The backstory behind our education experiment in Guatemala
In 2014, I was frustrated that I worked in a technology company, yet I couldn’t write a single line of code. If I wanted something built, I first needed to convince a programmer to help me build it. In most cases, I couldn’t even convince an engineer to help me test my idea. I don’t blame them — they were busy, with an endless To Do list of features to build at work, and they probably also had their own side-projects they wanted to build. Still, it was frustrating.
Eventually, I grew tired of this and I did something I should have done years before: I Googled “online programming courses”. To my astonishment, there seemed to be unlimited number of tutorials and online courses, most of which were free!
I started taking every course I could find. Courses from Codecademy, Khan Academy, Treehouse, edX, Coursera, Udemy, Laracasts, One Month, plus hundreds of FAQs on Stack Overflow.
Slowly but surely, I started learning. It was amazing and addicting. I could learn at my own pace, going quickly on some areas, and going (embarrassingly) slow on others. I started building simple websites with HTML and CSS. Later I started learning a bit of JavaScript, adding some interactivity to my websites.
I kept thinking, why aren’t more people learning this? There seems to be unlimited number of job offers for programmers, most of which pay handsomely, and are part of exciting companies. Could it be that people don’t know this exists?
Especially being from Guatemala, I kept thinking that this was the future of education in third world countries, since it’s harder for us to get access to great professors. I wanted to see a school built around technical education, with tutors and a community built around the great content available online. I wanted this to exist, yet no one was doing it.
Then, in 2015, I stumbled into CS50, Harvard’s intro to computer science course, available for free on edX. I started taking the course, and it quickly became the best educational experience I’d ever had. All of the course was available online (lectures, problem sets, quizzes, etc.), and I was taking it from my apartment in Guatemala, with nothing more than a computer and an internet connection. The course was amazing partly because I loved the subject, and partly because it was taught by a great professor, with a world-class production team.
In the midst of taking the course, I got in touch with the professor via Facebook, and through a crazy story and series of lucky breaks (a whole separate story), I ended up getting an offer to do a Fellowship program in his team for a year. I moved to Boston, and ended up staying there for a year and a half (early 2016 – late 2017), learning more about CS and education more generally. The experience was amazing, and it only amplified my desire to see a technical school built in Guatemala, focused on helping people find jobs in tech.
I kept thinking: “The content is there for the taking! If only someone created a space with access to tutors and computers, and helped students find jobs after graduation… if only someone did that!”
Then, earlier this year, I moved back to Guatemala and decided to put my money where my mouth was, and do it myself. I called it “Buildawow”, since I wanted every educational course to be designed around building things. I started looking for a co-founder and a team, and started spending all my time into creating this company.
After a couple of months of working through the plan and reading all I could about startups and new businesses, I decided two important things:
- I wanted to build a private company that offered great education. I did not want to build a non-profit (nothing wrong with non-profits, but it seemed like building a company was a more scalable path).
- I wanted to bootstrap the operation, and stay away from raising capital.
Now, how do you reconcile those two things with the fact that offering a great educational experience to people can be very expensive. I wanted to offer a physical space to build projects in teams, hire great tutors and mentors, and offer computers to those without access to them. How would that be possible?
My solution was to first build a software development agency, doing client work. This would serve two purposes:
- Build cash flow, which we would re-invest into building education programs.
- Learn what companies are looking to hire in terms of programming work, and use that to inform our design of the curriculum. In short, let’s teach the exact skills that clients are currently hiring for.
I found an amazing co-founder, made our first hire, and got things going. We’re 3 months in, and we’ve been able to get enough clients to get things moving. This week, we moved to our first office space, in a co-working space in zone 10 Guatemala City.
Now, we’re getting ready to launch our first educational program in September 3rd. We’ll be teaching a 3-month “Web Development Bootcamp”, focused on helping beginners find their first job as Jr. Web Developer.
The course will cost GTQ 9,000 ($1,200 USD), but we’ll be trying something new: students will not pay for tuition during the program. They will only pay us if we help them get a job in technology. If we help get them a job, we’ll charge 20% of their salaries until they reach the cost of the program, and then they don’t pay us anything else. No interest payments, no other hidden fees. And if they don’t get a job within 6 months of graduation, they don’t pay us anything.
We’ll be curating the best online content we can find, and acting as local tutors to every student that enrolls in the program. We’ll be attempting to create a community of students looking to learn programming, and companies interested in hiring graduates.
It’s still early days, and there will be a ton to learn and iterate over the next few months, but we’re hopeful this will be the start of a new offering in education for people in our country. An offering that provides opportunity for those looking to get better jobs and grow professionally, yet perhaps couldn’t afford a traditional education before this.
We’ll see where this ends… In the meantime, if you’re interested in enrolling in a course, or joining our team, or just getting in touch, email me at christian@buildawow.com. We don’t promise to be the most experienced team in business, but we do promise to pour our hearts into creating a service we’re proud of. A service that makes students and clients say “wow” :)
