Strong Opinions @marksbirch

How you define success can be a very tenuous thing.

If you have not heard, there was this campaign called Code Year ran by a NYC startup called Codecademy.  The idea was to help people make a New Year’s resolution to learn how to code.  By simply providing an email address, people receive a weekly coding lesson via email.  The strategy was brilliant as Codecademy’s mission is all about helping people to learning programming and the campaign helped them in one fell swoop capture 100,000 potential customers for their full classes.  Outside of a few minor hiccups with some sign-ups, the whole effort was very well executed and a marketing coop.

But is Code Year a success?  Fred Wilson is a big supporter of Codecademy and Union Square Ventures is an investor.  As any good investor, he lauded the Code Year initiative in his blog.  The problem I have though is he talks of the success of Code Year as fait accompli.

It was certainly a successful marketing campaign (a concept that Fred disavows) just looking at sign-ups.  However, can we call it a success in regards to its mission to “make your New Year’s resolution learning to code” and the promise of “building apps and web sites before you know it”?  Furthermore, have these signups translated to actual Codecademy users?

What we have here is a bad case of “Vanity Metrics” and extreme over-exuberance.  Sign-ups sound great.  Page views are encouraging.  Real engagement and achieving business objectives though is another game altogether.  Many startups and as well as well-established corporations have made big splashes only to see their efforts fizzle out for little to no gain.

Do not lose sight of your long term goals for the excitement of the near-term blips.  Vanity metrics become distractions if they are not tied to more meaningful measures of traction.  It is like checking email every couple of minutes; you cannot focus on the bigger tasks at hand because you need your constant stream of quick fixes.

Get on board with real metrics.  You need to look at conversion rates, analyses of cohorts, time spent and areas click per visit, cost per acquired customer, etc.  Those are metrics that speak to the health of your business, what is not working, and where opportunities may exist.  Without that type of in depth view of the business, every decision is like shooting in the dark.  Maybe you get a hit, but chances are you are going to wildly miss.

None of this is meant to be a missive towards Codecademy.  I think anything that encourages people to learn programming is excellent.  We need more people to take an interest in building things again, and coding is about the easiest thing one can do these days.  I have heard from other folks that the content in Codecedemy is solid and has helped them to make progress in learning to code.  If you are interested in diving into the programming world, I would also encourage the use of Codecadeny, CodeLesson, Code School, classes at General Assembly, groups such as Girls Develop It, and many other online resources like the MIT OpenCourseWare.

That being said, let’s not get carried away with declaring something a success until there has been sufficient time to deem it a success.  What Codecademy has done so far has been pretty awesome, but it is only the very beginning of the journey.  If Code Year is able to turn some of those 100,000 sign-ups into users of Codecademy and in turn those users become real programmers over the course of this year, then let’s call that a success and something to applaud.