To Infinity… And Far, Far Beyond

-By Matt Derrick, CEO

This post is one in a series about our rebrand; read them all here:

Introducing Kodeco — the New raywenderlich.com
Why Rebrand? The Backstory of raywenderlich.com
To Infinity and Far, Far Beyond – (you are here)
319 Days to Building a New Brand

I’ve always gravitated to startups. It’s something about having open, endless possibilities that are unencumbered by corporate bureaucracy, fear and unimaginative goals.* In a startup, there are seemingly infinite ideas to test, features to launch, and a frenetic pace to enjoy. That makes it, IMO, a far more exciting environment in which to work, hands down.

My First Days With raywenderlich.com

When I first heard about the CEO role at raywenderlich.com two years ago, it sounded like an incredible company and opportunity. Ray & Vicki Wenderlich, along with the leadership team, had built an amazing company that had grown to several million dollars of revenue, basically by word of mouth.

The high-quality content was created by the top mobile developers in the world — and they were passionate about the subject and the company. I came in and was blown away by the people that were on the team from Day 1!

A Year of Growth

Over the last two years, we’ve expanded in many ways. We hired a Head of Sales, Jeff Blomstrom, to target company subscriptions. We built a comprehensive analytics suite to quantify user engagement and progression metrics so we can make better, data-driven business decisions. We hired a Head of Content, Janet Shih, to broaden our content beyond its core roots of articles, books and videos.

This fall, we launched bootcamps for iOS, Android and Flutter. They’ve have proven very popular and are a great extension of our educational platform.

We’ve built up our engineering, design, member experience teams and more. We’ve overhauled our onboarding and rolled out scores of new features like badges, transcripts, and professional development seminars. We also developed a landmark State of Mobile Development study, which benchmarks salaries, experience levels and myriad other input, all completely free of charge for the mobile community.

An Unlimited Future

But that’s just scratching the surface of our coming growth, which is why I’m excited about our new company name: It gives us such a strong foundation on which to build. I cannot wait for you to see what we’re working on with learning assessments, and how they will help not only quantify your learning progression as you go through our content but even help determine what topics you should focus on learning first.

Another thing I’m very excited about is iterating on our three-month-long, mentor-led bootcamps to make them available in different formats and durations that fit different learner profiles. So, for example, if you only have two weeks available, or you want something entirely on-demand that you can do at your own pace, we can facilitate that for you.

New Platforms Await

Since content is the living heartbeat of our company, we’re spending a lot of time evolving that as well, with new products like cookbooks for those who prefer succinct code snippets to full-length tutorials. We launched a new content area for professional growth this fall, with topics such as how to find a job in tech or how to market your app, and it’s growing quickly in popularity.

But we know there are many areas that we could expand into with content, ranging from well-established like Java to the cutting-edge like Machine Learning or Web3. We’re eager to see where we could go in 2023 and beyond.

Still True to Our Original Values

On a closing note, last fall, we came up with a mission statement that encapsulated the values that we ascribed to when building Razeware: The mission of Razeware is to create a world-class educational platform and community for mobile developers.

It’s gratifying to see that, even though our company name is new, that is 100% still the mission of Kodeco. Everything begins and ends with our community of learners, and the more people that we can help along their learning journey, the more robust the ecosystem will be in the future.

To that end, if you have ideas or questions, I’d love to hear from you. We’re going to hold an inaugural Kodeco Town Hall on Wednesday, October 26th. I’d encourage you to sign up and attend. Or you can reach out to me directly at matt@kodeco.com.

I’m excited about building a company for the future with that mission at the center of everything we do, and I’m beyond proud of the team we’ve assembled to help us achieve that. Here’s to the next chapter!

— Matt

* Yes, in reality, most startups have elements of those, and you could even argue that many startups run into trouble by not having some checks on crazy ideas. And yes, it can be argued that perhaps some startups have too much imagination in their goals and not enough reality. However, you certainly encounter less “we can’t do that because of these reasons”, and more excitement in most startups than at traditional companies. TL;DR take it with a grain of salt.