Interview with David Dodge, Founder and CEO of CodaKid
David Dodge is the founder and CEO of CodaKid. Dodge attended The Lawrenceville School and Trinity College, and holds an MBA from the Thunderbird School of Global Management. He worked in Silicon Valley, where he worked as a game designer and software developer credited on over 30 games for the Playstation, various SEGA platforms, and the PC. Following his time in Silicon Valley, Dodge started a tutoring company, Sure Prep learning, where he worked for about 10 years before starting CodaKid. Dodge currently resides in Scottsdale, Arizona.
(Quoted from codakid.com)
“CodaKid is an online kids coding academy and tech camp that teaches kids to create games, apps, and Minecraft mods using real programming languages and professional tools. CodaKid's online classes are self-paced and include live support from a friendly team of engineers. Since 2016 CodaKid has taught nearly 10,000 students to code in 15 countries and growing. CodaKid's camps and classes provide the highest level of kids coding instruction available in the market with a fun, student centered approach and small group attention.
Our is a goal is to create a generation of young programmers, designers, and entrepreneurs who can build amazing games, apps, and more. Our courses are engineered to teach kids not only how to design and code, but to thoroughly understand the concepts so that they can perform them on their own. By making computer programming incredibly fun and engaging through game design, CodaKid students will develop the motivation and tenacity to learn to code with actual development environments and develop real world skills.”
Interview
Rana: What was the transition like going from a game-design job to being an entrepreneur at a start-up like CodaKid?
David Dodge: Well, CodaKid wasn’t my first startup. I worked in a start up in Silicon Valley developing video games, so that gave me a little bit of an understanding of how startups work and how to wear a lot of hats, how to make yourself useful, how to be nimble and learn quickly, fail quickly, and try to put out great products. My first startup that I did on my own, I actually launched from business school, and it was an academic tutoring company. My now wife and I actually launched it together when we were doing an MBA together -this was a long time ago- and thats what we did. We basically started with very little and built a company that at its height (it sounds more impressive than it is) had about 1500 employees and operated in 17 markets. Most of the employees were part-time tutors, which is why it sounds more impressive than it was, but 1500 people is 1500 potential issues, so it was a crazy business. We became a federal contractor for a large federal after-school program, which is what allowed us to scale, and that program was shut down during the change between political parties in the White House and Congress and Senate. So, rather than pivoting to a Kumon-style tutoring model, we decided to launch CodaKid. It was something that was part of my background, and we also had a background in academic tutoring and small-group instruction. I came into CodaKid not straight out of Silicon Valley; I had a few battle scars along the way, learning with Sure Prep (which is the prior company). The big difference between working for someone else and running a bootstrap startup is night and day: a bootstrap startup requires you to be constantly focused on your cash position, and your runway is very much life or death. No one gets into the business in any education business just thinking about money. Obviously, we’re all in it because we love what we do and we love teaching kids, but when you’re putting your home up as collateral on loans to make payroll, you have to think about money. Your focus is on how you can run a profitable, sustainable business, but when you’re raising capital, your concern is about what’s gonna look good and what these guys will want to see in the next board meeting, so it’s pretty different. Other things about running a bootstrap startup- it’s very fun building something from nothing, and with CodaKid we basically lucked in to our current model. My point is that you’ll start out thinking you’re going to be one thing, and as you go along you’ll either find an opportunity that you didn’t realize was there or you’ll realize that you’re really good at something that you didn’t even know you were good at. In our case, we started as a brick-and-mortar academy so we gave after school classes and summer camps, and our plan initially was to either grow organically or franchise it. We were in the game way before Code Ninja and a lot of the franchise players that are out there now, so we would’ve been the first at doing that, but we started getting phone calls from all over the world, and we then realized, “Wow there’s a real opportunity for online”. We realized that kids love YouTube, and they watch youtube the same way I used to watch the morning cartoons, and since kids love being taught by quirky, funny characters, that are cool, young, hip engineers, we just started putting up some Minecraft “modding” courses online and before we knew it, we had customers in 25 countries. Then, we sold those as products. It was a subscription, and now I look back on it like, “Man, how did we even sell those?”. They were like 249 dollars for all-access for one year to maybe 35 to 40 hours of student projects, and what we ended up doing was we started realizing, “Gosh we’re good at this”. We built out all these different tracks, and we started doing game development with Roblox and Lua, we started doing Unity and C#, we started doing HTML and CSS and web and app development, and all these other cool things, and we were like, “Oh let’s just have an “all you can eat” all-access subscription, charge people a really reasonable amount, and include unlimited support from a team of engineers that can support you”, and suddenly it exploded and we had customers in over a 100 countries. I guess the long and the short of it is the difference is that you’re in a survival-type mode whereas when you’re working for someone else it’s sort of like a job. Personally, I feel like you need the right personality to be an entrepreneur- it’s been glamorized by a lot of people, but it’s often not glamorous at all- and you’ll often be staring at the ceiling at 3 in the morning, even if you’ve raised capital. It’s just a tough way to go, but for people who like building things from nothing and who love that excitement, it’s just a fantastic career.
R: How do you plan on continuing to grow and develop the CodaKid services?
D: We are currently about to make a big announcement for us next week: we are going to have an upsell. We’ve never had a real upsell before, but we’re going to start offering private one-on-one computer programming classes with our curriculum, so that is definitely a big thing for us that we’re really excited about, and we think that that is going to add a very important source of income for the company that will allow us to grow. One thing I learned early on was that whoever has the most to spend on acquiring a customer profitably tends to win, so having an upsell is really nice because you can basically increase your customer “LTV” (life-time value), and it gives you more money to market. We think its gonna be great, and we’re going to try obviously to upsell our existing customers, and I think a lot of them are really going to like the new service. We’re also going to continue building out the current offering. We’ll never be the “Netflix” of kids coding- we’re never going to have thousands of courses, I don’t think, but we’re likely going to have hundreds, and we’ll also be building out resources for schools and nonprofits as well.
R: How have you been able to separate yourself and compete with other online companies offering programming courses like Udacity, EdX, and Coursera?
D: Most of the big players out there are interested in scale, and in order to scale, you have to have the most scalable model. That model usually (they all do the same thing) teaches kids using a closed-platform solution. Basically, you use code to guide your character through the lava without falling in, so it’s like they “gamify” it. Code.org we love, we love Swift Playgrounds, we love all of these guys and what they do, but eventually on your computer science journey you come to a place where you’re ready to start creating with code, and thats really our niche. We do the less scalable side of the industry in that what we do requires support- if you’re using the Eclipse IDE and Java, and you’re ten years old, you’re going to run across some bugs from time to time and you’re going to need help so, yeah, we fill a niche that a lot of people haven’t ventured into: when a user is ready to experience software development and is ready to take that leap and start using professional languages and tools
R: How have you been able to teach kids real and marketable coding languages through programming games and drones?
D: Thats a great question. As we continue developing our pathways, we are introducing some more academic tracks, and some of our course producers are not very happy about that- they’re like, “What are you doing? You’re ruining the brand!”. But I will say this- first of all, I can teach any student to build a Southwest Airlines-style ticketing app, but if you take a nine-year old and that’s their introduction to computer programming, they’ll do it for a little while to please Mom and Dad, but eventually they’re going to go running out the door and they may never come back. Whereas if I can teach you how to build an awesome infinite runner-style game using JavaScript, I very well might be teaching you, using the same language, conditionals and loops and variables and functions and all kinds of really important concepts that you probably would’ve used in building that Southwest Airlines ticketing app. It’s just that you’re building a really awesome game, and you’re going to be totally engaged with it. Soon, you’re going to get really hooked and start loving that problem-solving component of coding, and maybe when the time is right and you’re 15, 16, 17 years old, you’re going to start thinking about, “Hey, how can I make money with this?” and start wanting to learn how to make apps and stuff like that, so that’s kind of my overall approach.