What did you accomplish in the past 30 days? If you’re a student at One Month(Formerly One Month Rails), you could have a fully functional web application.
Yesterday, the Y Combinator-backed company announced it closed a seed round of $770K to bring accelerated programming instruction to the masses. YC led the round, with participation from Andreessen Horowitz, General Catalyst, Winklevoss Capital, Funders Club, Lew Moorman and Wefunder, among others.
One Month Rails has condensed learning to code in Ruby on Rails into a one-month program. The company plans to tackle other languages and toolkits from Swift to Web Security and it’s safe to assume they have their eyes on longer-form, online education at some point in the future.
Since its launch in August 2013, One Month has seen 150,000 lessons completed and over 14,500 students take its Ruby on Rails course. But we’ve seen impressive sign-up numbers before. And the space of online content, One Month is certainly not alone. From Thinkful’s class and mentor model, to Udemy and Udacity’s fully digital courses, to gamified experiences like CodeAcademy or Treehouse, there are more than enough locations to learn coding online.
Perhaps the reason for One Month’s traction is its targeted approach to content. As we’ve previously covered, rather than promising to produce well-rounded or hirable developers, the company is focused on teaching a finite set of skills that enable students to build products immediately.
As a wider variety of jobs and hobbies involve technology, we’ve seen the-learn-to code market grow rapidly. After all, some of the most recognizable names in America are technologists like Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk and Jack Dorsey. And as the space heats up, providing the opportunity to actually build something tangible while you learn, as One Month does, could be a deciding factor.
One Month is also focused on helping learners when they are most vulnerable — at the beginning. “When it comes to learning a new skill, the first 30 days are the most important to determine whether someone is going to quit or not,” according to founder and CEO Mattan Griffel.
Reporting a class completion rate between between 20-25 percent, or about 3x better than the average for most MOOCs, One Month is clearly onto something.
