Can you explain more about your mission? Why are the founders so passionate about disrupting the bootcamp market? For example, do they have personal stories or experiences or reasons why?
For example, the CEO of Launch School is extremely passionate about self service mastery based learning at a lower cost. The CEO of Nucamp believes most raw content is online already and wants to make an affordable program to guide people through it with some help. Leon at 100Devs believes that content should be free and the system is broken and wants to help people get any kind of real world experience as fast as possible through hustling to try to standout to get job so he does it entirely for free.
What drives the founders to offer such a cheap program for $1K that would normally cost $10 to $20K?
u/michaelnovatireplied·· edited
I think it would help if you explain why though. Why are you so passionate about this? Why don't you become professional soccer players, or build a rocket to Mars? Why are the founders so passionate about disrupting the bootcamp market more than the ones above for example? Leon at 100Devs has the same mission and offers a free program entirely to hundreds of people, so why are you more passionate than him?
For example, a staff engineer at Google is paid over $500K. If I believe that students need more teaching from someone of this level to become good, then I might need to charge MORE to help the students more so that I can pay this person to teach them. So more details on the passion will help explain the mission you have.
u/michaelnovatireplied·· edited
Why are they doing it for so cheap specifically?
I'm from Canada originally and I actually kind of understand the social motivations more and the United States is so much different culture. Sometimes things can cost more because they are better and more effective and they actually help people more. You mentioned your past cohorts were fully refunded because of bad experiences, so it's a little risky that someone will do the course for $1,000 and get a good job and they're going to spend three four five months on this. They might actually be better off spending $50,000 on something that is a guaranteed to get them a hundred thousand dollar fang job (no program exists but hypothetically).
So saying it's so cheap to help the students is not necessarily convincing that this is the right way to do it.
I'm trying to help y'all because a lot of people have been suspicious of this program and the cheaper and more free something is the more you have to genuinely explain the passion and motivations.
For example, my wife had a completely free boot camp in San Francisco in person for about 2 years and was paying for $5,000 a month rent out of pocket and took zero salary and it was entirely free. She was doing this because she had mentored at many programs and was frustrated by the quality of mentorship and wanted to do better to help people. Her dream was when she had enough savings to leave work and do this and she had worked at top companies for several years, becoming a staff engineer and having the financial savings to invest in giving back she did it. Then after running that program entirely by herself and only being able to support 6 to 10 people at once, and learning a lot about what works and doesn't work, she realized that she needs to hire the best people in the industry to scale effective training and that means that she needed to raise venture capital and that we she needs to charge people so that you can pay these amazing engineers to help teach. This has been really effective and worked really well and people have no problem paying because they are having such incredible increases in compensation from their training.
So I think you need a story like that to explain where this passion is coming from otherwise, people here are thinking that it's a big scam. I Ioked into the founders and the business registrations and your other data science bootcamp and I don't think it's a scam at all, which is why I'm trying to help you communicate your vision better so that people believe it.
u/smk284 wrote (the comment Michael replied to):
I don’t think you’re a serious option for people looking to change careers just based on the conversation and replies I saw.
While you may be “cheap” $1000CAD it’s still an investment of time that could otherwise be spent on a more expensive and efficient bootcamp/ program.
u/michaelnovatireplied·· edited
If the program has 25 students for an instructor and the program is 1 year long. That means you are making $25,000 to pay an instructor to teach for a year assuming all the other costs in running the non profit are handled by the founders. Unless you have donations, or this person is not very good, or this person is located somewhere else where that is a good salary than something doesn't add up.