“I don’t know anything about marketing, Brandon. Tell me, why I should care about marketing?”
This was the first question that came out of Shereef Bishay’s mouth when I met him for the first time.
Shereef is an incredible guy. Born in Egypt, he founded multiple companies including Dev Bootcamp. Dev Bootcamp or (DBC as it’s known) was the first immersive computer coding bootcamp which transforms novices into junior web developers in about 18 weeks.*
*our 9 week immersive program happens on campus for 10-12 hours a day 6 days a week and we have a 9 week virtual Phase 0 consisting of a 100 coding challenges, pair programming and reviews from our teaching staff
Late last year I found myself in the San Francisco headquarters of Dev Bootcamp right after I returned from a week of speaking with college students at two traditional colleges in Houston, Texas.
When I walked into the SF campus I was taken back by the sheer amount of “buzz” that was in the space. Comparing this to what I had seen the week before (apathetic students, struggling to stay awake, happy to be distracted by anything) I was inspired by the engagement and excitement happening.
Over 60 students were spread out throughout the large open room “schoolhouse.” The red brick walls, old-school lockers and giant jenga tower surrounded by couches all signaled to me, this is a place for learners.
I found myself sitting next to Shereef on one of the couches and he began our conversation by asking some interesting questions.
They all centered around a common theme, “Why should I care about marketing?”
Looking around I noticed the walls were painted with inspiring quotes about life, work and learning. Directly to my right stood:
“Anything or anyone that does not bring you alive is too small for you”
and
“Make beautiful and meaningful things”
I asked Shereef who chose to put those quotes up on the walls. He admittedly took credit and I said “See, you know a lot more about marketing than you give yourself credit for.”
He went on to explain the reason he always resisted hiring a marketing person in the past, which surprisingly got me more fired up about the job than anything else he could have ever said.
“I always figured if we put every ounce of our energy into making this (Dev Bootcamp) the best experience possible for students, we’ll never have to worry about doing any marketing to begin with.”
This is/was the best marketing strategy any company could ever employ.
Create an amazing product, one that people will line up out the door for and you won’t have to spend your time spamming your way to profitability.
In fact I learned Dev Bootcamp was already profitable, bootstrapped, and had a 3-6 month wait list for their classes. All this without ever dedicating a full-time resource to marketing.
Sure there was a great website and video, but outside of some blogging and a bit of social media-ing there was no concerted effort to invest in anything other than the educational experience.
Compare this to traditional colleges with dozens of staff, multi-million dollar budgets, and lavish sports stadiums or for-profit universities who frequently spend more money on marketing than they do on teaching.
An agile school with a single focus — student outcomes
When Dev Bootcamp launched as an initial experiment by Shereef et al, they had no idea if it was going to work, let alone predict the new “coding bootcamp” industry they would spawn.
After graduating their first two cohorts, some of the students were so inspired they went on to create schools of their own founding: Hack Reactor, App Academy, and Makersquare, and inspired 50 other competitors to open around the world.
The marketing machines at these schools began to go to work, and with players like General Assembly and Kaplan joining the marketing, DBC finally decided they should put a more concerted effort into telling their story.
Proving my value, the first month at Dev Bootcamp
After meeting with a majority of the Dev Bootcamp team, I was fired up about the new challenge ahead.
It was month one for me on the job, and I received an email late one evening asking for photos of our space for an upcoming piece in Fast Company.
The press we’d received up until this point was tremendously positive and I had just finished taking photos of our space so I was eager to send them along.
“Careful, the article isn’t going to be pretty” I was told.
The initial hype-cycle of our program eventually wore off and it was time for the media to look for other angles to shed light on coding bootcamps. A critical article published in Fast Company in December of 2013, claimed to cover the “truth about hacker schools”.
It’s no secret that a small percent (1-10%) of our students end up having to drop out, repeat the program or end up not being able to land their dream job as a junior developer.
But the Fast Company article collected a series of horror stories and weaved them together to make it seem like unfortunate student outcomes were the norm, not the exception.
After reading the article, I sent a note to the team and summarized how the article portrayed us compared to what we actually are.
If you notice the last line before the list is “I’d like us to set up a call to work on our response.”
Shereef’s marketing genius strikes again
On a call with the leadership team I was surprised to hear from Shereef he didn’t think the article was that bad.
I was convinced we needed to draft our response since it was such a gross misrepresentation of our program.
My “marketing training” told me that we needed to craft a response to any article that didn’t portray our story and our founders should step up to write this since they are the most credible spokespeople.
However, after the call people didn’t seem to be too concerned to create a rapid response. A day went by, and I felt like I was failing the company since we didn’t have something finalized.
What I didn’t realize is that Shereef had already taken care of this “marketing issue” back when they graduated their first class with a 95% employment rate.
As the article began to spread around the internet, graduates from our program, as well as others began to share their experience.
“Dev Bootcamp delivers one of the most empowering educational experiences on the planet and this article probably wouldn’t be being written had they not totally blown the doors off of expectation.”
“I attended Starter League and found it to not be a very good curriculum. All I learned was Rails magic. I wish I would have paid the extra money to go through Dev Bootcamp. In the same amount of time, those students learned waaaayyyy more than I did.”
It turns out we didn’t need to coordinate a response at all.
The most credible sources were from the students themselves, especially the student that graduated from another program. It hit me why nobody seemed too upset about the article on our team.
Instead of freaking out, they just went back to teaching.
An interesting position to be in
That day I realized Dev Bootcamp could fire me and they’d still have a wait-list of qualified students well into the new year.
And while there is definitely a lot of story-telling and marketing related projects to work on, no matter what I say or do, the outcomes of our graduates will pave the way for more students to line up outside the door.
So you may be asking yourself, “Why are you doing a job that you don’t believe needs to exist?”
When I walked into the San Francisco office of Dev Bootcamp I met some of the most compassionate, dedicated and intelligent people I have ever met in my life.
Not only do they help students learn an important skill and land awesome jobs, but they are also committed to helping their students and staff achieve at levels they never thought were possible.
Or as Dave Hoover’s Twitter bio sums it up, “Latent human potential pisses me off.”
The real story of the work and people behind Dev Bootcamp hasn’t been told. My goal is to lift the veil behind our program in order to inspire students, teachers and administrators that there is a better way to educate for the future.
The culture and energy of Dev Bootcamp has always been heavily vested in our students, however I keep trying to tell our staff, “It’s an injustice if we don’t share what we’re doing with the outside world.”
The state of our education institutions, especially higher ed is not pretty.
50% of traditional college students don’t graduate. The 50% who do graduate end up under or unemployed. Lastly 60% of alumni say they regret their college decision.
While DBC doesn’t claim to know the answers to these incredibly complicated, perhaps unsolvable issues, we can do our small part to offer an alternative that is life changing for students who believe there can be a better way.
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