Learn Barak’s secret for getting his first customers and growing his business using TikTok. Like so many episodes of this podcast, I learned a lot from Barak and will be testing out some of the strategies we discussed soon. If you want smart tips straight from a pro, this episode is for you.
Check out episode 46 of the First Customers podcast with Barak Glanz:
Highlights
- Meet Barak: What’s his business story?
- Barak’s top tips on understanding what customers want.
- How did Barak get his first customers? Find out!
- The power of good business relationships.
- Adapting to change: Barak’s advice on staying ahead.
Mentions
- Barak Glanz on LinkedIn
- Coddy.tech: Get a 20% discount with code “Paris20”
- Barak’s Book recommendation: “Don’t read… listen to the First Customers podcast!”
Show Transcript
Paris Vega (00:00.746)
Hey everybody, welcome to the First Customers podcast. Today we’re here with Barack Glanz. He’s the co-founder and COO of Codi.Tech, an online platform that focuses on teaching code in a practice-driven way. In the last nine months, they’ve gone from zero to over 500 paying customers. Barack, welcome to the show.
Barak Glanz (00:22.703)
Hi Paris, thank you for having me.
Paris Vega (00:25.646)
Glad to have you here. Let’s get into it. How’d you get those first customers?
Barak Glanz (00:30.989)
All right, so before I tell you about the story of the first customers, I’ll tell you just a quick brief on our company, what we’re doing and how we started. Right, so the company is Coditec. We are having, as you mentioned,
an online platform focused on teaching code in a practice driven way. Uh, I founded the company a year and a half ago with two of my childhood friends, Nathan and Kevin. And the reason we did that is because of, uh, a personal struggle that we had, uh, back in the day when we started, uh, learning to code. Um, well, when we, I don’t know if you try to learn how to code online.
but it’s not easy, it’s hard and it’s quite boring and there’s a problem that people are trying to learn how to code and sometimes they even start a course about data science or Python or anything and after a month or two, best case, they fail to stick to their learning schedule.
because it’s either too hard or too boring or I don’t know, they lose motivation. It’s very common. So we wanted to change that. And we built Kodi. We took a lot of inspiration from Duolingo. I really love how they disrupted the language learning sector and we wanted to do the same to the co-learning sector. So we started with the…
Paris Vega (01:52.127)
Right.
Barak Glanz (02:13.561)
something really small, an MVP just made very small courses online. We had this platform where you don’t need to download anything, you just go to the website and you start right away. We have an integrated compiler, we have some basic challenges and you learn on the go.
We did that a year and a half ago. As mentioned, we started working on the MVP. And we wanted to, before we try to acquire customers, we wanted to make sure that the platform is working as expected. So what we did, it’s just a very common thing to do. We asked from friends and family to be our first users to try out the platform. And…
Paris Vega (02:56.654)
sure.
Barak Glanz (03:09.505)
After we got pretty positive feedback, we wanted to give the opportunity to a lot of users to try out the platform, but it’s really hard to acquire users, even if they’re not paying at all. So we had an interesting strategy where we market the platform to Indian users. It’s really cheap to run campaign.
Paris Vega (03:25.666)
Right.
Barak Glanz (03:39.553)
focused on specifically India and a lot of people over there want to learn how to code, right? It’s a big thing over there. Sorry.
Paris Vega (03:48.13)
Sure. What platform did you use? What platform were you advertising on? Okay.
Barak Glanz (03:55.089)
Google, Google search specifically, and it worked really well. We acquired thousands of users over a very short period of time, and it barely cost us anything.
So after we’ve had those first few thousand users, we noticed what’s working better on our platform and what’s need to get changed. And right after that, we tried to market it to American people just because we always knew that they will show more willingness to pay.
By the way, we started with the platform fully free. Everything was completely free. We just wanted to make sure that it’s giving value, that we’re making some kind of an impact over there. Because if we’re not giving value, there’s no reason to continue with the company. And we’ve already had promising careers. I worked at Meta, my partner worked for Intel.
and we quit our jobs as soon as we’ve had something serious building up. So the American users were pretty expensive to acquire, much more expensive than we first thought. So yeah, even for free, I think it was around $2 for a registered user.
Paris Vega (05:28.382)
And is this still the free users? Okay.
Paris Vega (05:39.116)
Mmm.
Barak Glanz (05:39.377)
Um, yeah, we wanted to have a mass users. We want to have a lot of them so we can have, uh, so we can make statistics and get to, uh, data-driven decisions. Um, but, uh, we didn’t have enough money. So we, we participated in a startup accelerator program called Signal Apps by, uh, by Sorona partners. And.
we’ve had mentors over there telling us we should try to be a B2B company because we have a great platform, we managed to make an easy way to learn how to code and this can help coding boot camps in the in the states deliver what they want to deliver so we reached out to them
trying to sell them our product. And to keep things short, it was just a waste of time. It was a couple of months, we didn’t sell anything. It was a week after week that we thought we made our first sale, but we didn’t. So right after that, the B2B attempts, we realized that we have to…
start working on the original vision to be a B2C company. And we took the very scary step of plugging in the billing system. And this was nine months ago.
Barak Glanz (07:29.369)
But we also knew that it won’t work to acquire the users through Google search because it was too expensive. We already ran this experiment. So we tried something new. We reached out to TikTok influencers and believe it or not, this thing worked. It actually worked. And yeah, so we paid someone.
Paris Vega (07:51.33)
Hmm.
Paris Vega (07:54.498)
Really?
Barak Glanz (07:58.393)
30 bucks for a video where he mentioned Cody and what we’re doing. And people started registering and they made purchases right away. By the way, what we did there, we kept the platform completely free, but we put a limitation over the daily usage, meaning that if you only come for a
Paris Vega (08:15.496)
well.
Paris Vega (08:24.328)
OK.
Barak Glanz (08:25.817)
half an hour per day, that’s completely fine, but some users want to experience the code learning without limitation, and those are the ones who subscribe. And even the subscription price is already almost free. It’s $10 per month. So, a lot of people were using the platform, and a lot of them, about 5%, which is more than enough, actually subscribed.
and it more than covered the cost of the TikTok video, I think it’s 5x maybe, I don’t know, maybe even more so we tried to double down on that that’s the story of the first customers, by the way we acquired them through that silly TikTok video and by the way, I’m not such a TikTok user myself, I never had it installed on my phone
Paris Vega (09:22.775)
Yeah.
Barak Glanz (09:25.889)
but my partner said that maybe that’s a funnel that we didn’t try yet. So that’s the short story of the story.
Paris Vega (09:34.154)
And that was the first paying customers? So that was the first paying customers was through the influencer TikTok videos? How many of those did you do?
Barak Glanz (09:39.989)
Yeah, yeah, TikTok viewers. So from that video, I think it was like 20, 30 customers, something like that, yeah.
Paris Vega (09:51.586)
Wow. How many followers did they have? What size influencer were they? I mean, it couldn’t have been too big for only $30 a video.
Barak Glanz (09:58.477)
Yeah, I don’t remember to be honest. I think that specific TikTok channel, the first that we worked with, they had, I think, 20,000 followers. But the video performed really well. It reached 200 or 300,000 views. It was above and beyond our expectations. And yeah, this really kickstart our…
Paris Vega (10:10.227)
Okay, sounds about right.
Paris Vega (10:21.707)
Yeah.
Paris Vega (10:28.63)
So that one video, you saw traction after getting that video out there, people started paying. So did you ramp up more TikTok videos and just more influencers? Talk about how going from that moment forward.
Barak Glanz (10:37.665)
Yeah. Oh yeah.
Barak Glanz (10:43.681)
Yeah, all right, so important thing for the listeners maybe who are trying to learn, always dedicate some part of your marketing budget for experiment. And we experimented quite a lot, even though the TikTok influencer thing worked pretty well. We tried a lot of things, we tried to market on Twitter, on Quora, Reddit, Facebook.
a lot of things. Some things worked better and some didn’t. The TikTok influencer funnel was always the best up until recently. And it worked so well that we increased the budget each month just by a bit. We always spend about the same as we…
as we earn. It’s not like we have investors with suits telling us what to do, it’s always all out of our pockets. So we started really slow, but we saw a very solid increase by 20% each month in terms of newly acquired customers. And funny thing is that we, ever since then, each month we are sure.
that it will be the last month with the 20% increase, but we still keep this same growth rate up until now. So things are starting to look really good right now. All of the numbers are starting to add up and it’s a very exciting feeling.
Paris Vega (12:29.902)
Okay.
Paris Vega (12:36.798)
Yeah. So you said until recently, so what platform is producing the best for you right now?
Barak Glanz (12:45.473)
Yeah, so we started experimenting with the Facebook ads. We, well, I think I’ve worked with around a hundred TikTok influencers by now. So I have a lot of creatives. Yeah, they let me use their promotional videos and promote them on other platforms. So I took some of those videos.
Paris Vega (12:49.387)
Mm-hmm.
Paris Vega (13:01.451)
Right.
Barak Glanz (13:14.137)
and I spend just money on the meta advertising platform or whatever they name it and
Paris Vega (13:24.406)
Because TikTok let you download anybody’s video, right? Like if they create a video for you, you can download it, use that everywhere else.
Barak Glanz (13:28.26)
Yeah.
Barak Glanz (13:31.937)
Yeah, yeah, we didn’t think of that originally, but that’s another good thing to, another good advantage of working with influencers early on. They also make you a lot of creatives that you can use later. So we do.
Paris Vega (13:46.423)
Right.
So you don’t have to have video production budget or anything like that. That’s kind of included in the, in the price you pay them. Yeah, that’s smart.
Barak Glanz (13:52.461)
Yeah.
Exactly. Yeah. So, so we use those most successful vids from TikTok. And, and it’s all started very recently, right? About a month ago, I started the promoting those vids on Facebook. And we wanted to get a customer acquisition cost of around $100.
just so we can have something to start with and optimize it on the way. By the way, important thing to mention is that our retention is about 86 month, the monthly retention. So yeah, so if every customer pays us $10 per month, that means that the lifetime value of the customer is I think $71, I think.
Paris Vega (14:40.119)
Wow.
Barak Glanz (14:54.413)
we can check that later, we can calculate. So anyways, yeah, we wanted to have.
Paris Vega (14:57.625)
Wouldn’t it just be 860, like 10 times 86? Wouldn’t it be like the full amount they spent over that time period?
Barak Glanz (15:06.909)
Yeah, so the full amount, if the retention of 86%, that means that on average a customer stays seven months, so it’s about $70 lifetime value. Yeah, yeah. So B2C SaaS company need to have its marketing machine work, right? The unit economics must add up. The LTV must be higher than the cock. So…
Paris Vega (15:12.759)
Oh, okay. I got you.
Paris Vega (15:18.666)
I see what you’re saying. Okay, I misunderstood. Gotcha.
Barak Glanz (15:36.529)
Our goal is to lower the customer acquisition cost of a scalable marketing campaign to be lower than $70. So we aimed to start with $70, with a $100 customer acquisition cost on the Facebook ads campaign. But we actually, when we’ve taken a look over the data after…
about a week of experiments, we noticed that the customer acquisition cost over there is actually closer to 60, meaning that even though we just started experimenting with the Facebook marketing, the customer acquisition cost is already lower than the lifetime value, meaning that I can put $1,000 into the…
Barak Glanz (16:35.585)
into the Facebook ads and from that campaign I will get back $1,300, right? A little bit more. So potentially, potentially I think that if you put a million dollars into such a campaign you will get back $1,300,000.
theoretically, right? So that’s what we’re working on right now.
Paris Vega (17:07.071)
Right.
Paris Vega (17:10.829)
Okay. So you worked at Meadow, which is Facebook’s parent company, and yet you chose to go with TikTok first. Why not start with Facebook?
Barak Glanz (17:11.811)
Yeah.
Barak Glanz (17:15.905)
Yeah, right.
Barak Glanz (17:21.849)
We actually started with Facebook. It didn’t work well at all. I don’t like their marketing platform, to be honest. It’s not where I worked when I worked for Meta. I helped them build some financial product, not something interesting at all. But yeah, we started experimenting with the Facebook ads back in the day, a year ago, but the user acquisition…
Paris Vega (17:24.321)
Okay.
Really.
Paris Vega (17:35.566)
Gotcha.
Barak Glanz (17:51.541)
Was so pricey. I Don’t know maybe something changed. I don’t know we improved the product quite a lot in the last year so maybe our product is just better so Yeah, it’s more convincing it gives people a lot of value We integrated an AI assistant to the to the platform Yeah, that’s something interesting We are the only
Paris Vega (18:01.58)
Okay.
Paris Vega (18:04.898)
better conversion rates.
Paris Vega (18:16.202)
Okay.
Barak Glanz (18:21.701)
company in the sector with that capability. So whenever you struggle to understand what went wrong with a solution attempt to a coding challenge, you can just click on the Ask AI button and it tells you what you did wrong. Yeah, it’s powered by an NLP model, cutting edge technology.
Paris Vega (18:44.334)
It’s awesome.
Barak Glanz (18:50.753)
really cool stuff that the team worked on and yeah it’s working really well, improved the retention by a lot and oh another thing that we had, I think that it also improved the retention, we noticed that Duolingo, one of the things that they are doing really good is the personalization that they have.
Paris Vega (18:52.684)
Yeah.
Barak Glanz (19:20.373)
Each Duolingo user, they have challenges that’s given to them in a very personalized way. The challenges fit your level and abilities. It’s harder to do such a thing for code learning. But what we did…
is that we have all of the data on our users, what they passed, code executions that they have, and all of the topics that they were interested in. And we made a model that generates challenges based on the knowledge of the user and what they struggle with and what they are interested in learning.
Paris Vega (20:17.122)
Okay, that’s cool.
Barak Glanz (20:18.113)
Yeah, that’s another thing that improved their attention by a lot. And another thing that we are the only company with that feature.
Paris Vega (20:26.854)
OK, so it’s kind of reactive based on the user’s behavior. That’s really cool. All right. So videos have been what we talked about so far as your main tactic video ads. What did you put in that actual first video? Do you remember what that actual video was?
Barak Glanz (20:30.645)
Oh yeah.
Barak Glanz (20:51.557)
Good question. I think it was something a bit silly. I find it best that if you make the video, well on TikTok especially, you need to have the video feel authentic to the viewer. It needs to be very similar to just another video by the creator.
It was just another video by the creator of, by the TikTok influencer. He made a video where he finds out about a new platform focused on teaching code in a practice-driven way. And he just showed the platform. He experimented with it, shows it around.
Paris Vega (21:46.11)
Okay. So the influencer was the one just showing people through the platform.
Barak Glanz (21:47.458)
Yeah.
Barak Glanz (21:51.413)
Yeah, and we tried a lot of methods. We tried ads with a more specific agenda. For example, to make it appear as if it was a game. We tried to make it with a strict call to action.
and we measured what works best and in the end it doesn’t matter that much. That’s why it’s so important to measure every step you’re taking during the path to a working marketing machine. So we found out that it doesn’t really matter what’s on the video, what matters is that it will show the platform.
the product and it will feel authentic to the viewer so that they won’t exit the video in the middle. That’s what works best for us and it only makes sense that it will work for everybody.
Paris Vega (23:07.302)
Okay. And is that what most of your ads are? It’s kind of just showing the product, a person going through the app. Okay.
Barak Glanz (23:12.657)
Yeah, I think so. Yeah, the most of them is just showing the product. We’ve had a few videos that worked pretty well by people who are not necessarily computer scientists or anything, but rather personal development coaches and…
They are not showing the actual product on screen, but they talk about it. They talk about how beneficial it is to learn how to program and how hard it is to stick to your learning schedule. And then they introduce the audience to our platform. And that’s another authentic way to sell the product. Just…
talking about how the value that it brings. Yeah.
Paris Vega (24:14.57)
Yeah. Have you tried any other mediums like blog content or any other types of content marketing?
Barak Glanz (24:25.869)
Right now, we’re trying a new thing. I’m being interviewed to podcasts. So that’s another new thing. We didn’t try blogs or anything like that, but maybe it will be the next thing. Yeah, we’re also working on a mobile app.
Paris Vega (24:33.904)
Yeah.
Paris Vega (24:44.34)
Okay.
Paris Vega (24:50.442)
Okay.
Barak Glanz (24:51.441)
It’s harder to program on your phone. I mean, you need an actual keyboard to have the full experience, but we came up with some creative solution for that. So the reason, by the way, that we are working on a mobile app is because it’s often cheaper to acquire mobile users than it is to acquire desktop users. So…
Paris Vega (24:56.732)
Right.
Barak Glanz (25:20.049)
want to bring cheap users to the mobile app and then send them from the mobile app to the desktop version, the full experience. Yeah, that’s just another idea that we’re having. The next experiment.
Paris Vega (25:35.35)
Is that okay? Is it now you said it’s cheaper. Is that because there’s less competition advertising on the mobile app stores? So it’s cheaper ad costs or why is that cheaper user acquisition?
Barak Glanz (25:49.733)
That’s a good question. I’m not completely sure what’s the reason behind it. I think it’s a combination of both more users on mobile and also less competition on specifically our sector. The keywords and all of that we are competing on.
there’s more competition for desktop users so yeah
Paris Vega (26:19.634)
Interesting. Okay. And are you getting that from tools like, uh, SIM rush or, uh, just Google advertising or where are you seeing that?
Barak Glanz (26:32.584)
the cheaper price for users.
Paris Vega (26:35.29)
Yeah, how are you gathering that information that it’s actually cheaper on mobile?
Barak Glanz (26:40.129)
Yeah, we did a couple of researches back in the day. I don’t remember the exact platforms. It was a couple of them. But there was a significant difference in the price. Yeah.
Paris Vega (26:46.676)
Okay.
Paris Vega (26:57.822)
Okay, so maybe like an A-B test where you’re sending traffic to different places and just checking the cost after the fact.
Barak Glanz (27:03.853)
Yeah, we will need to conduct a couple of experiments to make sure that our theory is correct. There’s a big chance that we will develop the mobile app and in the end we will figure out that it’s actually more expensive to acquire customers this way. But as mentioned before, always dedicate a part of your marketing budget for experiments, it’s always important. Yeah.
Paris Vega (27:25.316)
Yeah.
Paris Vega (27:30.446)
That’s right. Yep. Yeah, I’ve never advertised on a mobile platform like that one of the app stores. Curious.
Barak Glanz (27:37.429)
Me too, but my partner used to have a lot of mobile apps developed by him He did that for a couple of years Now he just lives based on the revenue from his silly mobile games and stuff that he developed back in the day Yeah, so cool stuff
Paris Vega (27:44.588)
Okay.
Paris Vega (27:56.29)
That’s awesome.
Okay. Yeah. All right. So you guys found success by experimenting and, um, the tick tock ads worked out well. Was that the best performing ad that first video that you did, or were there better performing ones that really caused a spike in users?
Barak Glanz (28:20.417)
um yeah so i think the first video it wasn’t the most successful in terms of generated revenue but it was definitely the most exciting one because the first customers are always the they always bring the most excitement right but we we’ve had videos that generated a hundred customers
or even 200, 300 customers. Maybe not 300 actually.
Paris Vega (28:54.295)
Okay.
But they were all that same format of an influencer walking through the platform.
Barak Glanz (29:03.497)
Yeah, each influencer they have their own way of showing it to their audience. It’s not always the product on screen, it’s not always shown in the exact same way, but yeah, the video should…
Paris Vega (29:18.254)
Okay. So is it more the influencer audience matching what your product does, you think that caused the spike for a given video?
Barak Glanz (29:29.505)
Yeah, I always tell the…
people I work with on the videos that they have full creative freedom. My review on the video is very minimal, I just check that the video makes sense, that it’s promotional enough, but it shouldn’t be a straight up ad, because it just wouldn’t work. So I prefer a video with a lot of views and a lot of
Paris Vega (29:55.19)
care.
Paris Vega (29:58.57)
Right, you want to have a…
Barak Glanz (30:02.729)
a very low conversion rate in terms of views divided by customers. I prefer that over a video with just a thousand views and, I don’t know, twenty customers.
Paris Vega (30:06.05)
Okay.
Paris Vega (30:11.33)
Right.
Paris Vega (30:21.547)
Yeah.
Barak Glanz (30:23.393)
It’s also harder to make statistics on low numbers, so that’s another thing.
Paris Vega (30:24.201)
Okay.
Paris Vega (30:28.882)
Right. I think that’s an interesting point, making sure that, or just that tactic of making sure that you have entertainment value built in or the value of the content is there on its own in spite of it being an ad or whatever, that being a secondary part of what you’re doing. That makes a lot of sense given that there’s so much competition for everybody’s visual attention these days. So if you lean more towards
Barak Glanz (30:56.964)
Oh yeah.
Paris Vega (30:58.862)
prioritizing good content first, that makes sense that could be a more successful strategy.
Barak Glanz (31:04.621)
Yeah, and the concentration span is getting shorter and shorter, right? People lose their focus just like that. That’s another thing that we are working on. On Cody, we make sure that our challenges, all of the lessons are bite sized to match the
the short focus that people have nowadays. So it’s just the same with ads, I think.
Paris Vega (31:36.002)
Right, it’s easy to just glance over most of the ads you see because they’re all so similar or so obvious. Okay, this is really interesting. I don’t think anyone has done a pure TikTok based strategy yet of those we’ve talked to are mostly TikTok based, it sounds like. Have you switched over to experimenting with all the other short parts of the other video platforms like YouTube shorts and…
Barak Glanz (31:43.267)
Yeah.
Paris Vega (32:05.17)
Instagram reels or Facebook stories or whatever they’re called.
Barak Glanz (32:06.881)
Yeah, we just recently started experimenting with Instagram Reels. It’s working really well, just the same as TikTok. And…
Paris Vega (32:14.827)
Okay.
Yeah. Now are you using the same influencers or is it just per platform? You’re choosing different influencers or you just using the influencer videos from Tik TOK across platforms.
Barak Glanz (32:28.629)
I would say that we use the same type of influencers, we look for the same typecast, but it’s not necessarily the same people.
Paris Vega (32:40.022)
Gotcha. Do you have a platform you use to reach out to influencers or is it all just manual contact?
Barak Glanz (32:47.573)
Most of them share openly their email for business inquiries. For TikTok, they have the TikTok Creators Marketplace. But the good influencers are not there. You need to reach them outside of the marketplace.
Paris Vega (32:55.021)
Okay.
Paris Vega (33:11.17)
So do you just search through TikTok and find people in your niche?
Barak Glanz (33:15.329)
yeah my partner does that part he finds out the potential people he sends them over to me and then I make the calls and I continue from there I hate searching for them I don’t know, I’m just not good at it
Paris Vega (33:17.728)
Okay.
Paris Vega (33:29.463)
Okay.
Paris Vega (33:36.05)
Okay, interesting. And so you manage the whole relationship manually.
Barak Glanz (33:42.141)
Yeah, yeah, it’s not that hard, most of them are very friendly and it’s not very time consuming, it’s pretty nice.
Paris Vega (33:43.406)
through email.
Paris Vega (33:51.906)
So what kind of volume then? It must not be like a high number of videos per month, for example. How often do you launch a new video?
Barak Glanz (34:00.045)
Yeah, it depends on the month Right now we put all of our focus on the Facebook advertising So I think in August we’ve had maybe one or two videos on TikTok But we’ve had months with 20-30 videos I don’t know Times where I’ve… sorry
Paris Vega (34:24.75)
Wow, and that would be 20 or 30 different influencers. So that would be 20 or 30 different influencers.
Barak Glanz (34:32.561)
Yeah, I’ve had times where I’ve had a meeting every day with a new influencer. Yeah, it’s not that bad.
Paris Vega (34:41.855)
What’s the price range for the videos, Ben?
Barak Glanz (34:46.285)
So when we started we were scared to spend a lot of money so we only worked with smaller influencers just to minimize the risks. I don’t know if it was a smart move. There’s a higher variance in terms of the number of views per video for the smaller influencers. The bigger channel…
they have a more consistent performance for each video so I think back in the day it was around $50 per video and right now I’m working with the channels that I pay them $3000 per video so the price range varies a lot
I’ve heard that if you want MrBeast to make a video for you, it can cost you like half a million dollars for a single video. Yeah, crazy thing. And the craziest thing about it, that it might actually give you more money than it costs you, right? Because he’s so, so popular.
Paris Vega (35:52.758)
Mm. Yeah.
Paris Vega (36:08.042)
Right. Yeah. Such a massive audience. Yeah, that makes sense. Okay. Really cool. You’ve inspired me to look more into hiring TikTok influencers.
Barak Glanz (36:12.993)
Yeah, crazy.
Barak Glanz (36:23.757)
Yeah, you should try.
Paris Vega (36:25.362)
Uh, yeah. Uh, do you recommend any books for people who are on the path? They’re trying to get something going. They maybe they’ve got a little startup or they’ve got a little app they’re working on. Uh, do you recommend any books, uh, for people on this journey?
Barak Glanz (36:42.373)
So I stopped reading books about four years ago, I think, but I started listening to more and more podcasts. So for those type of people, I will recommend to keep listening to the first customers podcast. That’s my recommendation. Yeah, with all honesty, I really think that listening to the people you want to be…
Paris Vega (36:52.999)
Okay.
Paris Vega (37:00.639)
There you go. There we go. You heard it here.
Barak Glanz (37:13.057)
In their position you just need to listen to what they are doing and try to mimic that That’s exactly what we did with Cody. There’s this Luis Von Ahn guy the CEO of Duolingo. He’s also the guy who made ReCAPTCHA. Did you know that? Yeah so he did both CAPTCHA and also ReCAPTCHA which is another version of CAPTCHA or whatever
Paris Vega (37:29.758)
Oh wow, I didn’t know that. No?
Paris Vega (37:40.243)
Okay.
Barak Glanz (37:41.461)
And then he made Duolingo and this guy, he did a crazy thing. I think he disrupted the whole language learning sector. I mean, back in the day, 10 years ago, if you would ask me what’s the market for learning a language as a hobby, I would say, I don’t know.
$100,000 per year, but right now with Duolingo it’s It’s closer to a hundred million dollars per year or even more. I’m not sure about the numbers It’s something crazy like that. Yeah
Paris Vega (38:15.532)
Yeah.
Paris Vega (38:23.57)
Yeah. Because now they, I think, have relationships with schools and, you know, people use it as part of curriculum. There’s, yeah, it’s really scaled up. Yeah, I think that’s good advice.
Barak Glanz (38:30.798)
Yeah.
Barak Glanz (38:34.369)
Yeah, so we’re trying to do the same with code learning as a hobby. Maybe there’s a market for that. Right now, seems like there is. Only time will tell.
Paris Vega (38:40.639)
Yeah.
For sure. Yep. So cody.tech is the website for Coty and you can use it online right now and you guys are working on a mobile version. If they wanna reach out to you, should people just go to cody.tech and sign up or hit you up on LinkedIn if they’ve got some other kind of partnership. You did mention the pre-show.
You had a discount code for our listeners.
Barak Glanz (39:15.433)
Oh yeah, so I’ve prepared the discount code, Paris 20. So it gives you a 20% discount on the almost free premium plan on Kodi. So instead of $10 per month, it will cost you only $8 per month. But with all honesty, you can just use the platform, learn how to code, you don’t need to pay anything. It’s…
Paris Vega (39:23.01)
There we go.
Paris Vega (39:36.686)
That’s awesome.
Barak Glanz (39:43.725)
completely free anyways, but if you want to experience it without limitations and use the Ask AI button freely, you can now pay $8 instead of $10 per month.
Paris Vega (39:56.294)
And we’ll have the coupon code in the in the show notes on the website as well. Okay, cool. Well, Brock, thanks for being on the show, man. This was really good. Like I said, I’m gonna have to look more into. Yeah, man. Thank you so much for saying that. It’s awesome to have somebody on the show who’s listened to it before. So that’s really cool. All right, everybody, go to Cody.Tech and learn how to code.
Barak Glanz (40:00.258)
Yeah.
Barak Glanz (40:03.832)
Alright.
Barak Glanz (40:08.093)
Again, thank you for having me. I love your show, man. Great stuff.
Barak Glanz (40:17.41)
Yeah.
Paris Vega (40:24.218)
Level up, get some new skills. You can do it.
Barak Glanz (40:28.129)
Yeah, start today!
Paris Vega (40:32.722)
All right. We’ll see everybody on the next episode later.
Leave a Reply