Start with why
Some context first on DataCamp
At the start of 2016, DataCamp’s team consisted of 8 people. Less than 18 months later, we’ve grown to 45 people. DataCamp’s subscriber numbers and courses have grown exponentially as well in that period. In the spirit of transparency, since the start of 2016:
- # DataCamp subscribers grew from 4,900 to over 33,000
- # registered students grew from 260,000 to over 1.3 million
- # courses grew from 18 to 85
So why?
While that’s incredibly exciting, it has forced us to rethink both internal as well as external communication flows. We hope to fix some of the internal communication challenges we’ve recently experienced by regularly explaining why DataCamp is doing certain things, by sharing mistakes, challenges, future goals, etc. In addition to improving internal communication, by being transparent, I hope other entrepreneurs may learn from our past and future mistakes in building a SAAS (education) company.
Two words of warning:
- Things change fast when a company is growing double digits month-over-month. In a few months, some of what gets written here now, may no longer be true or relevant.
- I’m an INTP and have a tendency to share undeveloped thoughts in a debate against myself. I’ll try to share developed thoughts in these initial posts, but I’m pretty sure that won’t last long. A dream scenario would be that this becomes a scalable sounding board on what DataCamp is doing (and not doing).
The initial posts will cover the following topics (among other things):
