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One Month Rails (YC S13) Teaches How To Build Your Startup While Learning To Code
- patio11 13y agoThere's going to be a lot more teaching-programming-as-a-product startups because the user base is proven, the economics are compelling, and the underlying story is that "Anyone who successfully figures out a scalable process to turn people into programmers wins the 21st century." Incidentally, as long as I'm up: https://onemonthrails.com/try https://onemonthrails.com/try A little birdy says that "Submit" is the worst possible copy you could use for that button, unless you're running an S&M site. Try [Get A FREE 7-day Video Crash Course] rather than "Sign Up For..." and [Send Me My Videos]. (As always: do it in an A/B test if you don't believe me. This one is generally cough fairly compelling.)
- scottmagdalein 13y agoWhen do you think this space will reach full saturation to the put that new entrants will find it hard to notch out a spot in it?
- mattangriffel 13y agoAs some others have mentioned, knowledge economies are not zero-sum. It's not like you can only use one course or one class (I've taken many). As for market saturation, I think it depends on what your thoughts are about theories that some futurists (like Doug Rushkoff) have put forward saying that one day everyone will have to learn how to code. If everyone will one day learn how to code, then it's a pretty big market.
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- badclient 13y agoA little birdy says that "Submit" is the worst possible copy you could use for that button Aren't you being too literal here? Vast majority of internet users have been trained to see "submit" for "okay I'm done filling out this form, next!".
- patio11 13y agoWe have competing hypotheses about an observable future fact. We should resolve them via the scientific method. But if you don't have an email form doing thousands of impressions and want to just bet on this one, your bet would be a very bad bet to make.
- badclient 13y agoWhile I won't disagree that there might be other labels that perform better than "Submit", calling "submit" as the worst possible copy seems overtly sensational. We both know it isn't.
- dxm 13y agoIt was too literal. "Don't submit" would definitely be worse, but still not the worst possible copy.
- mattangriffel 13y ago@dxm, haha I actually want to try "don't submit". That one may backfire and actually work better.
- rmc 13y agoDo an A/B test. What if you're wrong?
- mattangriffel 13y agoHe's likely right, it's a best practice that may be wrong in some cases. Though generally, you're better off going with a best practice and then A/B testing alternatives. The reality is that you're limited in the number of A/B tests you can do, both by traffic but also by your own time and resources. So you can run a test against something that is generally accepted (like what text works on a button) or against more important changes like headline copy or page layout.
- mattangriffel 13y agoGood call patio11, I made the change. It's a good thing we're using optimizely and can push that up quickly. On a side note, this landing page is actually an A/B test we're performing on the effectiveness of an email drip campaign vs a hard sell to signup (which is currently still up on the homepage). The writer of the article was part of a 10% of people that were redirected from the homepage to the try landing page and so he hardlinked directly to that page in the article. That's our mistake.
- wallawe 13y agoDoes that have anything to do with my not having received an email for the 7 day trial? I signed up over an hour ago. Also as a side note, you privacy statement link is 404ing. Edit: got the email! thanks
- scubasteve 13y agoI signed up about an hour ago and got my email just now.
- mattangriffel 13y agoSorry about that scubasteve. That's not nearly fast enough.
- scubasteve 13y agoIt was more informative than being disappointed :). Thanks for the great service.
- pallandt 13y agoOne question, sorry for hijacking the discussion. Is this the same course offered on Udemy? (https://www.udemy.com/how-to-teach-yourself-to-code/ https://www.udemy.com/how-to-teach-yourself-to-code/) Potential suggestion: add a syllabus or at least a (more) concrete summary of what course takers will learn/build. I read the 'Sign up for this course and you'll learn' section and it's very thin on the specifics. The Udemy page is much better in this aspect, IMHO.
- tropicalmug 13y ago"97% of people recommend One Month Rails" is also a little misleading. I'm willing to bet 97% of people don't know what One Month Rails is.
- mattangriffel 13y agoHaha that's fair. Not intentionally misleading though. I had hoped people would interpret that as "97% of people who have taken One Month Rails recommend it" like when mouthwash brands say "4 out of 5 Dentists Recommended" they don't literally mean 4 out of 5 dentists on earth.
- philwelch 13y agoFun fact: all five dentists are employed by the mouthwash company. But five out of five would sound suspicious.
- zinssmeister 13y agoI see this "guy with macbook air and coffee" picture on a few landing pages lately. For example here http://www.timecamp.com/ http://www.timecamp.com/
- joshuahornby 13y agoHe must be a very hipster and busy kinda guy!
- mattangriffel 13y agoIt's because it's a free image from Unsplash (http://unsplash.com/ http://unsplash.com/) which provides free hi-res photos. Highly recommend.
- cmadan 13y agoIts from http://unsplash.com/ http://unsplash.com/. We also have him on our landing page - gonna have to change it if he shows up everywhere :).
- zinssmeister 13y agoyeah usplash is a popular/great resource, and that unfortunately makes it almost useless. Right now there is another HN post on the front page that is using an image from that same MacBook Air series (as a background image): http://www.codingjohnson.com/an-awkward-conversation http://www.codingjohnson.com/an-awkward-conversation
- alaskamiller 13y agoReinvention of the For Dummies series. One of those dev bootcamps sales pitch was the average coder makes $83,000. This one is pushing the ante to $120k. Do you know why developers get paid on average $120,000 or more at some of the world's fastest growing companies? It's because of various contributing factors. But for $49 you can buy the dream.
- mattangriffel 13y agoYeah something like that. Except leveraging technology to help people learn faster :)
- jfarmer 13y agoSpeaking as one of the co-founders of Dev Bootcamp, they take a very different curricular and pedagogical approach than this course. The emphasis is 100% on fundamentals and Rails is used only as a means to that end. Curricularly, Rails isn't touched on until week 7 or so. This seems like a fine thing for someone who just wants to learn to sling together an app and learn some of the "Rails incantations." If they're self-directed, maybe they'll dive deeper. DBC eschews that -- one of the first things they try to unteach students is that programming is about memorizing a bunch of magic spells.
- TORIG-TG 13y agoTook his class on Skillshare. It was not a good first encounter with Ruby or Rails, but a decent class once you have some background experience. The class moves too fast, and he needs to practice his presentation skills (he types something out in a video, and switches screens immediately). Also, the material was not entirely up to date with the gems. That being said, I really enjoyed the class and would take more in a similar fashion.
- willbill 13y agoI remember reading his quite useful blog post on learning rails quickly which included what was involved in creating a website and how to attain a simple understanding of web-specific database design, REST and front-end design. It was pretty good. Two things sort of dismay me though when I see something like this: 1. There are lots of free resources available online, like the above mentioned blogpost. We need to make a better case for open and free learning. 2. All start-ups are forms and the display of the information entered into those forms according to nearly all of the start-ups I run into in NYC.
- mattangriffel 13y agoGood points willbill, my responses: 1. Learning has always been free! (Okay, almost always.) You can walk into any library and pick up a book on any subject. But most people don't do it because there are too many resources out there and they're not synthesized in a way that is catered towards a particular audience. People still pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to go to universities to learn topics that they could theoretically learn on their own. Why? Because text is really energy-intensive to consume. I don't feel like having a ton of low quality resources online is not the solution. That being said, I'm all about reducing the cost of learning and making it more accessible, which is why I hope that this class can provide a similar quality of education as $10-$18k intensive (like Hack Reactor or General Assembly) for people who can't afford that. 2. 95% of products are forms and the display of that information - that's correct. That's why I don't think it's so hard for beginners to learn, and that's what makes Ruby on Rails particularly powerful. It's just tools for building forms, pulling data out of databases, and displaying that data in a pretty way.
- cschmidt 13y agoHmm, it says: Which Programming Language should I choose? on a site called One Month Rails. I wonder what language they'll suggest?
- mattangriffel 13y agoThat's fair. But you'd be surprised how many people still ask me the question.
- kyllo 13y agoYeah, I bet there are a few people who sign up for "One Month Rails" and then ask if they can use Python instead.
- mattangriffel 13y agoThere are actually :)
- petercooper 13y agoAs someone heavily into the Ruby world (and particularly the news side of it) this has certainly seemed to come out of nowhere for me, though to be fair.. existing Rubyists are not really the target audience :-) How did it grow to reach 9000 students? As it stands now, the YC-backed startup has over 9,000 paying student customers, with a month of tutorials costing $49.95. I'm guessing earlier signups got preferential pricing, but there's still a potential for $100k+ per month revenues there.. that's pretty striking! :)
- steveklabnik 13y agoI heard of them a month ago. Come on, peterc! :p (I only noticed because I've been a bit obsessive about twitter followers as of late, and noticed that they followed me.)
- mattangriffel 13y agoHey Peter! We've been running under the radar since about November, iterating on the content on the online system itself. It started out as the best-selling class on Skillshare (with 2000 students) and grew from there. While the first version was only $20, it was also only about half the content of this current one (and was recorded in one day!)
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- BWStearns 13y agoOMR was on TC "university", while this was the only one I tried I assume that had a lot to do with their numbers. I tried it because I saw it at the moment I decided to give rails a go and I got it for $20 because of a sale. That said, Mattan did make a good class for beginners and I've recommended at least one friend who was interested in mucking around with rails but was a rather novice programmer (even moreso than I am).
- prakster 13y agoHey Mattan, Do I have to have a Mac for your course? A Windows Laptop won't do? I want to make sure I don't get caught with the wrong hardware. I asked YC a couple of days back, and most said 'no', although the q was not specific to your program: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6152605 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6152605
- mattangriffel 13y agoA Windows laptop can work, but it will be a little tougher (the videos are recorded on a Mac so some of the commands are different). When you install Rails using RailsInstaller, use the Git Bash program that it comes with and most of the commands should be the same.
- xpop2027 13y agoI took this course and learned more while taking it than any other RoR course.
- bdcravens 13y agoIf you've taken multiple courses, then wouldn't your knowledge be cumulative? If you're an absolute beginner, any given course may be too fast or confusing, but after you've seen info on routes, models, generators a few times, the next bullet point tends to stick better
- mattangriffel 13y agoAbsolutely agree here. Different people learn concepts in different ways, and it's hard to know that teaching something a given way will stick. That's why we have to try to reach as many people as possible until we can build a personalized education system.
- xpop2027 13y agoGood point, but OMR was by far the easiest to understand.
- smooradian 13y agoI took this class on SkillShare with almost zero experience and loved it. I wish the lecture notes were formatted for printing. Keep up the good work Mattan.
- raganwald 13y agoAs a business, this makes perfect sense to me. San Francisco is the city that taught the world you make more money selling pickaxes and denim than from digging for gold.
- mattangriffel 13y agoI taught myself how to code on my own and realized that there are no good resources out there that provide a clear path for beginners. Yes, and the fact that I get to empower other people to build something they want to build is a bonus )
- raganwald 13y agoIt may be true that many who buy pickaxes won't find gold, but if you don't buy a pickaxe or make your own (as you did), you definitely aren't going to find gold! Besides, the canonical Ruby book is the "Pickaxe Book." What other metaphor fits?
- eriktrautman 13y agoI'm totally with you on this and I'm trying to fix that issue with an open source curriculum for aspiring developers at https://github.com/theodinproject/curriculum https://github.com/theodinproject/curriculum that charts a path through existing content and encourages collaboration on projects. It's still quite preliminary but some students are already finding value with it. Hopefully it's the kind of thing you wish you'd had when you got started!
- bdcravens 13y agoSubmit without an email address, and you get this error: "The email parameter should include an email, euid, or leid key" Wow, for something targeting those who aren't yet coders, that's a scary error message. (I've been dev'ing professionally since 1998, and I'm taken aback)
- mattangriffel 13y agoHmm, that must be a Mailchimp default. Agreed, it's not very good or clear.
- bdcravens 13y agoWrite a gateway in-between to process success and smooth out the error message the end user sees.
- scubasteve 13y agoLooking forward to trying this out! As an FYI, you're missing a period in one of your paragraphs for your email copy "...If you’re not sure what to build? ...no worries, I have advice for that too" - that last line should be "too.".
- mattangriffel 13y agoGood call, will make a note and fix that shortly. It's people like you scubasteve that make me not look like a total asshat on the internet.
- knes 13y agoI'm more and more disappointed in Startups that comes out of YC these days. What's the different with peepcode, net tuts+, codeschool and co? What is the bigger picture here? Is this just a guy who was running a successful Skillshare course and decided to spin a company out of it and through his personality got into YC? Why even go through YC if he already had 5000+ student on skillshare? Something I'm not seeing here?
- mattangriffel 13y agoI'm not sure, but if I'd make a guess about why I got into YC it's because I was able to build something that tapped into a powerful need. It's definitely a good indicator that something is when whent there are so many resources out there and yet time and time again people who finished my class said it was the first time they had ever successfully learned how to code (after failing with other resources). We're trying to take a more human approach to learning about technology. There are live chat and discussion sections as well as in-person study groups which is not something you'll find on peepcode and the rest. On top of that, you don't end up finishing any of those resources with a live product that can serve as the MVP for the company you're trying to build. Just some thoughts, though I'd love to get your take.
- richsin 13y agoI believe this has huge upside, this can turn into a "One Month" brand that teaches everything under the sun. At the moment it's about technology and coding, but the brand is so much more versatile than peepcode or codeschool to name a few.
- eranation 13y agoCongratulations Mattan! I'm looking forward for something like this but on growth hacking... since Googling about growth hacking yields so many great items you wrote on the subject, is there anything planned?
- stevewilhelm 13y agoDuring a gold rush, sell pickaxes and shovels.
- throwaway7989 13y agoThis company is a very smart scam. I'm an experienced ruby developer, and have been following them for a while. I checked out the course just out of curiosity when it was up on Skillshare. The way Mattan approaches the topic is interesting, and makes this company one of the most successful and not-scam -looking scams you will find. Here's how it works. Rails is currently a buzzword for those just starting to try to learn how to code - very attractive. But in reality, Rails is not the best way to start learning code, it's a framework for experienced developers. Rails takes a ton of shortcuts and pushes a lot of things under the hood. This is very convenient if you understand the concepts that rails has abstracted, but very dangerous if you don't. Rails makes it easy to set up a basic rest MVC app for testing, but making a full blown custom web app requires a good understanding of many concepts, some of which are detailed below: - The principles of computer programming - SQL and relational database design - HTTP protocol, how it works - MVC architecture, why and how it operates - HTML, CSS, Javascript, and Ruby - proficient at least - The difference between client and server and how they interact - Basic web security - The command line and UNIX I could go on with that list, but you get the idea. Building a real rails app is tough, and requires a large stack of knowledge that simply cannot be amassed within one month. So how does Mattan handle this? He does away with the part where you actually learn any of these things. In One Month Rails, you are quickly introduced to concepts, then given code you can copy and paste in order to make it work. For students, this is fantastic. They are attracted by the word "Rails" and the concept of becoming a programmer in one month (and allegedly making over $100k/year after that, as he claims). Everything works great, and it comes really easy. You skip the whole hard part where you actually need to understand things, and are just fed answers that always work. You look at him type the code, then you copy it exactly yourself. Developing an app suddenly became easy. Fast forward to the end of the course. You have a working clone of twitter or pinterest or something, and life is good. You made this all yourself - you put in the code, ran the migrations, added the twitter bootstrap classes, etc. You are asked to review the course and of course you give Mattan a glowing review. It really worked - within a month you were able to build a full web app on your own! By now, most of you will recognize where the scam is. You paid for the course, you finished it and you gave it a great review. But you also have not learned anything at all. And as soon as you actually need to go build an app or apply for a job, you'll quickly realize that you are out of luck. This is a successful and obviously profitable class, but at it's core, it's a scam. And to add to that, Mattan is at most a junior level developer himself. This post is not here with the intent to be mean to Mattan or his company - he is a great guy, and the company has obviously been successful. I just wrote this here to tell the truth about what the company is doing and how it operates. I would love to see stats on how many people who have taken Mattan's class have gone on to actually having a career as a developer. I'm willing to bet it's 1% or less. But prove me wrong, please.
- richsin 13y agoI did this course a few months back when it was on Skillshare and met Mattan at General Assembly in NYC - he's a sharp guy and very pleasant to talk to. The course is a great introduction for anyone new to programming to get from zero to app in a short period of time. It also allows people to determine if this is something they really want to dive into.
- rrouse 13y agoBeing a developer that works with Rails daily, the first thing that jumped out at me was the code on the screen in the landing page image. Rails hasn't used named_scope in a long time :) I also found this bit to be just wrong "I'm not even joking when I say this, but I think some of the resources out there make it intentionally hard for non-technical people to start learning. Maybe they want to keep this stuff a secret." I don't believe for a second this exists. It's actually kind of offensive.
- Jimmy 13y agoI agree. The number of resources available on the internet for beginning programmers is astounding. You can find tutorials and documentation for any language that you might want to learn. Professional-quality tools are available for free. There are numerous websites where professional programmers will provide comprehensive answers to your questions within a few hours, sometimes within minutes. The source code of major software packages, like the Linux kernel or the Firefox browser, is available free of charge to anyone who wants to study or modify it. Someone who wants to learn to program is limited only by their intelligence and motivation.
- Yhippa 13y agoHmm. I clicked on the intro video to play it. It started playing. I clicked on the dark background to dismiss it so I could continue viewing the site. The video still played in the background instead of pausing or stopping.
- mattangriffel 13y agoYep, that's because it's just being hidden and not stopped. It's a bug I need to fix :)
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- saturdayplace 13y agoWell, if this isn't validation for my latest idea, I don't know what is. I know it shouldn't, but finding out about competitors always seems to take the wind out of my sails.
- ulisesrmzroche 13y agoIt would be far more honest to give a real starting salary rather than almost CTO ones.
- dspecs 13y agoI took the class a few months ago so I thought I would offer my unvarnished opinion of One Month Rails. I've always loved technology but never had any coding skills whatsoever. To be honest, I didn't know where to begin. I would run a few searches and play around with a hello world tutorial and pretty much drop it from there. Then I found this awesome speech by a guy named Mattan Griffel. He was speaking at an NYU event (pretty sure) and discussing how he learned to code in one month. I was blown away. It was like I was lost in the jungle blindfolded and someone handed me a map and a light. I finally had a way that all of this was accessible. Griffel used a combination of a Lynda course, a Stanford course and Hartl's Rails tutorial to teach himself but in the meantime he had put together this course to learn Rails in a month. Disclaimer: I didn't learn Rails in a month. I completed the course but I still can't build the next Facebook/Twitter/Linkedin/Pinterest on my own if it didn't have the exact same features that Griffel's tutorial had. Here's what it did do for me. For a person coming from a completely non-technical background, I had a roadmap. Terms, technologies, languages, databases are all things that are obvious to any CS/EE major but totally baffling to an outsider. Griffel's tutorial brought me into the coding world. Eventually, I was so blown away by what I learned that I wanted to do this as a profession which led me to the Flatiron School and I hope to pursue a new career as a web developer. The One Month Rails course gave me the confidence to see that it really isn't all that difficult to learn this stuff. Time, dedication and perseverance are your friends. If you're completely new to programming, want to know the lay of the land, and have no idea what Ruby, Rails, Git, Heroku and jQuery is, this course is exactly what you need. Mattan, thank you.
- typicalrunt 13y agoWith these types of companies popping up, I'm left wondering how carpenters feel when someone watches a few episodes of HGTV and decides they can build their own house. There is so much more to programming and building a product than simply typing some magical symbols into an editor. Sure, it's a start, but once a product is built, deployed to production, and then has customers, it will need constant nurturing. Databases get slow, hardware fails, logs fill up diskspace, and yet that's only the tip of the iceberg in programming. Stating you can learn to code in one month is nothing more than the 'Teach Yourself $LANG in 24 Hours" from yesteryear. It minimizes the amount of skill and experience one needs to be a programmer and make $120,000 per year (which is still a lot of money). OneMonthRails is a start, especially if you want to learn how to program, but I find it unethical to insinuate that one can land a $120k/yr job after 1 month of training. For all my fellow Canadian compatriots, I read the marketing page of OneMonthRails and see visions of Tom Vu [1] trying to tell us about his guaranteed technique to becoming rich (later found out as the greater fool theory). [1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iQNdi-fRExc http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iQNdi-fRExc [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greater_fool_theory http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greater_fool_theory
- lrobb 13y agoThis is eerily similar to what happened with seo: people started to realize there was more money to be made teaching people how to make lemonade than there was in actually selling lemonade.
- beh 13y agoHere's a code for 10% off: http://onemonthrails.com/signup?discount_code=rEEvPf http://onemonthrails.com/signup?discount_code=rEEvPf
- codex 13y agoMake money fast--earn thousands of dollars working from home in your spare time! Truth is, in a world where everybody is special, nobody is.