.5k a month in server expenses? Are they using AWS?
  • re-thc 2y ago
    > Are they using AWS? Yes!
    • Laaas 2y ago
      You’d think they’d use a cheaper hosting service if that’s literally the only thing preventing them from having positive gross profit.
      • fendy3002 2y ago
        honest questions, is there any ECS-like hosting that's much cheaper?
        • re-thc 2y ago
          > is there any ECS-like hosting that's much cheaper? Most have adopted EKS-like services i.e. kubernetes. There is fly.io that's closer. Hope they improve on the reliability aspect.
        • jfdjkfdhjds 2y ago
          for compute of containerized payloads, in house servers is a no brainer for cost. almos zero sysadmin troubles. might even reduce the troubles of working with eks/ecs. now for storage and db, that's a different story.
        • evantbyrne 2y ago
          Docker Swarm. After building a whole CD PaaS for ECS, I came to believe that swarm is a much more reasonable place for teams to start, so I built a free tool for deploying single-machine swarms called Rove. Do your own research though, and remember you don't have to use one tool or platform for everything.
• tr33house 2y ago
  First time I've heard about them. I hope this helps them get a bigger donation pool and support from similarly minded organizations
• bux93 2y ago
  What does "I've lost faith in the nonprofit business model" mean? Non-profits have costs they pay. Many famously outlive their founders. Many, like co-ops or credit unions, don't depend on donations/endowments. They have revenue greater than expenses as a matter of basic accounting?
  • pjc50 2y ago
    Non-profit is OK. Non-revenue is a bit of a non-starter.
  • FollowingTheDao 2y ago
    Yeah, that was a big weird red flag for me as well. He is blaming the failure of his dream on "the non-profit model"? Wait till he tries the for-profit model... Then he goes on to say that he is upset that 96% of people stop the program. Dude, coding is BORING, but coding is hyped so much that people have high expectations so you get delusional people coming and signing up to your website.
  • gwd 2y ago
    It sounds like his model was: "Make a non-profit org to do something useful for society, get funding from orgs that have money and want useful things done"; and it sounds like the problem he had was that orgs that want useful things done are often too specific. E.g., there are orgs to promote computer literacy among women; and among poor people in India; and among middle-schoolers in Africa, and so on. And he has users who are women, and who ware poor people in India, and who are middle-schoolers in Africa, and so on. But none of the orgs will give him a grant, because they can't guarantee the money will only be spent for their own target groups. I can see why that would be kind of discouraging.
    • deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
    • iamleppert 2y ago
      You can still work out a deal where you could identify some portion of your users as fitting the mission.
• sneak 2y ago
  Why not charge 5000 users money instead of servicing 2M users for free? It seems to me if you can’t get 1 in 500 of your users to give you $10 per year then maybe your product isn’t actually valuable or useful and should just shut down. I say this without knowing anything whatsoever about this product or its utility; it just seems like a general thing. If you have this many signups and you can’t charge even a tiny tiny fraction of them, it means the signup number is irrelevant.
  • philipwhiuk 2y ago
    They're charging 4000 users. The paywall is ethical.
  • galactus 2y ago
    They say in the article they tried to force 1000 random users to convert to paying account and none of them did
    • grardb 2y ago
      Can you point out where they said this?
• thunderbong 2y ago
  The title has a typo - it's Exercism, not Exercise.
  • dang 2y ago
    Thanks! Fixed now. Submitted title was "Exercise has 2M users but no money in the bank". Solution is not to fix the typo but to follow the site guidelines: "Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait". It's not necessary to add the company name since the domain is displayed next to the title.
• benreesman 2y ago
  Where the fuck are the VCs looking at serious hackers with millions of users who haven’t gotten the business model dialed in yet? Y-Combinator says “build something people want”. Two million sounds like a lot of people. I’ve only glanced over this so I could be missing some critical fact, but superficially it sounds like pmarca or pg should write a check before the rest of us stop believing in the startup lottery.
  • EduardoBautista 2y ago
    Well, exercism is a "not-for-profit organisation registered in the UK" according to the footer of their website. Edit: It appears that their "not-for-profit" message in their footer is a bit misleading, as explained by those who replied to my comment.
    • benreesman 2y ago
      OpenAI is a 501c nonprofit. Doesn’t stop Sam taking big time meetings more often than he checks his email.
      • LunaSea 2y ago
        Part of OpenAI is a nonprofit, not in its entirety.
        • benreesman 2y ago
          Matt Levine uses a diagram to allude to the complexity. And that was before Larry Summers and the National Security Administration got involved. A better term for OpenAI would be “rogue state”. https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2023-11-20/who-controls-openai https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2023-11-20/who-co...
    • choult 2y ago
      They're not officially a non-profit, they're a limited company. Obviously they can still operate as such - that's down to the board how they distribute profits via dividends, so they might choose to do so. A true non-profit company in the UK would be a registered Community Interest Company, or a registered Charity.
• andrewstuart 2y ago
  How can there be NO money in 2 million users?
  • aswerty 2y ago
    I would be more interested in active users. I have had personal projects with 100s of registered users yet I was the only one who actually used it. So 2M users might translate to somewhere between 1000 and 10000 unique users per month. Considering the niche; many of them young people with very little discretionary spending money.
    • ihid 2y ago
      We have about 70,000 MAU. People tend to spend an intense few weeks learning a language, then disappear for a year. Then come back and learn another language. A large part of the 2M is still "alive" (I don't know exactly what number that would be, but I'd think around 600k) but Exercism isn't the sort of product you use day-in-day-out.
      • Lionga 2y ago
        At 1.500 signups per day (45K a month) 70,000 MAU are horrible retention. Usually you need about 10 times MAU to signups. Unless you can make that happen you have nothing that people actually use and not just try out.
        • ihid 2y ago
          It takes people about a month to work through a language track, learn the language, and get on with their life. So I wouldn't expect to have more than 45k MAU. 70k MAU is because people LIKE the site and come back to learn another language. We're not trying to be some business that sucks people into using our site every day and monetise them. We're aiming to teach people effectively and efficiently and then get them moving on with their lives. We could make the site less efficient, or change it's purpose, but that's not the mission of the organisation.
• Oras 2y ago
  I'm just thinking out loud here, but for 2 million users learning to code and improving their skills, there is a chance they want to change jobs or are already looking for one. Have you thought of adding a hiring feature? Where people upload their CVs, and companies search (anonymously) for talent? There is a hiring model called PPA (Pay Per Application), or monthly fees to search CVs. Your unique selling point would be companies are not getting hundreds of custom AI CVs flooding their application; they search for what they want, and you're helping both sides. Good luck! edit: grammar
  • zurfer 2y ago
    even easier, just a job board (like stackoverflow), where companies pay to advertise a job.
    • rkowalick 2y ago
      the job board could even pitch jobs in the language an exercism user is currently learning
  • authorfly 2y ago
    This is a tarpit monetisation method unfortunately. (I learnt the hard way) It's common for student ideas too (as in ideas with students/recent graduates as endusers/customers). The general argument is - we can specifically identify talent and motivated learners/skill-possessing people, who will look for jobs. That's exactly what companies need and companies pay $5k-$10k a head during good markets for this rare STEM skill, like programming! Problem - The people on these platforms are 70% likely to give up within 6 months or go into another field Problem - Experience means 10x more than education to employers, especially fundamental experience Problem - Your information on potential hires as the provider becomes outdated fast and supply-demand changes in hiring market can reduce your commissions by 50-75% in one year (as happened from 2022-2023) I would go as far as saying these users - because they are typically earlier career - are actually worse for connecting with jobs boards/hiring than literally any random iPhone user for advertising purposes. And companies don't pay much to advertise to random iPhone users. I wish it wasn't so, but it is so according to how companies act. If OP wants to monetise this way they should consider an affiliate programme to a CV upload or Jobs board site, it will test any appetite for hiring these people at the moment much quicker.
• philipwhiuk 2y ago
  > For the last few months, I've been working on a new educational product teaching coding fundamentals that I'm going to launch in 2025. 96% of people who try to learn coding give up - which I find unacceptable, so I'm aiming to change that. Feels like you've been kickstarting a competitor/pivot on the side.
  • elAhmo 2y ago
    With those stats, even with just 4% of people wanting to learn, and just a fraction of them actually paying, that would be dozens of thousands of paying customers. Even at 1USD per month, it seems a relatively sustainable business.
    • FollowingTheDao 2y ago
      Yeah, I think he is confusing "non-profit" with "non-payment". You can have a non-profit company with paying customers. I think he need to take a basic economics class.
  • sealeck 2y ago
    I think the tone of this comment is unnecessarily condemning (apologies if I am reading it incorrectly) – I can totally understand why someone who has worked for years on a non-profit business which has created a lot of value for people (I think exercism is pretty good software) might want to be able to at least pay themself.
    • kelnos 2y ago
      Non-profit doesn't mean you didn't get to pay yourself. It just means that any revenue that exceeds expenses must be reinvested into the business.
      • slkjdlskjdklsd 2y ago
        That sounds like Amazon to me.
• deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
• heeton 2y ago
  I don’t know if Jeremy will see this, but: At my org it’s hard to get justification for donations. However if this was something like ~100$ a year or whatever per dev, I’d be paying it today for my team.
  • throwaway2225 2y ago
    I remember reading an article about a non-profit discovering a work around for this problem. They created a subscription plan that had no real value except maybe adding some trivial "feature" like a gold star next to their name (I don't remember the details). This made it possible for the companies to receive a standard invoice that had a greater chance of approval.
    • whatevaa 2y ago
      Yeah, can't justify donation to corporate, need some reason to pay for stuff.
  • ihid 2y ago
    Hello :) Appreciate the comment. If you have thoughts on that, I'd love to hear them here: https://forum.exercism.org/t/exercism-teams-coming-soon/12667 https://forum.exercism.org/t/exercism-teams-coming-soon/1266...
• napoleoncomplex 2y ago
  Maybe this will be helpful to the author (partially already mentioned): - Nonprofit business model does not equal "everything is free for the user forever", I'm guessing you already know that, but the wording on why you don't believe in nonprofit business models explicitly mentioned keeping everything free as the reason. You can earn revenue from users in a nonprofit business. - You have a big audience with good engagement for the segment, there are multiple ways to make money without abandoning the core mission (job boards, screencast upsells for advanced courses, premium content, whatever else, look at how Remoteok.com makes money, copy-paste as the founder is super open on his process) - Being a for-profit business and fundraising, will temporarily solve your issue of having funds to run a business. It will not solve the issue of not knowing how to/being afraid to charge users or other parties for the value they get out of your product. You could already be solving this problem today, and you have a 2million audience pipeline built in to solve that issue. I'm not dismissing the challenge of some business segments being extremely difficult to make money in despite the value being meaningful, I work in healthcare, so I know, but since your new business will effectively be in the same segment, do focus on the revenue aspect much sooner and much than you think you'll need to, because you already know what happens if you don't. And big respect for what you've built in a super crowded space, you obviously have the product and user empathy chops needed, wishing you the best of luck on nailing the business chops!
• leetsbehonest 2y ago
  I just don't agree with this leetcode industry. That, recruiters and the whole tech hiring industry that has spun off from a process originally intended to get to know and gain confidence in a potential employee. It is just I have doubts in the educational help these platforms really deliver given that there are already so many resources to learn these days say compared to 20y ago.
  • ihid 2y ago
    We're not really part of the "leetcode industry". People have used Exercism to learn new programming languages for a decade. We've deliberately not wanted to become a place of competition or a recruitment space. We've always focused on helping people learn based on their intrinsic motivations.
    • leetsbehonest 2y ago
      Sorry you are right, what I posted isn't fair. I should have read more into it.
      • ihid 2y ago
        No problem. Thanks for acknowledging that! :)
• FollowingTheDao 2y ago
  The biggest issue I had with the tech boom and the current tech culture is when they replaced "profit" with "people" as a metric of success. To me they took the phrase "people over profit" and turned it into "people are profit". It is time investors businesses and started looking at the bottom line again, even non-profits. I mean can you imagine if we based the success of a store with how many people walked in even if they did not buy anything? Even non-profits need to make money, so their business model was either wrong or they do not have a product worth paying for. On top of that we are probably in economic stagflation so we will be seeing more stories like this as the months go on.
• rurban 2y ago
  This are the LinkedIn comments on this post: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/exercism_activity-7237480303219388416-vJ1v https://www.linkedin.com/posts/exercism_activity-72374803032...
• physicsguy 2y ago
  This is the problem with ed-techs. Nobody wants to pay. Those that do (Universities, schools) are also competing with the platforms to some degree.
  • mizzao 2y ago
    It's hard to build a business model around education because the product succeeding removes the user's need for it in the first place. Kinda like a dating app, where maximizing usage means not getting you hitched (too quickly). One of my theses as an edtech founder is that the education can't be the core business model long term.
• xrd 2y ago
  This is one of the saddest posts I've read in a long time. I love exercism. It's beautiful, works in the browser and from CLI. The lessons are really well designed. It's the perfect coding school environment. So, I'm sad it isn't viable. But, I think I am really saddened by the comments here, second guessing all the decisions they made. If I were to second guess the people behind most of the comments, I would assume no one has ever run a business with payroll, or built something with this much reach. The comments ring really hollow for the most part and seem really callous given this person has sunk his life into making the world, and my life, a better place. I'm scared for the moment he is in life and sad there are not more positive comments, and even better, comments from people where they would actually help by making a donation.
  • ihid 2y ago
    Thank you for being so kind and supportive. I really appreciate your comment. I'm ok. I'm hopeful for the future. I believe there's lots of amazing stuff we can do and that Exercism has a great future. But right now it's in a hard, low place. The last few months have been pretty tough emotionally, but I think getting to this place is one of acceptance. The only direction now is up :)
    • xrd 2y ago
      I've gotten so much from your site. I'm sorry you have put so much in of yourself and haven't been able to make it work financially. Would you email me (chris@extrastatic.com). I've got a few people I think would help depending on what direction you want to go in.
      • ihid 2y ago
        Done, although I emailed the email in your profile. I'll send it to that one too :)
    • stavros 2y ago
      Can you please just add a paid tier before shutting down? Just a $5/mo something that shows a badge on your account, or whatever. Call it something other than "donate", "premium account" or something, and see how many people pick it up. You "only" need 1500 people to do that to cover the costs, which is less than a thousandth of your user base. Even if it gives a few useful features to subscribers, that's better than shutting down.
• KoftaBob 2y ago
  > I think it's fair to say that at this stage I've lost faith in the nonprofit business model working in a way that allows Exercism to reach any of its potential. Keeping something free for everyone relies on either the user being the product, or on significant donations, and without either, it's very hard to grow. Non-profit =/= the product is free. The vast majority of hospitals and universities are non-profit, and their product/service sure as hell isn't free. Nonprofits operate under a non-distribution constraint, meaning any surplus revenues must be reinvested into the organization's mission rather than distributed to private ownership. What they've lost faith in is running a business with a free product.
• zelphirkalt 2y ago
  At some point they messed up their login with google captcha stuff. From the moment I discovered this new state of affairs, I have avoided exercism. A shame, that they ruined it.
• tpoacher 2y ago
  Just donated a small amount. I think this is a nice service, and can think of a couple of friends who struggle with programming (professionally!) but are too embarrassed to ask and progress, and could make use of this service. I hear the pain-points about the donation-driven model not rising to the task, but I do wonder how prominent that particular call to action is on the site. On one hand you don't want to bombard your users with annoying jimmy-wales-style boo-hoo donation banners. On the other hand you don't want your users to be completely oblivious to the fact that their favourite service is about to be shut down if everybody thinks that "it's ok, they probably have enough money / I wouldn't make a difference anyway". Have you considered having a discreet yet prominent progress bar on the website, showing your monthly donation needs/goals? This could act as a good prompt for users to consider donating. One suggestion would be to accompany this by an information button, which when clicked takes you to a page explaining the different costs that need to be covered, where your money goes when you donate, and a detailed breakdown of what is currently still required / missing. Optics-wise, I would also try to find a way to differentiate between "large" donors and donation "trickles". E.g. you could color code on that progress bar different "tiers" of donation (or perhaps display this separately as a pie-chart in the breakdown information page). The point of this is to show to people who might be tempted to donate "small" amounts but are sitting on the fence because they don't think it'll make a difference, that it "can" actually make a cumulative difference, and push that kind of user past that threshold and donate "something". Alternatively / additionally (you may do this already), if and when you see that a user has already extracted value from your service, such as, e.g., when they have submitted their 100th exercise, you could show a "congratulations" banner that says that you hope they're finding the service useful, and politely asks them if they could consider donating (oftentimes worded as "buy us a beer or two"). If they decide to donate, then after their donation, you could also have a tickbox at the bottom of this banner to ask in a respectful manner (i.e. not a dark-pattern-worded / confirmshaming one) if they would like to be reminded again after some time / number of exercises, or if they simply prefer to make a one-off donation and that's fine. Finally, depending on your resources, if people "do" buy you a "beer", it would also be a nice touch to thank them for it, in an as personalised a manner as possible. Better yet, you could give them some sort of 'reward' / 'recognition' on the site; e.g. I think something silly such as revealing a hidden feature that allows a user to then tick a box to add a silly 'holding a beer' overlay to their avatar icon (in a similar way to how stackoverflow gives 'hats' close to christmas time), would actually go a long way to motivate people, after seeing these beer mugs on other people's avatars. And it's "silly" enough that people might donate to get this just for the fun and silliness of it. The donation model is an odd one. Obviously, not everyone donates, but I think given some prompting and lack of friction in doing so, there's a significant number of people who would be inclined to donate out of a sense of gratitude, but who don't do so if they haven't been given a reasonable opportunity / visibility to do so, or some sort of confirmation that their donation doesn't just go to greedy shareholders on top of some sort of pre-existing dodgy revenue stream, but makes an actual difference to real people running the service.
• yieldcrv 2y ago
  So you need to charge, but don’t want to lie about the 100% free part even though you can change that So you need to upcharge. It is 100% free… to start and then there is a subscription that is paid to finish the language course, shown in monthly cost but charged annually by default more languages? charge more You can sell the account data to recruitment firms. Everyone hates this but you know that your users are the product, your users know that they are supposed to be the product. Keep a cut with the recruiters so they have to pay you a little commission when candidates land a job
  • acureau 2y ago
    I'm not sure whether to be appalled by your suggestions or impressed by your blatancy
    • yieldcrv 2y ago
      wait till you see educative.io‘s pricing then 85% off on the annual plan, just that it’s $200, but at least you’re not paying $99/month anymore the interesting thing about the not “not-for-profit” model is that all you have to do is just undercut educative.io by a tiny bit
• NoblePublius 2y ago
  Crazy idea: charge $1
  • cheema33 2y ago
    Charing $1 is harder than it sounds. Many commercial transactions have a minimum "service fee" that would eat into that $1. But $12/yr. is probably doable.
• efitz 2y ago
  From the article: > “I've lost faith in the nonprofit business model”. There’s your problem right there. Investors want profit. If you want investors then you have to convince them you’ll deliver ROI. Altruism is not a business model. There is nothing wrong with altruism but it is not compatible (except in short term or insignificant ways) with most of the business world, which is profit driven.
  • mdgrech23 2y ago
    I think it's fair to say we need a new model, just saying but all of that is way bigger than me or you or Exercism.
  • darth_avocado 2y ago
    Non profit doesn't mean you survive on donations. Non profit can still charge money to keep the lights on. If you have 2M users, charging $0.50/year for use can still get you $1M to run your business. Edit: I think the comment was taken quite literally. The point I was trying to make was that the user base exists, monetization for profit is definitely hard, but monetization for keeping the lights on can work. You could try a flat fee for all users, you could do seasonal exclusive contents to support the platform, you could try selling merch, you could literally put a banner annually like Wikipedia does etc. The point being, if you have 2M users and you provide enough value, there are ways to make it work. Donations unfortunately don’t work, because it’s not top of mind for people and people need a little pushing.
    • chaos_emergent 2y ago
      this isn't at all realistic; a tiny fraction of free users are going to be willing to pay for your product.
      • darth_avocado 2y ago
        Updated the comment with clarifications.
    • mrmuagi 2y ago
• insane_dreamer 2y ago
  Congratulations on a very successful platform! (Success should be measured in usage/reach, not $). You've probably thought of this, but it might be easier to charge a very small amount -- say $1/month, which most people even students, could afford, rather than rely on donations. If you get 1% of users paying that, it's still $20K month which is more than you're getting now. (Of course managing the payments themselves costs money). It can still be non-profit (which is a great thing), so no one is getting rich off of it, and it doesn't poison the mission. But it could pay the bills. Update: Processing fees are a problem as posters have pointed out, so you'd probably want to make it $10/year, or $5/six months. It's still an easily decision for a very large number of people. Patreon has $1/month options, not sure how they do it though.
  • charlie0 2y ago
    Would $1/month even be worth it? It seems payment processors would take a big chunk out of that $1, which is why I very rarely see monthly subs of that amount.
    • whatevaa 2y ago
      Yeah, if you want that little, do Bitwardens $10 a year. $1 transactions are ripe for abuse, checking if cards are active.
    • insane_dreamer 2y ago
      You'd probably want to charge $10/year (once) rather than $1/month. It's still an easy choice for many people (of course still inaccessible for students in some countries).
      • zip1234 2y ago
        Another option is to make deals with universities or schools for access for their students where they pay a certain amount per year and the students can all have access
        • 2y ago
• ocean_moist 2y ago
  The only way out for something like this to stay afloat is to be subsidized by a big tech company. $7,500 monthly is nothing to a large tech company. It sort of does makes sense for big companies to subsidize this so that the quality and amount of software engineers that join their company increases. This value prop is intangible, but I feel like at least one big company would go for it.
  • fastball 2y ago
    Well... they could charge for it.
  • pico303 2y ago
    The $7500 jumped out at me, but for a different reason. This seems awfully high for a site with 2 million registered users. I feel like some backend optimization could get than number way down ($1000/mo?). What is all this computing power going towards?
    • pcthrowaway 2y ago
      I imagine they need to run code for their exercises on a server. There are probably lots of ways to optimize that, and perhaps even ways to get the code running in the browser via webassembly or something, but all of these things require technical expertise and time.
      • computerdork 2y ago
        That's interesting. Well, they are coding gurus, so maybe it's feasible :)
    • Lionga 2y ago
      It is going straight to Jeff Bezos pocket selling them servers at at 10 to 20 times markup then reasonable
      • Cpoll 2y ago
• dlahoda 2y ago
  Tried to donate in crypto, failed. Bad UX. May I have just address and chain to send to?
• fredgrott 2y ago
  I wonder why this would not be a fit for GitHub and Microsoft...seems like it could complement GitHub...
• bloopernova 2y ago
  :( exercism has been great. I've been subscribed to the insiders program for more than a year now, I wish I could help more.
• huijzer 2y ago
  > We've tried a lot of things to change that. We've spoken to hundreds of funders and companies, The goal isn’t to get investors! It is to get money from customers. A lot of startups seem to get this wrong.
  • lolinder 2y ago
    This is apparently a nonprofit, not a startup. They weren't looking for investors, they were looking for donors.
    • huijzer 2y ago
      Ah yes you’re right. Thanks.
• dartharva 2y ago
  Can't you just add in Wikipedia-style donation request popup/banners for everyone in general? I reckon plenty of people will be willing to spare some change even multiple times when they log on, just like they do with Wikipedia.
  • Workaccount2 2y ago
    If anything Wikipedia as an example of how unsuccessful a voluntary donation model is. 0.2% of people who use wikipedia donate to it. Unless you are doing tens of millions of unique views a month, it's probably not gonna be sustainable. People really hate paying for things. Even things they use and love.
    • deisteve 2y ago
      the only way is to lower your operating costs but you are correct ppl on the internet simply do not like paying for stuff even donating is a tough ask. even getting people to click on affiliate links that won't cost them anything I find is tough as most people remove the referral link or purchase on another device probably out of privacy concerns.
    • PaulHoule 2y ago
      Also it's a subtraction from the legitimacy bank account. It's well known that Wikipedia doesn't need those donations. Endless telethons for public television in America annoy 100 people for every one that donates. Despite that you see ads on public TV for the Archer Daniels Midland corporation all the time even though, allegedly, there is no advertising on public TV.
      • quesera 2y ago
        I don't know enough about Wikipedia, though I have heard this point made before. I do know a lot about noncommercial broadcasting in the US though, and your comments appear superficial. A sponsorship message is different from a call-to-action advertisement. The former is permitted, the latter is not. They are not different enough, in my opinion, but they are discernible. Public TV and radio station finances are public information. Audience fundraisers are a meaningful portion of their operating budget (~25-50%), though it varies by market. As are program underwriting (up to 50% in strong markets), and often CPB funds contribute a few points (this is highly politicized and if you overindex on it, your news sources are likely polluted).
• bluepuma77 2y ago
  Switch hosting model. Assuming you run expensive cloud services for $7500. Get some inexpensive bare metal servers and you maybe can save 80% cost.
  • lolinder 2y ago
    Their model may be one of the few that would truly be quite challenging to pull off with bare metal—running sandboxed code for 73 languages is hard to do economically with any setup, but being able to lean on cloud services for provisioning would make it much more achievable.
    • deisteve 2y ago
      ah I see that might be a bit more tricky. I was wondering why the costs were so high. For example, I serve roughly 3 million users on a $40/month VPS. I only run Postgres + Django, if I use Supabase and all these other fancy cloud SaaS I wouldn't be able to sustain it as the costs would increase 10~20x fold.
      • kiwicopple 2y ago
        (supabase ceo) our postgres offering costs roughly equivalent of RDS so if you use it with Django I don’t think you will come close to 20-40x a VPS, ymmv, depending on your workload We have an Auth service, but since you use Django you wouldn’t need it - sounds like you’d only need postgres (like a lot of our customers)
        • deleted 2y ago
          [deleted]
        • timc3 2y ago
          I don't think you get the point. RDS is expensive, just because you having pricing parity with it doesn't mean that you are going to be at the same pricing level as cheap hosting. And thats fine, you have features on top that can be worth paying for certain customers and expenses of your own to pay. Those of us that have been around in this business for 30 years know how expensive PAAS and IAAS can be and how easy it is to roll your own solutions and when not to do that.
• breck 2y ago
  Nice post! Nice site! I just added 70 links from PLDB to your site. Some thoughts before I donate: > I've lost faith in the nonprofit business model Great! You will find a way to generate revenue streams. This is a good pivot! I would recommend going fully open source and public domain as you add a profit model. IMO public domain for-profit companies are superior to (C) non-profit companies. Profits don't make you evil, closed source and copyright does. > every PR in a live Exercism repository should get a review before it can be merged Why? I recommend just merging in. Quickly fixing/undoing problematic commits. > $7,500 in monthly donations. That covers our server cost OMG!!! Stop! This money should go to you 3, not cloud providers. Server costs should be $0. This should be a local first, entirely client side site. Maybe 1 $50 a month droplet if you need some read/write user stuff. With less than 100K active users in a day, 1 server should be more than enough. Finally, ditch the (c) symbol at bottom. Go public domain! Here's my user test and authoring of this comment: https://www.loom.com/share/763e480438c4481ba0aa056c6ef0cbbb?sid=d01d0d9d-1f98-4215-8bb1-8793faf6da7e https://www.loom.com/share/763e480438c4481ba0aa056c6ef0cbbb?...
• bigdict 2y ago
  This a political/economic system failure. How do we design a system that allows for entities like exercism to be funded/supported?
• lowbloodsugar 2y ago
  >Rust does not use a garbage collector, using advanced static analysis to provide deterministic drops instead. Huh?
• squigglydonut 2y ago
  Surprised that a Pluralsight type company wouldn't acquire.
• shams93 2y ago
  What I did once in the very early 2000s was to white label a free platform so that other people could license the software from us for $$$ to pay for our free flsash game platform in 2001.
• Arcuru 2y ago
  That's too bad. I used to contribute to Exercism a lot (I'm still technically a maintainer but haven't meaningfully helped in a while), I think it was the first OSS project I contributed a large amount of effort to. I was more or less the sole maintainer for C++ for a while and also helped with the C track. It's definitely a good service and OSS project, I recommend it a lot. Fundamentally though people don't want to pay for things that they can get for free, or they're used to getting for free. If people actually want OSS projects to survive, you should be giving a little bit of recurring money. I set aside $XX/month to distribute to projects and I don't even work anymore.
  • deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
• jll29 2y ago
  My heart is in pain from reading this post - as everybody's who had a startup & encountered the "poor fit" argument. I particularly feel for you regarding the problem of being more generic than needed when people prefer smaller scope (happened to me a few times). I don't have a solution for you, and you probably tried a lot of prudent things. I assume you have already contacted people that buy into educational software (e.g. Kevin O'Leary of 'Shark Tank' fame)? I wish you some kind of miracle that turns things around; sometimes once conversation can change everything. Surely this user base deserves that the site finds a way to sustain.
  • mizzao 2y ago
    What does the "poor fit" argument refer to?
• trcarney 2y ago
  I just had an idea that is a shot in the dark but you could try cold calling large companies with complicated SDKs to see if they will pay you a large monthly fee in exchange for exercism hosting a tutorial they create for their SDK. You already have the sandbox and the support for the most popular languages. It may take some development to build out the feature but you probably wouldn't need too many to sign on to cover your costs and you could still leave your core offering free.
  • primitivesuave 2y ago
    This is a great idea, especially when you consider the untold millions that companies like Twilio and Stripe already spend on educating developers. Perhaps along with "language tracks" there could be "API tracks".
  • stefek99 2y ago
    Brilliant, genius idea, defo worth trying.
• cheema33 2y ago
  Like many others I had never heard of this service. I looked and I am very very impressed. The way topics are laid out... someone put a lot of thought into this. I would love for this site to continue and thrive. I also agree with some others here that the hosting at AWS is probably best left to organizations that have a lot of spare cash. It is way overpriced. I self host a fairly busy site. It is mostly hands-off. I have never really fully understood the AWS premium.
• ihid 2y ago
  Hello. Blog post author and Exercism co-founder here. Thanks for all the comments, especially those kind supportive ones. I've replied to a few, but I thought it would making a couple of general points for context. 1. I feel something that's missed is that if Exercism just continues to help tens of thousands of people per month and has no-one working full-time on it in the future, that's not the end of the world. Our donations cover server costs (thank you, donors!) so there's not an existential threat. And our wonderful volunteers keep our content growing and up to date (we've added a dozen new languages already this year). For most of Exercism's existence, it has had no paid staff. Me and Erik having to become volunteers again is ok - it just means things will improve slower. The blog post was written as an update to our community, and our community has been on this journey with me over the last few year. They've seen us go from zero money, to raising over $1M in donations and hiring people, to not having follow-up donations and having to let those people go. They have a lot of context that's maybe not seen by people new to the story. The post is sad, because Erik, who's well loved is leaving, and because the last couple of years haven't financially gone in the direction we'd have liked it to. But the post is not me complaining. Exercism hasn't been financially successful during the last 18 months, but it's fulfilled the core part of its mission by helping hundreds of thousands of people. And it will continue to help people moving forward. 2. Our aim is to get people to learn a programming language and then to get on with their lives. It's actively not to monetise people. That's important, because it changes the model a little. We don't expect people to stick around month-after-month doing stuff (one person said that having 70k MAU is terrible - but you can also see it as totally expected - you sign up, learn, leave - that's the point). Which means having some recurring Premium offering doesn't massively work. Nearly all the people who donate are also contributors, power-learners (learning multiple languages), or people who feel aligned to a world where something like Exercism exists, and want to ensure it continues to do so. So the only real end-user model is to charge an upfront fee for using Exercism, which actively goes against the mission and doesn't honour the commitment under which people have contributed. 3. To all the other monetisation ideas, thank you for them. I appreciate you all wanting to help. We've considered and experimented with lots of them over the years. We've not found one that fits well yet but maybe/hopefully that'll change in the future. I have areas I will continue to peruse and am hopeful about. 4. There are numerous threads on server costs, and while I appreciate the opinions there, saving some cost there wouldn't massively shift the needle. Our donations cover our server costs. Hiring good developers and other people costs a lot more money than the ~$3k/month we'd save. I'd also say that there's some general under-appreciation of the complexity of running student's code in 73 programming language sandboxes in real-time. Exercism is a lot more complex than a webserver/database model - we have over 400 GitHub repos. I'm certain some ops gurus would be able to do a better job at building a server infrastructure than I've done for less money, but the one I've built works with basically zero maintenance and not having to be on call 24/7/365 is something I need/value. As I said in my blog post, I'm going to take a couple of weeks out now, and come back hopefully re-energised to keep building Exercism, and the new project alongside it, which hopefully will help keep Exercism funded. Thank you again for all the support, ideas and well-wishes. --- Changelog: - Added "For most of Exercism's existence..." to the end of that paragraph.
• dools 2y ago
  > My plan is to give beginners a rock-solid base, then funnel them into Exercism Shouldn't you be doing this the other way? If you have 2 million users, then just make something that you can sell to them. Whenever you have a bunch of customers paying you $X there is a subset of those customers that will pay you $(X+Y). You don't have to "make them the product" in the sense that you would be selling their eyeballs, but you're teaching people to code, surely some of them will want to get a job as a coder afterwards. What about creating a paid placement program where you give recruiters at companies hungry for tech talent access to the coders that perform the best on some tests? The coders can voluntarily take the tests, so they know their info is going to recruiters. You could also offer certifications as a service to companies looking to test proficiency of their existing staff or create a subscription model for use by companies who want to upskill their existing staff. With 2m users surely you have people using it from all over the world. Companies might pay a premium to hire the best up and coming talent on Upwork because generally their hourly rates are not as high as experienced devs on the platform, but you can tell based on the code they're writing that, despite their relative inexperience, they're an outlier in terms of coding skill. You could get affiliate revenue or commissions by selling other, paid certifications such as for SAP/ABAP, Cisco, Microsoft and the like. It just seems like you can take this as the platform product and upsell, rather than trying to create another product that you sell to people who aren't already using Exercism.
• d3vmax 2y ago
  Can you integrate commercially with a jobs board? Or create a jobs website?
• 8bithero 2y ago
  I was doing some Exercism tasks the other day and then saw this so if only felt right that I make a donation. Looking at some of the comments there seems to be a number of people who have also just made a donation. Given the state of every service becoming subscription based, I can definitely see a lot of subscription fatigue. Maybe an alternative route you could try is the annual wikipedia "We want to keep this free. Please help us buy donating". I think a lot of people appreciate the service but a lot of the times it's easy to forget that running a service like exercism can get expensive, and would be willing to donate, given a compelling enough reminder of this.
  • freedomben 2y ago
    Personally, I think this approach of asking for donations is the right move for a non-profit. Subscription fatigue is real and is becoming a major problem. I am now at the point where I will go without software I would absolutely pay for one time, but because it is a subscription I refuse. I'm sure when all is said and done, there just are not enough people like me to make a difference, but I sure hope things swing the other way. Subscriptions for everything and tips for everything are two cultural things that need to die in a fire. They are ways of squeezing more out of people, especially by taking advantage of human tendencies. It's gross and at this point I think it is unethical. Maybe not all implementations, but there are plenty that are.
    • 01HNNWZ0MV43FF 2y ago
      You could use the time value of money formula to convert between one-time prices and subscriptions. just multiply annual price by 30 to get forever price. So my $6 per month VPS would be about $2,000 upfront. And a $500 game console would be a $1.50 monthly subscription. (Obviously glossing over tons of differences in say, a PS2 and a Stadia subscription) It feels easier to ask customers for $1 per month than $360 up front... Especially since I don't know if my service will be up forever
      • jamwil 2y ago
        I don’t think a perpetuity is correct in this case. Software depreciates rapidly without updates and the norm was to charge the one-time price for each major version, which was always somewhat analogous to a subscription assuming you wanted up-to-date software.
• dboreham 2y ago
  I haven't used this site but I did run a service a while ago that had 100K free users. All the talk here about not using AWS is bunk. Not needle moving. OP needs to bite the bullet and charge their customers. At least some of them, for something. Heck some of their traffic probably comes from bots. Bill them. Make a white label version and try to sell that to big customers. Actually the other way round: try to sell it then make it if they bite.
• game_the0ry 2y ago
  I have a theory that developers are a difficult demographic to market to and monetize off of. Its bc we are skeptical and frugal.
• mistyvales 2y ago
  I was donating, but my skill level is not good enough to successfully use the site. It's not really a place for beginners though, so once I learn more I will probably sign back up
• cj 2y ago
  My marketing department this week asked for my approval to spend $50k placing our logo in an IT newsletter with 300k subscribers. If you have an email list of 2 million… a lot of companies will pay $50-100k for a mention.
• hankchinaski 2y ago
  why not charge for access? There is plenty of people making money with subscriptions and courses in this space. You just need to gate the content. You have an audience already, bait and switch. Money will come.
• arbuge 2y ago
  > The one area we have had some promising success is in advertising on the site. But the effort it takes to find advertisers and manage them, and my general desire not to flood Exercism with adverts, has meant that I feel this isn't a very sustainable strategy. To me that begs the obvious question... what about trying some automated advertising like Google Ads? Probably not the most theoretically optimum use of their ad space, but minimal effort is involved.
  • ysofunny 2y ago
    so basically letting google be their business???
    • arbuge 2y ago
      Better than shutting down entirely I think.
  • varispeed 2y ago
    That probably requires investment in good content moderation and monitoring the account. There are people out there who like to report anything that violates T&C or create such violations themselves and then report them. Either for the kick or could be done by competition. What I am trying to say, there is no free lunch.
• ysofunny 2y ago
  capitalism doesn't really play well with digital assets, services, nor anything digital really. we need a lot more Byung-Chul-Han somehow
• bitcoinmoney 2y ago
  Can I buy in as a share holder and monetize this?
• nakovet 2y ago
  I've completed Exercism courses and they are great. One thing that was obvious to me is that if you want to focus on a specific topic the $15/month subscription is too cheap, you can pay, take the course, cancel because you are done with the course, all within the month. The other thing that is challenging is that the majority of programmer is either too cheap or "too broke", $15 USD is a meaningful amount of money in other countries with weaker currency, and in countries with strong currency I've met people paying thousands for a university diploma, doing a well paid internship that "could not afford exercism". That's though, I hope I never have to build a business for software developers. All of that shared experience comes from 3-4 years ago, so prices, models might have changed since that, but if they go under it's sad, their UI and their UX was so clean, fun, interactive, pleasant, etc, it was a joy to study using their material.
• charlie0 2y ago
  Exercism looks really cool! Have you thought of reaching out to philanthropists, particularly in tech? Just a wild guess but I believe there would be at least 1 wealthy individual out there willing to donate money for this cause.
• grosjona 2y ago
  They shouldn't have advertised 'free forever' on the website. OMG. In that area, people don't even think about the next day. One of the things I learned is that you should never offer even one tiny ounce of added value which the average user is not capable of perceiving. Literally the entire idea of profit rests on arbitraging between perception and reality. You don't want to pay for surplus value that is beyond your customer's perceptive capabilities.
• lanecwagner 2y ago
  I don't know if iHiD will see this, but this is Lane, the founder of Boot.dev. One of our students shared this article with me, and it really sucks to see. Exercism has always been a go to recommendation of mine for students who need additional practice or to learn languages we don't yet teach. I know you mentioned you don't wanna do ads, which makes sense. But if you're getting 1200 sign ups a day thats worth a lot, and id be happy to chat and see if there's a sponsor opportunity thats uninvasive and that could at least keep you going. anyhow, you can reach me on Twitter @wagslane or via email: lane @ boot dev. either way, hope things turn around
  • thelastparadise 2y ago
    [flagged]
  • ipaddr 2y ago
    I agree with the ads model as a way forward where purchasing a membership removes them. The fairest way.
    • synergy20 2y ago
      second this, pay to get rid of ads, a fair deal and proved model.
      • beacham 2y ago
        Thirding this.
    • nnurmanov 2y ago
      Another thing to try is to find mentors to train juniors and charge small %
• xavdid 2y ago
  Exercism is a great site and I'll be sad if it goes away entirely. It's a really wonderful service and community. I used it [throughout 2023](https://xavd.id/blog/post/12-languages-in-12-months/ https://xavd.id/blog/post/12-languages-in-12-months/) to tour new languages and have been on a deep dive of Rust this year in their [48in24 program](https://exercism.org/challenges/48in24 https://exercism.org/challenges/48in24). The UI and tooling is great, there are real humans available to mentor and everything is open source and volunteer driven. They make learning fun and that's no small feat. Of course, things like this cost money to run, especially when there's so much going on behind the scenes. Sad that the current iteration hasn't worked out financially, but I have every faith in the team that there are good things ahead.
• notnmeyer 2y ago
  exercise-monetize your users! even it’s a pay-what-you-want with a minimum of say $10 or $20usd per year. your service is loved.
• tadasv 2y ago
  I don't understand. I don't even know what exercism is. You created a site that has 2 million users and don't know how to monetize? Just charge people $5 a month to use. It will solve all your problems.
• tomrod 2y ago
  Wow this is really surprising. Exercism is simply the best put together language training program I've come across. I hope they find a way out of these headwinds.
• grodes 2y ago
  Do a paid job boar within the website itself Or paid mentorships or something like that
• sockbot 2y ago
  Is there a way to get funding through libraries? Kind of like how it's possible to read subscription journals and newspapers for "free" in the library. The library must be paying for the subscription right? I think there is a strong values alignment with public libraries and exercism.
• mvkel 2y ago
  Adsense alone would more than cover this. Of the 2M users, guessing the MAU is much lower, which would render the ad model non viable. Still always sucks to see solid products rendered unsupportable
  • ToucanLoucan 2y ago
    > Adsense alone would more than cover this. God please no. This is already dreadfully normalized and the web is utterly drowning in low-effort link spam, dick pills, cryptocurrency and hot Russian singles. I can't think of anything sadder than taking this lovely product and letting Google piss all over it.
    • mvkel 2y ago
      > I can't think of anything sadder I can
• nederdirk 2y ago
  Seven years ago, excercism helped me get through the children's cancer ward with my mind intact when my daughter got treated for lymphoma. Thank you
• pkphilip 2y ago
  Given that you are not making money on this at all, it would be wise to consider charging a small amount. If the number of users drops because of this, you still won't have lost any money. But those who choose to stay will help make this sustainable.
• ed_mercer 2y ago
  Maybe pull an OpenAI and go for profit?
• AdeptusAquinas 2y ago
  A shame. All the random garbage that comes out of things like ycombinator, promoted by 'visionaries' like graham, thiel and other bottom feeders, and something truly useful to the world like exercism is starving for funding :|
• larodi 2y ago
  Founder mode can raise 1B with plain html page, but himself and investors always shy from tossing few mil at useful content sites it gonna later be scraping. It's not sad, it's really ... disgusting.
• shadowmourne 2y ago
  Can you perhaps issue certificates which we can get after completing the course? USD 50 - USD 100 isn't that bad.
• xiaodai 2y ago
  sad truth of a no profit model
• Jabdoa2 2y ago
  Sounds like a very useful service. I just signed up. Did you consider to inform new users that the service is financed by donations? You seem to focus on "always free" which is nice but I guess most people are also ok to pay some money if your service is useful to them. I guess this might drive some more donations if people knew that you need money. Also a banner like Wikipedia (maybe a bit less annoying) would work.
  • ihid 2y ago
    Hello. You'll get an email after a day telling you about it, and you'll get a banner after you've submitted a couple of exercises :)
• niemandhier 2y ago
  Exercise seems like a goldmine for coding LLMs:The same challenges solved again and again using different languages and user provided feedback. Much better for analysis and training than random GitHub repositories. Have you tried selling access to that data to the usual suspects ?
• ta12653421 2y ago
  Sorry for being upfront honest and transparent: If you have that amount of users and you cant even pay 3(!) people, then your business model is massivly fci*g wrongly configured, Jesus! You have that much traffic and you are unable to monetiz - i guess, this is because the "founder" is also the lead developer and the product genius. You need some business guys to tune this! Jesus, if this product fails, it will be a great example in whatever Stanford Business 101 course :-))
• chmod775 2y ago
  > Right now, we have about 800 monthly donors and about $7,500 in monthly donations. That covers our server costs pretty much exactly. For only 2M registered (not even monthly) users? Tell me you are using AWS without telling me you are using AWS. Let's think about their heaviest workload, which is likely running user-submitted code server-side to test those exercise submissions. Say it's really bad performance-wise and costs 1s of single-core CPU time per submission. 45m submission gets us 520 days of CPU time. I'm going to go out on a limb and claim their entire site could run off a $50/month dedicated server, and it would be unimpressed.
• breadsniffer01 2y ago
  It does not help that many expect learning material to be free online. This ends up capping the quality of learning exp as the orgs can’t re-invest earnings to make a product better.
• stefek99 2y ago
  Archchair business strategist, snippet from the homepage: "Exercism is fun, effective and 100% free, forever" Business model: "I've lost faith in the nonprofit business model" Also noting changing in the IT market, tech layoffs, AI revolution, less demand for tech workers. Hope it will work out for you!
• mikestaub 2y ago
  Just add a premium tier or partner with coding bootcamps. Don't give up so easily.
• pollies 2y ago
  [dead]