Meet Isabella Hoesch, founder of Codum: a Matchmaking App for Motivated Learners
An interview with the creator of an accountability-buddy platform for Data Scientists and Web Developers
Introduction
December is a month for reflection. It’s a time we gather around fire and food with our families and friends to remind ourselves of what really matters in life and what we want to focus on in the future. I got a head start on my habit cleansing this year by quitting drinking and reading Atomic Habits by James Clear.
In it, Clear teaches multiple strategies to break bad habits and build good ones. A major theme he promotes is designing your environment to make success easier. One such way is by getting an accountability partner; i.e. someone who will watch your behavior.
Surrounding yourself with a community of people who hold you to high standards is also essential to unlocking your full career momentum.
I recently spoke with Isabella Hoesch, a founder of Codum, a “matchmaking app for motivation”. Codum’s global audience is comprised of web developers and data scientists looking to uplevel their skills. Users are matched according to timezones and have the opportunity to work on whatever they want, so long as they check in with each other regularly. The app charges a sliding-scale commitment fee — starting at €5 — and the matched users meet for four weeks.
I came to know Isabella after she reached out to me asking if I would spread awareness of the Codum platform. As someone who is interested in elevating the experiences of people from non-traditional backgrounds and other marginalized folks in tech, I chomped at the bit and met Isabella on a Wednesday afternoon in Seattle (evening in Munich).
Isabella’s background and origin story
Isabella is originally from Germany, born and raised south of Munich, close to the Alps. After high school, she attained a dual degree in Economics & Business and Social Sciences in the Netherlands. Then, she moved to San Francisco to pursue her Masters with a dual major in International Business and Analytics where she discovered her dream career: data science. After graduating, she accepted a behavioral data science role at a local FinTech company.
During COVID, Isabella returned to Munich, where she worked in business intelligence at a LegalTech startup before starting Codum.
Isabella had studied business it was practical. With a general business background, one can then specialize in an adjacent area like finance, marketing, or analytics. She describes herself as having always been an analytical person, for example, someone who always loved solving riddles and brain teasers.
Through her analytics major, she took several introductory courses over the span of 6 months — in Python, mostly, and R — that ended up being her favorite courses. She experienced firsthand the nature of coding and how it involves complex problem solving and logical thinking.
While her exposure to programming was somewhat limited, she found a new passion, beyond many of her peers, about coding challenges. She saw, from a business perspective, the potential of data-powered storytelling.
Isabella considers her education a good base for gaining the confidence to apply to jobs. But she credits receiving an offer from the first FinTech job from her showing that she was highly motivated to learn whatever it takes and a emphasizing a willingness to learn the job rather than presenting herself as having the perfect resume.
Once Isabella landed her first data science role, she realized that the work ahead of her had just begun. Regardless of our technical backgrounds, we can all relate to needing to learn or upskill on the job as a big part of the start of our careers. Rarely can a generalized education prepare us for the specific business problems, tech stacks, and niche challenges we face in the working world.
COVID and the Quest for Community
When Isabella returned to Munich, she was still fueled by the excitement and passion of having recently moved into a new data science career. At the LegalTech company, initially, she had some cool coding projects. But she was on a small team, and the company worked in the airline flight compensation area. During COVID, because there were very few commercial flights, the company faced an identity crisis. While Isabella’s role was in business intelligence, at a startup on a small team, one must wear many hats. Because the company was struggling to survive, her favorite coding projects were never important enough or urgent enough to be prioritized. So, any programming-related projects were left to her free time.
In other words, she was left to work on her passion projects, by herself, without deadlines, without a use case, and without a team from which she could request feedback. Unlike in her first role in SF, she had no fellow coworkers to struggle or also to celebrate achievements with. Compounding on that, her move from San Francisco to Munich left her without her peers and a tech community she had previously found refuge in. In Munich, while there is tech happening, it’s not surrounding you on the street or bubbling up in every conversation with a stranger.
Isabella realized, “Okay, I need to surround myself with people.” Otherwise, she feared she would lose the motivation to continue chasing her career in data science. However, because of COVID, there were also no Meetups. So, she turned online and investigated which communities were out there.
The Importance of Peers
Isabella clicked with Women Who Code (WWC), a large, global non-profit. She recalls the moment first joining their Slack group and recognizing, “Whoa, there are so many people like me.”
But Isabella’s time zone didn’t match most of WWC’s events, which were mostly catered towards either India/Australia or the US. Because she had a full-time job, it was hard to fit any of the events into her schedule. While the events sounded interesting, she actually just needed one person to build something with or just to have as an accountability partner.
“So I posted it in that community. ‘Hey is anyone up for peer learning?’ Because alone, you know, it’s boring and frustrating. And this post really took off, because a lot, a lot, a lot of people responded to it,” she recalls.
Isabella only needed one partner, and she found her match. Driven to help others, she sent a Google Form to everyone else who expressed interest, and she did her best to find a good partner for everyone.
Codum’s first MVP
Isabella did the buddy matching manually the first time. It took her forever, because she wanted everyone to get a quality match. After she was done, however, she kept getting messages from other community members who missed the first round, asking if she could still find a match for them.
During that time, Isabella was working with her first accountability partner — a woman named is Rachel from New Zealand. Isabella and Rachel we were brainstorming ideas for what they wanted to work on together. That’s when Isabella came up with an idea. She asked Rachel, “Hey, I don’t want to do this manual matching again. It’s tedious. Why don’t we build a matching algorithm? It’s a really fun project. It’s an interesting problem to solve algorithmically. In the best case, somebody benefits from it.”
Rachel agreed, and together, they built the matching algorithm as a first project, with Google Forms as the user interface. In the next project, they replaced the Google Forms input with a simple custom interface.
And thus, the MVP for Codum was born. Like many great products, it was timely, if not a bit scrappy, and based on real users’ need.
Codum’s offerings
Codum started with a vision stemming from Isabella’s going through the pain that a lot of Codum’s users go through. Eventually, the matching app, started by a group of like-minded volunteers, grew large enough to leave WWC and become Codum. Isabella’s sister, Tatjana Hoesch, joined Codum initially as a user and then as a co-founder.
Codum offers buddy matching to audiences learning either web development or data science, the topics where Isabella and Tatjana had a strong network which would reduce their need to launch with a huge marketing budget. While the core principle of the platform — accountability — can be applied to any topic, they wanted to keep their offerings high quality and not initially grow beyond where they knew they had industry knowledge and access to reach people.
Accountability is a topic most people know from New Year’s resolutions along topics like losing weight, being more physically active, and other lifestyle habits. Codum differs from this generic approach by applying the concepts of accountability towards current, in-demand topics in the job market. Codum does want to grow organically beyond just data science and web development, but only as its leadership team acquires good access to a large enough group of people with relevant skills.
When users sign up for Codum, they commit to a four-week program where they are expected to meet regularly with their newly matched accountability buddy.
One challenge Codum has faced so far as a platform with an initial focus on matching is that often people get matched and then stop being active on the platform. This limits leadership’s visibility into the program completion rate. However, they often hear, several months later, about buddies who are still working on a product together. Isabella estimates that more than half of their users, after matching, are switching to a combination of apps like Notion, WhatsApp, or whatever is their comfortable environment to continue coordinating with their buddy.
In order to capture these data points, Isabella and her team are developing features to support users after the initial matching. “We’re currently working on improving our features, especially progress planning and tracking features, on the platform so that they don’t have to have this basket of other tools that they use for their accountability partnership.”
Sliding scale pricing model
Codum started out as a freemium offering. The team was committed to making the platform accessible to everyone and pursuing revenue from different streams. However, this past summer, they tested out a B2C paywall, and Isabella and Tatjana found that the quality of users’ motivation and commitment rose a lot.
When Codum was free, they had a huge ghosting rate, which was horrible for many of their users. Or, one person didn’t really care, and the other person had a bad experience. Just by adding a paywall, where users can choose how much they want to pay (with a minimum of five Euros), they saw a huge difference in the consistency of user behavior in terms of how often they meet and continue working together.
Thanks to data-driven storytelling, Codum leadership changed its opinion from thinking, “No, we don’t want to charge the learner,” to now, “Yeah, we should ask a commitment in some form in the future.” This commitment might eventually be a combination of different things, not just financial.
In Atomic Habits, Clear suggests one way to make the mental commitment to building better habits is to sign a contract stating your goals. A financial investment (even at five Euros) is a signed contract of sorts. Echoing Codum’s financial model, I previously volunteered for the non-profit, Software Carpentry, who charged $10 or $20 USD for four days of intensive instructions and workshops. While a nominal fee, the financial commitment significantly reduced student’s no-show rate.
Who uses Codum?
The two female founders of Codum have a strong diversity mission with an emphasis on closing the gender gap in tech. Not only is it important to them because of who they are, but also because they have a strong network in underrepresented groups. Currently, the gender ratio between male and female or non-male learners is about equal, with slightly fewer than 50% male representation. Isabella and her sister put effort into keeping it this way because they want to make sure that everybody feels welcome.
The matching algorithm, however, only considers learning goals and time zones when it pairs buddies. What leadership has realized, especially with the number of users that they match, is that the most important factor for a successful buddy relationship is the similarity in their goals and aspirations above anything else.
In the long-term, when they have thousands or tens of thousands of active users, they are interested in matching buddies based on other self-identified characteristics like personality traits. It would also feed well into Isabella’s behavioral science interests for research and experimentation. But ultimately, what they see is that people bond over shared struggle and shared excitement over the same topics. Suddenly, it doesn’t matter where you’re from or what your background is.
There are some rare instances where matched buddies do not work out. However, there is zero tolerance for any assumptions users may make about a buddy based on their location or name, for example. All users are required to meet with their buddy at least once. Then, if it doesn’t work out, which is very rare, you can get unmatched. What happens more often is that someone needs to quit because of sudden life changes, or they get sick, or they need to take a break from the grind. Occasionally, someone reports that their buddy has ghosted them, and that’s usually the worst thing that happens. “We have very well-behaved users actually,” Isabella boasts.
Matching currently happens once a month, but if a few latecomers or a few people who want to get rematched appear, there is a chance they can jump into the program slightly late but before the next month’s cycle.
On being a founder
Isabella is someone who faces new challenges boldly. Even in her Master’s degree, she never doubted her ability to succeed in her courses, thinking: “If others can do it, why shouldn’t I?” Furthermore, she launched Codum well before most technologists would feel ready to be self-employed.
When I asked Isabella what expertise she would recommend when founding a technology company, she said “you have to be an expert in learning.” Having a specific skill set from any field will be helpful. Even being a generalist makes it easier than starting from scratch. “If you start from scratch, you can still do it, but it will just take longer.”
“Every founder journey is different because every founder brings their own little tool set from themselves and which tools they can find within their network. So I know founders that are really strong in UI/UX design, but they have no coding background, let’s say. Or founders who have no legal background. And I’m like, ‘My gosh, knowing this will save you so much money.’ And then, they have to find their complimentary part if they want to build a tech company.”
According to Isabella, when you start a company, you are only one piece in the puzzle. If you go it alone, then you have to be able to understand everything. You’ll continue doing everything yourself until you have the resources to find someone who’s better than you. Ultimately, Isabella believes you should not be the best person in your company in any department, because that’s what your team will be for you. As a founder, you’ll be busy switching and wearing a lot of different hats.
Imposter syndrome
Isabella did encounter imposter syndrome when she started her first job. She remembers being so excited that she reached her goals, but then in her first few weeks, worrying, “Oh my gosh, but I’m not qualified.” But over time, she understood that she wasn’t there to be the perfect coder. She was there because her employer saw her potential: that she was motivated and she could learn.
To avoid the echo chamber of self doubt, it’s nice to have someone else there with you on the same journey. Then, you’re not surrounded by people who are on completely different levels. Then again, it comes down to “who is around you? How do they make you feel? How do they encourage you? Do they give feedback? How much can you learn from and with them?”
Biggest challenge
As a first time founder, Isabella has learned so many things. Codum grew out of a pet project stemming from a proof-of-concept. So she thought, “Okay, I’ll build a really cool product. Let’s go.” But, then she realized there are so many other things that have to be done: a lot of admin, paperwork, legal stuff, and finding resources whether it means investors or people to help you out.
“And while you’re doing all of this, who’s building the product?” This was a harsh realization for Isabella, who started this journey as a solo founder and found herself doing everything except actually building the product.
“Every founder will always say things are going too slow, but everything will just take more time to get to the point where you would imagine it to be. So I guess that was... Is it frustrating or is it just the learning? It was part of it.”
Biggest reward
On the flip-side, Isabella has found immense satisfaction stemming from Codum’s users. She is surrounded constantly by people who want to learn and grow and change their life. Codum’s users are usually aged mid-twenties to mid-forties. When you have, for example, a 40 year old mother who is re-entering the workforce after raising her kids, and is now really motivated to break into tech, and she finds the perfect accountability partner, the passion is contagious.
“With Codum, we are really in a thankful space. It’s not that we’re building and maybe five years later we see an impact. We launched very early. We started having early users with a scrappy MVP, but seeing these motivations and seeing how it really helps people and how they not only help each other learn, but also sometimes there’s great friendships that come from that. That’s the best part of Codum.”
Future of Codum
As Codum looks towards future growth opportunities, they are aware of one observation: many of their users are employed. Companies need employees to continuously grow and stay up to date in the latest tech. Not only is there a business need for it, but also a job’s growth and development opportunities have become baseline expectations for many modern employees.
Codum, building upon its learnings in the B2C sector, is actively looking to partner with a few tech companies that would be interested in collaborating on a solution to help their employees grow better. Isabella describes co-creating an accountability platform with self-directed learning topics that includes progress charts, gamification, tracking features, and notifications (features currently in development at Codum).
If anyone reading this thinks this would be an interesting opportunity for their company, then Isabella would be “super happy to jump on a call or to have an exchange and discuss.” You may reach out to her on LinkedIn.
Conclusion
I was honored and inspired to speak with Isabella about her founder origin story, including how COVID played a role. We talked about how crucial peers are in setting you up for continued success and discussed Codum’s business model. In addition to solid wisdom I gained from a first-time solo-founder, I got a preview of what’s next to come for Codum.
For more reading, check out Isabella’s blog post:
