Austen Allred was homeless for 3 months when he was fundraising for his first company Grasswire, a media platform that lets everyone create collaborative news reports by voting on and fact-checking social media content in real-time. Austen was so broke that he couldn't afford to rent a place in Silicon Valley to meet with investors.

To still have a chance to raise money for the startup, he decided to take a road trip for 3 months in California and sleep in his car. Unfortunately, the startup did not work out despite having some early traction. But this pales in comparison to what came next: his daughter got extremely sick and had to be hospitalized for some extended period of time. He needed to do something.

In a conversation with one of his friends Vin Clancy, they both came up with the idea to expand upon their blog posts and turn them into a marketing book and use all the tactics they wrote about to sell the book. Austen and Vin were both into marketing and had created content in the marketing space over the years and amassed a sizable following. The book they ended up co-authoring was named Secret Sauce.

The book's massive success was clutch. It helped Austen pay off the debt and save some money for his next venture (Lambda School).Austen shared some key insights from this experience selling Secret Sauce: 1. People desire to improve their life circumstances 2. People don't like doing the work 3. People love free content

Lambda School's MVPA Haskell course: Lambda School started off as a Teachable Haskell Functional Programming Course. Considering that the first learning from the book Secret Sauce was that people purchase outcomes and not content, teaching programming seemed like the highest leverage opportunity to tackle.

Javascript Bootcamp: The actual market hiding in plain sight was Javascript. This time, instead of running a Teachable course, Austen switched to the boot camp model.

Third Lambda School iteration: New Business Model. The model was working, creating free content upfront adding value to potential members, and converting a small percentage of people who were motivated enough to up-level their careers to join the 3-month $10k course.

Fourth Lambda School iteration: Lambda School as we know it today. This was "the aha moment" for Lambda School: shouldering the risk of the outcome of their boot camp was inherently more valuable to their students than a high-touch boot camp with an extremely low admission rate.

Traditional education is clearly broken. Every year, students take on tens of thousands in debt with the hope that their education will pay off with a job on the other side. Lambda School wants to disrupt the system by up-leveling a new set of talent and helping them access lucrative, in-demand careers in technology.

Leo Luo • 🏫 Lambda School