Zach Sims on Why Learning to Code Makes You a More Powerful Writer

You may have noticed a certain hashtag this past New Year‘s: #codeyear. The hashtag spread across the Twittersphere as users pledged to make 2012 the year they would learn HTML code.

The company behind the push, Codecademy, was just a few months old at the time, but founders Zach Sims and Ryan Bubinski felt their teaching tool could make coding easy and fun to learn — and users agreed. Just a few days after the site’s launch in August 2011, over 200,000 users had started an easy HTML lesson, and over a million had tested it out by the end of the year, Sims says. And, thanks to the viral marketing push on Twitter, Sims thinks there’s a good chance this could be the year everyone learns to program together.

How did the idea for Codecademy come about?
My co-founder and I have known each other for a long time. We started working on some projects together starting in January [2011]. My co-founder started a group at Columbia, where we were students, called the Application Development Initiative that was basically focused on teaching people to program. And we started working on a bunch of different things, sort of random projects. Ryan was a biophysics and computer science major; I was a political science major and I worked at a number of start-ups in the past, always doing user experience product stuff, business development stuff.

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And what we found is that I wasn’t as good of an engineer as Ryan. So, I started working to become as good an engineer as Ryan was, and I was reading books and watching videos, and I really just found the whole process incredibly frustrating. So, we basically wanted to make something better. And we thought about the problems I was having learning to code, and we thought about how we could solve them. And that’s why a lot of what we built is easy for people to get started on, easy for them to follow, and we try to make everything really, really simple.

So this idea came out of your own desire to learn how to code. Do you think it’s important for everyone to learn to code?
I think coding is 21st century literacy. Traditionally, there are the 3 R’s of literacy: it was just reading, writing and arithmetic. And we think the fourth should be algorithms. I think it’s a better way of understanding what’s going on; you’re using your phone all the time, using your computer. But, beyond that, it’s just a skill that’s virtually guaranteed to turn you into a maker. As soon as you can program you can build things.

Codecademy garnered over 200,000 users within the first few days of launch. What do you attribute that sudden success to?
I think we made it really easy for people. I think that’s really the most important thing: We made it super simple for everyone to get started. It’s always like, download a program, download instructions, set up your programming environment, purchase seven different books. So, we really consolidated resources, and we built an educational experience for consumers based on other consumer Internet companies and things we learned by building products for consumers.

We were lucky enough that our users got the word out for us. 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.

How did you go about getting funding the project?
We were lucky; we already had a bunch of traction for us to raise money from the investors that we knew we wanted to raise money from. We knew Union Square Ventures, obviously by reputation, but also because I had worked with some of the people there at previous companies before. So, for us, it was really all about the people and we found a good match with them. It is easy to negotiate with the right people, so it was definitely a smooth process and we’re very fortunate for that.

You make it sound so easy to get funding, but I’m sure it was a lot of work. Did you write a business plan? Did you struggle to get meetings with investors? How did it all come to fruition?
The product that we were building already had a ton of traction. We had gathered users very quickly; we already had the product built. The relevancy of a business plan is less so than it has been in the past. Obviously, PowerPoint decks and well-thought out explanations of what you’re doing are important, but, at the same time, having a product built and executed is important too, and we already had that.

What are the biggest hurdles that you faced in launching the app?
For us, it was figuring out what we wanted to build, figuring out what it would look like, and how to get it into the hands of the right people, and how to get them to continue to use the app and tell their friends about it. Could it really awaken a collective feeling that, “We need to learn to code” in people who normally wouldn’t? This wasn’t a social website that fits into people’s everyday behavior; we want them to do something new that they didn’t want to learn before.

Around New Year’s 2012, your company used the hashtag #codeyear to motivate people to learn how to code. How did that come about?
We decided that we wanted this to be something that everyone had in their collective consciousness, and we thought that right around New Year’s resolutions was a really good way for people who wouldn’t traditionally code to get started with something new that they wouldn’t do otherwise. So, it was a great opportunity to get the word out that way.

What are your ultimate goals for Codecademy?
This is what we want to do for the next 20 years. We want to build something that’s easy to explain for anyone to program. And we’ll keep doing that for a while and do it with different languages. We’ll diversify our method of teaching, but it will all be with the same goal in mind.

Zach’s Tips For Launching A Successful App:
1. Create an app you — and your users — will love. “Don’t settle for something that you think might make you a lot of money that you don’t think you can do for a long time,” Sims says. “Build something that will really make a difference in the world.”

2. That hole in the market is staring you in the face. Sims and Bubinski just asked themselves, “What are you having difficulties with in your own life that you think you can fix?”

3. But you should have the expertise to execute. With Bubinski’s coding background and Sims’ experience with user experience products, they could create a useful, user-friendly tool.

4. Build it and investors will come. “If you build something that people want to use, it’s much easier to get it to investors and to get investors to understand things,” Sims says. “For us, going in with traction was much easier for us than going [in front of investors] and saying, this is something that we think will be really cool.”

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Amanda Ernst is a freelance writer living in New York. She also manages business development and social media marketing for B5 Media, the publisher of five women’s lifestyle sites.