Fostering creativity — Mixing people and projects
This Week at Craft Academy — Week 2 June 2017
There’s a lot of exciting things happening in the Craft Academy ecosystem at the moment.
Monday started with a new cohort going live. This summer, five students will go through the tough and fast paced Craft Academy Bootcamp. Only five, you think? Well, the concept of Accelerated Learning is still not as well known in Sweden as it is in many other countries, and our learners are early-adopters. So all kudos to them for jumping off a cliff and trusting both themselves and us, but also and a pat on our own shoulder for sticking to our belief that has guided us this far: Be more than a coding course, focus on the individual and provide your customers with the best possible curriculum and personal support. This is what we set out to do when we started this company two years ago and that is what still guides us in our day-to-day operations.
At Craft Academy, there are at least three active coaches supporting the learners at any given time. That usually means a 2-to-1 learner-coach ratio. That translates to good support during the camp. However, on the business side of things, if you want to build a scaleable business, is that ratio sustainable in the long run?
We do not WANT to scale Craft Academy in the start-upish sense of the word (taking over the world, serve hundreds of thousands customers, and whatever else start-up founders and VC’s dream about). Money is not everything. We are making relatively good money with around 8–12 students in a cohort. We believe (well, we actually KNOW) that the quality of our bootcamp would suffer if we would go for the pressure-cooker approach that we’ve seen at some bootcamps in the US and UK. Education is a people focused business — independently of what the subject matter is. And people are not machines; there is no way we can predict every reaction to every situation during the camp, not in a complex setting like ours. We truly believe that we need to focus on each and every student, coach her or him, give support, motivate, support and just…, you know: care. So massive growth is a no-go on our part. (Not meaning that we don’t have a growth strategy — let me get back to you on that in a separate post.)
But back to the current events at Craft Academy: Our seniors started their Final Project week and are coding like crazy building Taskr — an online marketplace for connecting people to request and do everyday jobs and tasks.It is amazing how fast they grow up! Just 12 weeks ago, these guys hadn’t written any significant amount of code and now they are developing a product of their own — as a team. That makes us proud as hell!
Our so called super-seniors (a term used by bootcampers about recent graduates) are in the process of building a revised MVP based on their final project. With some assistance from our coaches these guys are moving toward starting their own business and landing their first clients for the Tenant Services Platform they built as their final project. More info on that will come further down the line…
In CA Labs we are in the final stages of two major projects: Stylistas.com and AdventureMap. These are two online mobile logging, photo-sharing and social networking services we have been working on for the past couple of months. Two social networks targeting different demographics — young fashion oriented females and more mature nature loving and adventurous adults. It’s all-hands-on-deck time as we are nearing the beta test periods in both projects. ;-)
Mixing people and projects like this creates a truly inspiring environment for us coaches and students alike. Would you like to know more about what we do? Follow us here on Medium, on Facebook, Twitter or visit our website.
