My Journey with Enlight
Solving a problem, building an MVP, gaining traction, and working on a passion project that’s gradually evolving into something special.
Hey 👋
I’m Samay, a sophomore from New Jersey studying Computer Science at the University of Michigan. I love to build, run, and make videos.
Since I was a middle-schooler, I’ve helped my dad at his small business. I learned a lot of things from shadowing my father, but perhaps the most important of them all was this notion of creating value. I realized that value creation is one of the most important skills to develop, and I wondered if I could do it myself.
Shortly after, I started a snow shoveling business with some friends. I took it a little more seriously than a typical kid my age. I created marketing flyers, stored my customer’s information in a spreadsheet-CRM, and tracked expenses. Sure, I didn’t make a fortune, but it was my first real experience creating value for someone else.
This was a great exercise in creating value, but it wasn’t that fun. I wanted to incorporate my personal interests as well. I then created a YouTube channel about technology, where I contacted companies and reviewed their products, providing value for them in terms of publicity and traction for my online brand.
Over time, I learned how to code and built fun side-projects to make an impact. This included everything from building an app for my high school for any student to check their grades and class schedules to working on V1, a talent community for Michigan students.
Enlight
Nowadays, I spend most of my time on Enlight, an educational platform to teach anyone to code by building projects.
How it started
When I first tried to learn to code, I had no idea where to start. Online courses, theoretical CS classes, books, etc. just didn’t click for me. I couldn’t build anything useful, like a website or mobile app. I was frustrated until I discovered the concept of learning by doing.
I then built fun mini-projects, such as a to-do app and a weather app by Googling my way online and watching tutorial videos. Building these projects gave me motivation to learn and iterate on my creations, allowing me to unlock my true potential. Instead of memorizing syntax, I was able to create websites accessible by anyone on the internet. That was game-changing for me. I could finally make something useful.
During this time, I discovered that there weren’t any websites out there that embodied this method of learning. Therefore, I decided to post my projects online with a tutorial for anyone to follow along so that they could learn by doing, just like I did.
I whipped up a scrappy HTML website, wrote a few tutorials, and named the site Enlight. I didn’t recognize it at the time, but that was my MVP. The url, https://enlight.ml, was a free domain name that I secured online from a domain provider called Freenom (Please don’t do this, I’ll explain soon!).
Gaining traction
After I built my MVP, I couldn’t wait to share it with the world. I posted on Reddit dozens of times in several communities until it got some sort of traction. If you’re interested, here’s the Reddit history for the original domain (here’s the current). I received a lot of feedback from online communities such as Product Hunt, and I iterated and pushed out changes nearly every day for the first few weeks. One day, Enlight made the front page of Hacker News. There were hundreds of simultaneous users on the site, but I realized that I had no way of retaining them. To solve this, I hacked together a newsletter sign-up box and collected 1,000 emails from users in the hours that followed. It was a good day.
Creating something of value and releasing it online was amazing — and also incredibly rewarding. The fact that people appreciated Enlight motivated me to continue building out the site and adding more content. As I built more projects in web development and data science, I created tutorials and posted them. I also enabled anyone to add in their own projects through creating a pull request on Enlight’s GitHub repo.
In 2017, approximately one year after I started the site, my free domain name was taken away. One year of building a brand on my original domain was gone. For a few months, Enlight was hosted on GitHub’s domain, and accessible at https://tryenlight.github.io, where I continued to add more content and grow the site.
It wasn’t until the summer of 2018 when I decided to grow Enlight into a platform where anyone could login, interact, and share their own programming projects. I also re-launched the site with a brand new domain name: https://enlight.nyc. This was a huge transitioning point as the website expanded in many different ways — more projects, users, and engagement followed. In many respects, Enlight was a direct reflection of my personal growth as a builder.
Summer 2020
Most recently, instead of doing a virtual internship, I brought on my friend and cofounder, Max, and we’ve been working on growing Enlight into much more than just a side-project. Along with Varun, who joined us on this journey over the summer, we went through Georgia Tech’s CREATE-X Startup Launch program, which was an incredibly valuable experience for learning more about building a startup.
Over this past summer, we improved Enlight’s infrastructure, added new projects, grew our user base, cultivated our amazing community, and launched our cohort program.
Enlight Cohorts
Enlight provides the best-in-class education paired with a supportive community and accountability. Enlight Cohorts teaches web development by building three unique projects in two weeks, all within a supportive community of other builders. This isn’t an ordinary coding bootcamp or course, but instead an interactive cohort where learners attend live workshops and build projects. At the end of each workshop, cohort members have a finished product that they can share. By the end of the program, learners have 3 unique projects of their own and have a well-rounded knowledge of web development.
Our cohort program started as a way for us to learn more about how people learn to code so that we could improve engagement on the platform. Little did we know that we ended up discovering a whole different problem — staying motivated and accountable when you’re learning something new. We learned more about this through A LOT of customer discovery, which consisted of calls with hundreds of users, students, friends, and professionals who are currently learning to code. This gave us insight into their pain-points, which allowed us to create a product that solved one of their main problems: motivation and accountability.
Online course completion rates are ~5–15%. Our completion rate for Enlight Cohorts is over 50%. One of the driving factors of this is the fact that everyone’s creations are automatically shared within our community, keeping everyone motivated and accountable. After a workshop or project deadline, members can view the projects their peers have created and drop a note of encouragement or a suggestion. In addition, our live and interactive learning experience, combined with support from mentors, is what sets the program apart. Feel free to read more about it on our Product Hunt launch here.
It’s truly been an incredible journey thus far. Although I’ve been working on Enlight alongside school, it has been really cool to be able to work on something that makes an impact while, you know, being a student! I’ve learned so much from my experiences working on different projects, and strongly believe that everyone should work on side-projects that combine their interests and passions while creating some type of value or impact.
Product Mindset
Whether you’re building a website, community, organization, or anything else that can make an impact, I think the number one thing you should keep in mind is the value you provide for people who would benefit from what you’re building. This product mindset is something that I’ve subscribed to (especially in terms of building Enlight), and I think it’s one of the most important frameworks to consciously think about. This is exactly what I practice at MProduct, Michigan’s product organization on campus. I’ve been a part of a consulting team for a smart-building startup, the education team, and the building team. The common thread between all these initiatives is that we always kept the end user in mind so that we could provide the most value possible. In addition, the MProduct Community is just great — they’re the type of like-minded and ambitious people I want to surround myself with.
Thanks for reading a little bit about me. Now that you’ve heard my story, I’d love to hear yours as well! Feel free to reach out anytime: samay@umich.edu
Go Blue!
— Samay
Thanks to Erik Wihlborn, MProduct B&P Team, Sean Stapleton, and Maxim Geller for reading drafts of this post.
MProduct Links
Medium: https://medium.com/mproduct
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/mproduct
Website: https://www.mproduct.org/
If you are interested in MProduct check out the above links to learn more about who we are, what we do, and how to get involved. Fill out the interest form to stay up to date with MProduct events and learn more about being a part of our next cohort!
