The company behind the push was Codecademy. Within just a few days after the site’s launch in August 2011, over 200,000 users had already started an easy HTML lesson with the site. And thanks to the viral marketing push on Twitter, co-founder Zach Sims thinks there’s a good chance this could be the year everyone learns to program together.

“We were lucky enough that our users got the word out for us,” he said in a mediabistro interview. “They were the ones that put it on Facebook and Twitter; they were the ones who shared it with other people. We never did any advertising or anything; it was all user-driven.”

Read the full interview to get Sims’ four tips on how to make a successful app.

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