Space Coders
Space Coders (also known as Coding NZ and Coding AU) is a SaaS education product where students aged 9 to 18 learn to code games and websites while attaining beginner to advanced coding skills in gamified, interactive lessons.
Broadly speaking, there were 4 key parts of the Space Coders build. Often, these parts were being implemented/happening at the same time, but I've broken them down here for clarity:
1. MVP & Scope2. Product Improvement & User Feedback
3. Automation of Operations & Third Party Integrations
4. Internationalization & Scalability
MVP & Scope
When Covid lockdowns hit NZ in March of 2020, we (Josh/my husband and I) still owed parents/students ~5 weeks of coding lessons (they had prepaid for our in person coding lessons at the beginning of the school term). So we got busy. We decided to build an online delivery method for coding lessons. The rough MVP needed to be good enough to "replace" in person coding lessons. It was built out over 8 weeks, and included automated signups and payments, an interactive online code editor + curriculum questions, and live tutor chat help. Anyone who has built a SaaS product knows building all this in 8 weeks is no mean feat, and I the only reason we were able to release a stable and useful MVP so soon was because we opted to use modern, well documented tools like Laravel and Vue, as well as constraining our requirements/scope (e.g. instead of building for all screen sizes and browsers, we built for only the Chrome browser on laptop screen ratios, because 90%+ of our users were on Chromebooks).
Noticing that student learning rates had increased now that lessons were online, and that running a SaaS business was A LOT better than running a physical business (less hassle, better margins, easier to scale), we decided to continue running coding lessons online while building out this SaaS product.
Product Improvement & User Feedback
Over the last 2 and a half years we have consistently improved the Space Coders Product. For us product improvement has three aims:
- Better trial conversion rates
- Increased customer retention
- New referrals/sales
But how do we come up with product improvement ideas? I would say that is the easy part. We asked customers. We watched users interact with the system. We interacted with the system ourselves. There was always something (and usually several things) that could be improved to make the user experience better. The trick was to pick the improvement that would have the most impact on whichever of the three above aims the business was currently focused on.
A lot of product improvements centered around trying to make a challenging learning experience something that students would want to do after school (remember, we were competing with Roblox and Minecraft here). We learnt the value of good design (everything is space themed now), and fun (I developed several gamification elements including points, leaderboards and avatars.) We also focussed on our core purpose, which was being the best place for students to learn to code, and I think we largely achieved that (purely project based learning, instant private tutor level help from our automated bot whenever students are stuck, and problem solving challenges to flex their mental muscles).
Having received a 4.77/5 star rating in our latest customer survey, I'm pretty happy with the approach we took to product improvement.
Automation of Operations & Third Party Integrations
Did you know I now run a tutoring business that delivers 1 hour coding lessons to over 250 students per week with only about 2 hours a week of my time? And it's possible because of automation. We followed a tried and true cycle to increase the efficiency of our operations:
- Prototype
- Standardize
- Automate
For example, if we wanted to send personalized certificates to students: First, we would come up with the idea and try a few design and delivery formats. Then we would standardize the process (settle on a day/time to send certificates, what templates and delivery methods to use etc.) And last, we'd automated the whole process. Every week various students are emailed a personalized certificate and report to show the learning progress they've made, and when a student finishes the entire curriculum they receive a physical certificate in the post. The best part? This personalized and rewarding experience for our users costs me no time per week. Zilch. None.
What else have we automated? Tutor help during lessons (it's instant and feels like students have their own private tutor), text reminders before lessons (Clicksend), registrations, payments (Stripe), trial follow ups (Postmark), subscriptions management, marking students work, referrals etc.
With technology, it really is possible to deliver a better user experience while spending less of your own time. I would certainly make human errors, skip sick days, and simply not have time to personalize all of the above automated interactions consistently for each users, but technology does it without breaking a sweat, and I love that.
Internationalization & Scalability
Having reached an organic plateu in new student sign ups in NZ, we decided to cast our net further abroad. With eyes on the MUCH larger populations in the US and Canada, we got to work. (For some reason Jeremy Clarkson was narrating that last sentence in my head as I wrote it).
After purchasing the spacecoders.com domain (codingnz.com simply wouldn't do overseas!) we got started. Internationlization took longer than I was expecting. There were timezones, different payment systems/tax setups, and localized wording to consider (to name a few).
We did eventually get codingau.com (added just for fun) and spacecoders.com live. They don't have any signups yet, and we're hoping to sell them off with the rest of the business to some marketing/sales genius.