I left my job to help my friend to learn how to code. Then I found many people in my community trying learn coding by themselves. These are people who are getting priced out of the bay area and struggling to make ends meet. Ive been teaching as many as I can. Why don't they join bootcamp? Because they either can't afford a bootcamp or they couldn't get in. Bootcamp only wants the "best and the brightest". I teach them for free, anyone is welcome. So I've been paying some of my students 1k/month so they are able to continue learning and teaching them from my apartment. These people work hard! 10am-9pm. But my savings is drying up and I'm wondering what to do next. Currently I'm thinking of getting a job to continue supporting my students. But that takes time away from me improving my curriculum and running things. Is there another way? Another idea I tried is to offer weekend bootcamps for engineers where engineers come learn from my students about react, react native, nodejs, and other web technologies but seems like engineers have better things to do on the weekend than to spend money learning.
You quit your job to teach your friend?! You are using your own money to pay students?!? You are fucking nuts
Mom?
^ lmao
What cloudev says makes sense. Or have a gentleman's agreement that they pay you 10k over two years or something like that. That's the only way to stay afloat.
Or start your own boot camp. 50% of the people pay and the rest study for free.
I'm not a fan of bootcamps (yet), but I might warm up to the idea. One of the things I don't like is a scheduled curriculum. I believe that every student should learn at their own pace
Regarding bootcamp commissions: I'm not a big fan of training people just for them to leave. That approach forces people to get into the mindset of finishing as quickly as they can, which leads to memorization instead of understanding. The way it's been scaling so far is that our students to teach one another. It builds an incredibly strong community. If I can start paying some of these students, they can stay for longer and teach so they can learn better and build confidence. If they stay longer to teach we can scale up and help more people in the community. I want to be able to start getting people from calworks (government welfare program). There are dozens of people hoping for tech postings on there but there are very few. Could there be government assistance programs that I could qualify for? How does programs like yearup stay afloat?
Can you form a nonprofit, and apply for grants and funding?
I'm in the process of forming a non profit, and have gotten a lot of inspiration from this thread about reaching out. I'm going to try them out!
Firstly, 👏👏👏. Not many people in this world help others for free and you went way above that. Now, turn what your doing into a non-profit venture and then ask for grants from big companies. A lot of big companies give away millions in charities and there are several govt. grants as well. Now as part of that grant money which your venture will receive, you can pay yourself a salary. Pay taxes on that salary but ask for a tax exempt status from IRS for that venture. Over a period of time, try to grow this venture. Apply to several accelerator programs like YCombinator to help you grow.
Thank you. I've applied to ycombinator (winter18) and I've applied to become a non profit. The process takes some time Any suggestions on how I can get in touch with big companies to show them what I'm working on? I've only interacted with engineers in my professional career
You have to do some research, but write list of big tech companies (don't forget traditionals like IBM, Cisco, HP, AT&T, Comcast), go to websites, find company About section and dig to see if they have grant and investment programs. Make sure to read fine print about any ownership stake they would get for investment. Also, the marketing departments usually control sponsorship budgets. If you build a solid following on some social media platform and/or deliver valuable content that is consumed on a regular basis (newsletters or site contributor) you could pick up sponsorship money. Lastly, check out what Geek Girls has done. It's been long tough road but Leslie has done a great job of pursuing her vision of getting more women involved in tech and teaching.
Interesting idea, I'll send gates foundation an email and see if I get any luck. 🙏
Awesome thing you have going. I wish you the best and truly hope you can keep on keeping on.
Create a low-cost bootcamp and become multi-millionaire.
Or... Create a free learning community that accepts everybody.
You need a business model though. You could make it free until students get their 1st eng job and take 10% of annual income for every semester. You’d reinvent student loans too :)
Dude, you should realize that most people you will never be able to help them. If they can do well, they don't need your help. If they need your help, most likely they will end up only wasting your time.
Some people you may never be able to help. But doesn't mean you don't try to help people around you. The government can't help hardworking parents who work 10 hours a day to make ends meet. In society's standard they are doing okay. It's really up to people to help them find a better life
Why don’t you sign a contract with the students you help financially to give you 2% of their job for a year?
Yeah, thats currently a verbal commitment. 2 of them are graduating and they are going to donate back
Nice!