Wow, these guys have had incredible success in the press, almost as if they were first to market. Since they aren't, and there are many sites doing things like this already, I wonder what the secret is.
Is it their investors? Is it the name? Is it something I'm missing?
I agree with you, I'm confused as to why they're constantly talked about. The idea is nothing new and there's plenty of competition. Personally, I think it's just the industry's current shiny thing.
Regarding the constant press, I'd be willing to bet it's the investors. Money talks, right?
I think it's because they have a great UI, they respond to feedback, they've worked hard at marketing it, they impressed some VCs, and all the million other reasons that start-ups succeed. Don't complain about it, ask why.
My point is not that the product is bad, but that there are many products just as good, hitting the same demo.
I'm sure the team is great and the investors are great, but let's be honest, the product is fairly light right now. The UI is nifty, but there's nothing special about it.
I'm not trying to knock the guys, I'm simply trying to determine why they've become such media darlings without really having delivered anything.
Please share these other products with us. I genuinely want to know - out of curiosity and because Codecademy tops out too quickly as it is (I had a relative of mine try it out.)
Then of course there are sites like Peepcode, Udemy, and a host of others that offer tutorials, which aren't quite the same, but stil serve the same purpose.
Though I think there closest competitor is teamtreehouse but it's not free. I did subscribe to treehouse for a month but I preferred Codecademy's style of teaching.
I'm Codecademy's cofounder. I can tell you our investors have very little to do with our press - we've used them rarely, if ever, to get press thus far.
The difference I see between CodeSchool and Codecademy is that Codecademy's front page is targeted to people with zero prior experience. CodeSchool on the other hand is pushing classes for learning CoffeeScript, jQuery, and Rails. People with no prior experience aren't going to know what the heck those are or why they should care. Codecademy's proposition on the other hand is straight forward, "Learn to code". Note there is no mention on their main page of what language. It's like they are doing for coding what Apple did for the PC marketing in the sense that Apple doesn't really focus on the processor memory details etc...
Codecademy appears (for now) to be entirely free - which is not the case at all for Codeschool.com. To me, a free site is "way cooler" (to use your expression) than one that requires a fairly pricey monthly subscription.
Does Codeschool have as many people signed up as codecademy? That could be one reason for the press. I would guess Codecademy has more users because it's free and you can start learning within 10 seconds of landing on their homepage.
tryruby.org is totally unrelated. It's not directed learning - it just drops you into an REPL, what good does that do people who have never coded before (the primary audience of codecademy)? It has a help feature, but it's clearly not the main point or call to action.
Codecademy instructs you immediately. Tryruby has a tutorial hidden as a "help" link among other identical-looking links. It is not a clear call to action.
IMO it is a combination of effective product, great marketing and hustle, well timed pr, air of inevitability making people forget their competitors. (disclaimer, Twilio is a Codecademy partner -- I suppose you could also read these as reasons why we are a partner)
So here's a question from someone getting ready to raise an Angel round. Do investors help bring groups together in this fashion, or am I reading into it too much?
I'm not saying that to judge, I truly want to know.
When you say well timed PR, how does that work? Is it a PR person on staff, or friends in high places? Coming from someone on the outside looking in, it's amazing, and I'd love to generate just a fraction of that type of publicity.
In general, press for early stage startups is something you get because you work hard at it, have an effective strategy to get it, and (sometimes) have the resources to hire help to get it. In this way it is not unlike achieving success in other parts of building a startup. Very little of it is the press looking at all of the companies in the space and blessing the ones they deem best.
Edit: That said, I'd add that I disagree that there is nothing new or special about the Codecademy product vs. it's competitors. I'm not sure I really understand why it's better myself, but I have certainly seen it inspire and click well with more new coders than other such sites, so there's probably something I'm missing specifically because I'm not a beginner.
Thanks, mlinsey. I'm Codecademy's cofounder and I'm glad you've seen people enjoyed the experience. As you said, it is indeed something you get because you work hard at it.
As someone interested in learning to code who ultimately signed up for Codeyear instead of Codeschool or Team Tree House:
-Codecademy offers to teach me how to build an app
-Codeschool offers to teach me how a bunch of different programming languages (which is the easy part), with no clear instructions on how to put that together into an app
-Teamtreehouse does offer to teach how to build an app, but they're full of videos. Their introduction to HTML lesson is 30 minutes of video!
So Codecademy has a massively better first impression than its competitors.
One factor you aren't thinking about in this is the founders. I know one of them personally, and let me tell you. He is amazing. On the day I met him I knew he would be very successful.
I'm Codecademy's cofounder - we work hard to make our product and we have a lot of satisfied users. As a lot of other people have alluded to, there's no "secret." We work all the time to build awesome stuff and we're lucky that people notice.
The key difference is they took a broad approach vs. a narrow approach. Most sites like this focus on current developers - codeacademy has focused on non-programmers which makes a much better story.
Is it their investors? Is it the name? Is it something I'm missing?