welcome to another episode of “9 strangers from around the world visit Ryan’s basement to learn to code.” for 14 days. and it’s called Camp.
who showed up
just like Cohort 1, the turnout was a mix of existing programmers and total beginners. but 1 thing all students had in common was learning to code in Ruby on Rails with the Founder/Hacker curriculum.
participants flew in from Nevada, Brazil, The Netherlands, Wyoming, Turkey, France, and Texas.
we also welcomed our first TA, Tony Ennis. thank you Tony!
the vibe
at Camp #2 we had less “10 pushups on the hour, every hour” and more “let’s have a movie night!“
but besides a few improvised Rocket League (PS5) tournaments the sentiment was clear — work until you can’t see your screen.
on several occasions Campers burned the midnight 3am oil and still made it to our group workout the next day. we had a group that fasted (from food) to increase focus and working hours. and we had outdoor desk setups with external monitors and keyboards thanks to beautiful Fall weather in West Georgia.
at our halfway point 1:1 checkins i reminded folks that “you are only competing with yourself, not with each other.” luckily, our last night’s Demo Day presentation did a pretty good job of enforcing productivity throughout the program as well as endless iterations to daily priorities.
the outcomes
Derek of remotejobs.com may have delivered the funniest demo of all time. you had to be there.
by the numbers:
- 2 students – finished the Fundamentals course and began 24 Hour MVP
- 5 students – built entire apps from scratch (leveraging APIs + custom scrapers + LLMs / AI)
- 1 student – pivoted and finished an existing app, enabled Google Ads and got his first signup
- 1 instructor – delivered 2 live coding sessions on OAuth2 + HubSpot and Ruby + Rails + SQL tricks
- 1 TA – helped every student scale their code, deploy servers, and learn to play Irish billiards
profit motive
i’m including this because the numbers are quite different from Cohort 1.
- Revenue – $14,250 (still a few discounted tickets)
- Expenses – $4,644 (mostly food/booze, also extra furnishings and outings)
- Net Profit – $9,606
to make Camp sustainable i’m increasing the price to $3k for upcoming cohorts, with early bird pricing ($2500) for launch day enrollments. we’ll also invest more in catering and accommodations, for example the new container house under construction.
going forward
this afternoon i sent some photos, a survey, and an open source project to Cohort 2 alumni to keep us connected in a post-Camp world. because if the energy died on Day 14, i didn’t do my job.
Camp is not for everyone. it’s a lot of work and not a lot of sleep. it’s months of Learning On Your Own, compressed. you won’t have a car or privacy or silence or all the creature comforts you’re used to back home.
but you will ship. i guarantee it. join the waitlist here.