Our Revenue Went to Zero Overnight. This is How We Survived.

Sean Weisbrot: Welcome back to another episode of the We Live To Build podcast. Today's episode is with Kim Desmond, the co-founder of Coding Nomads. Coding Nomads teaches software development training courses, both online and offline, so that students from around the world can get the ability to learn what they need to launch their careers in tech.

Sean Weisbrot: This was a really interesting conversation with her because like her, I have extensive travel experience and oftentimes will live in places for long periods of time. So while this episode was originally meant to focus on the topic, adapt or Die, where we talked about how her offline business was forced to go online because of the pandemic, we also talk about what it's like living as a nomad, entrepreneur overseas.

Sean Weisbrot: Why don't you tell everyone a little bit about you and, how you got into coding Nomad.

Kim: Sure. So my name's Kim. I'm the co-founder of Coding Nomads. I started the company about five years ago with my partner Ryan, and we teach intensive software engineering programs.

Kim: Basically, we teach people how to code so that they can go on to pursue careers in software engineering or product management or entrepreneurship or data science, machine learning.

Kim: There's. You know, there's tons of different career paths for software engineers nowadays. So we started the company and it was a little bit of a unique take on it.

Kim: We were hosting our courses around the world. We're a US based company, but we were doing kind of travel style. I. Immersives, so places like Bali and Thailand and Mexico, Spain, when the pandemic hit, we were running a course in Bali and everything changed at that moment.

Sean Weisbrot: Okay. Well thank you for the quick intro. It would be great to hear a little bit more about how you came up with the idea to start this company.

Kim: Before we started coding nomads. We were living in San Francisco. my partner Ryan, is a software engineer and I was working in marketing and product management. We decided to quit our jobs and travel the world for a little bit.

Kim: We totally went off the grid. both of us had traveled a lot before we'd met each other, and we just kind of wanted that extensive travel experience again together. So while we were traveling, we were doing. Remote work, you know, freelance work, doing some freelance writing on my side, and for Ryan doing some freelance software engineering.

Kim: And while traveling, we met a lot of other travelers who looked at the lifestyle that we had and thought, man, I wish I could do that. They would say that, I wish I could do that. I wish that I had the skills. To work remote. I wish I could work from my computer. And in his last job, my partner Ryan, was training engineers.

Kim: And so he had a bit of training experience and he really enjoyed it. So we just thought of the idea, well, we could teach people how to do this. We could teach other digital nomads or aspiring digital nomads, how to, you know, have these really valuable skills, how to go get jobs in technology. And then they would have the.

Kim: Money and the power to work wherever they wanted to. We were actually in Costa Rica when we thought of the idea. Some of our friends have a Spanish immersion language school down there. All the pieces kind of fell together. We thought, well, instead of teaching a foreign language like Spanish, we teach a programming language.

Kim: In our case, it was Java. 'cause that was the programming language that my partner was experienced in and had done training in and had worked in for many years in San Francisco. Then we started doing some research on the market. Found out that coding boot camps is what they're called basically 12 week programs.

Kim: Um, sometimes longer depending on how you know, full-time. It is several months where it's full-time, really intensive. You learn a programming language, you learn a framework, you learn deployment. You know, you learn the. Kind of package of skills that is needed to get an entry level job. And we saw that there actually was a huge gap in the market for Java training.

Kim: Most of the other boot camps were teaching front end technologies like JavaScript, a lot of boot camps teaching Ruby on rails, which are great. Technologies and in super high demand as well. But, Java is just one of the most in demand programming languages, and it's been around for decades and it's just super widely used.

Kim: And so we saw an opportunity there and put a little website together. we did a ton of research on where we should host our first program. We thought it would be Costa Rica or someplace that we had been before, but there were certain components that we needed. For a course to make it run smoothly and make it really comfortable for everyone.

Kim: We landed in Bali actually because they had a really great coworking space that could help us with accommodations and airport pickup and scooter rental and sim card. Like they just had the full package. We put a website together and you know, got, got a little bit of media coverage and just, you know, got our name out there through social media and. Word of mouth and had several students sign up. We almost couldn't believe it. And then we all went to Bali together and it was incredible. It was such an incredible experience. It sounds like it might be distracting going to a place like Bali to learn to code, but it was actually the opposite because everyone was so far away from home.

Kim: They didn't have any other friends except for who was in the class. And you know, because it was a travel program, it attracted students who were. Open and, you know, somewhat adventurous and ready to have fun and meet new people. So everyone got along really well and you know, we'd work really hard during the day and then on the weekends we'd go explore the country and take breaks and or have impromptu study sessions.

Kim: And it was just a very fluid and cohesive experience where by the end of it. It was really sad to say goodbye and then, you know, students were going off and getting software engineering jobs and so it just proved that it could be done. So we kept doing that for several years and it was, yeah, very fun, very productive.

Kim: A lot of work. You know, really intense for the students as well as us leading the programs. But overall, just an incredibly rewarding experience.

Sean Weisbrot: Great. Thank you for explaining all that in more detail. It's, it definitely gives a lot more context and I was the moderator for a digital nomad community for several years On Telegram.

Sean Weisbrot: There's about 1500 people there and a lot of the people that joined. The first question they asked was, how do I get started? You know, sometimes I'll say, well, you know, you need a hard skill. You need something, right? There's a difference between someone who's a digital nomad, who works for others, and, and a nomad entrepreneur who works for themselves, where the earning potential is much higher and therefore your ability to travel and the quality of your experience as your travel is different with that difference in the, the salary and the the earning potential.

Sean Weisbrot: But the fact remains that people want to travel and they want to be location independent. And that's one of the reasons why my company is remote first, because I want my team to be able to choose where they work and where they live.

Kim: I mean, sure there's people that wanna be traveling all the time, but after a few years of doing that, it can be exhausting to not have a home base or not know where you're gonna be the next month, or, you know, constantly scouring Airbnb.

Kim: Constantly scouring, you know, nomad list or these other places to figure out, okay, where has decent wifi, where has a decent coworking space? All this stuff. A lot of people think that it's this really just glamorous lifestyle of traveling all over. And, and it is in some ways, but it also has its hard sides.

Kim: And, you know, I think for, for our students, especially in the beginning with the traveling bootcamp, that did attract them because it, it was a fun trip. It gave them a chance to really. Step away from their lives, have a really fun experience, and learn a really valuable skill so that in the future, you know, the dream is to travel and maybe work from the beach.

Kim: But the reality is that people just want the freedom to work where they want, whether it be from their home or from a coworking space, or from an office if they want to. And with software engineering skills, you do have that freedom. You can choose because software engineers are in such high demand and they make really good money.

Kim: And so. You can live wherever you want and you can work wherever you want. That's what we're trying to help people achieve.

Sean Weisbrot: I stopped being able to count how many beaches I've worked from, or different coworking spaces. Yeah. I've been to 40 countries. When I first started traveling, when I was younger, I said, this is a holiday, and if it was like a one month trip, I was not working that entire month.

Sean Weisbrot: Obviously, as you own your own company, that becomes much harder to do. Yeah. This may be a tip for the people that you share this with. As I became more business-minded and got into starting my own company, I learned that when you go to a place and you stay there for a month or two at a time, rather than I'm gonna go to this city for a week and the city for a week, you actually get to know the culture.

Sean Weisbrot: You get to know their people, and you can start to develop local networks. So if entrepreneurs that you can meet and they can introduce you to other, you know, entrepreneurs or investors or whatever it is you're looking for, and kind of create a base for yourself, and it's a good way to decide. Is this a place I'd like to stay in or do I wanna move on?

Sean Weisbrot: So I, I try to stay a month in each place just to see is this somewhere that I want to be or not?

Kim: Yeah. I like that as well. I'm kind of spoiled, but I dislike going somewhere for just a week. You know, you just can't even really get settled there. You can't find your coffee shop. I mean, you can, but it just, you can't really get a new.

Kim: Into a routine. So I agree with you that, you know, staying somewhere for a month is an awesome way to go, especially if you can work remote, then there's, you know, there's no issue with that. And the Digital Nomad community and network was something that came out of our experiences that we weren't.

Kim: Anticipating at all, you know, just meeting so many really inspiring people who were doing so many different things, just super random and varied, depending on what their passion was. And that's another tip for people who wanna be digital nomads. You know, you do need to have some, some sort of hard skill.

Kim: You need do, need to have something of value that you're offering. But there are so many different avenues that you can go down, which I guess could be kind of overwhelming, you know, analysis paralysis. But there's so many different things that you can do from the road or you know, from home. And it was really cool to meet so many other digital nomad entrepreneurs that were doing things similar to us, or completely different than us, but we, we learned so much from them.

Kim: We now have this. Amazing group of friends who are also entrepreneurs who we can call on if we have a question about something or get advice from, or just talk about our really random and unique problems that they totally understand, but nobody else does. You know? 'cause when, when you're a digital nomad and you start talking about your problems, like, ah, you know, we don't know where we're gonna go next.

Kim: Week or we have to do a visa run or, you know, we have to do this and that. And to someone who doesn't do that, they think, well, that all sounds amazing. That sounds super fun. Why are you complaining? But to another digital nomad, they say, oh, I, I get that. You know, here's where you could go for a quick, cheap visa run.

Kim: Or here's where I went, or here's what I did in this situation. And you know, you, you realize that you just have a lot in common with those people and you develop a kind of comradery that is really, really awesome.

Sean Weisbrot: So an example of one of those unique and annoying experiences is I used to fly from Vietnam every 90 days to to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, because I needed to do a visa run.

Sean Weisbrot: And since one of my best friends lives there and he is also my COO, I spend a week with him and his wife and you know, it's like 75 minutes on the plane. It costs like. $30 each way to get there. Fantastic. And Malaysia is visa free for Americans. But when the pandemic started, I was afraid to get on a plane.

Sean Weisbrot: This was like Feb, early February, 2020. I had to do a visa run. So I was like, I'm afraid I don't want to get on a plane. I learned that there was a land border that was about an hour and a half away that I could get to. But I would have to get on a bus with a bunch of people, but I didn't wanna do that.

Sean Weisbrot: So I ended up finding, like one of my friends knew of a van company, and the van company let me rent the whole van with just me and the driver. And the driver took me there, I crossed the border, came back, he took me back, and it was like $200. I mean, it was more expensive than most people want to pay. But I got exposed to one guy instead of like.

Sean Weisbrot: 20 people and I didn't have to wait for them to all go through the land border. And then when I went back in, they were trying to charge me extra for my visa or whatever, and I was like, no, no, no, no, no. I've got a visa. Like I shouldn't have to pay it. An entry fee. This is a visa. It's good for a year. So they were trying to screw me over at the land border.

Sean Weisbrot: But at the airports, they don't do that. You know, just people trying to make money off you. We all go through these weird kind of things that, as you said, people might find adventurous, but like after 14 years you're like, nah, this isn't adventurous. This is just one of those things you have to deal with.

Kim: Yeah. We were also on a visa run around that same time, and yeah, we were talking about coronavirus and it seemed so far away, but it wasn't that far away. We were, we went to Borneo, so sometimes we would try to make our Visa runs. Fun for this particular one. We had to be gone for three weeks because of how we were coordinating our stay in the other country.

Kim: And yeah, we made a trip of it and went to Borneo, but we also went to KL once and didn't even go into the city. We just did an airport hotel right back out the next day. So it always varies. Sometimes you can make 'em fun. Sometimes they're just a pain in the butt.

Sean Weisbrot: The power of travel, it's something I, I think everyone should do.

Sean Weisbrot: I've said for a long time, I think that every government in the world should pay for every university student to spend one year in the country of their choice.

Kim: I. Traveling really breaks down those barriers because you know, especially if you go to places like Central or South America or Asia, which is where I've mostly traveled, I stick out like a sore thumb.

Kim: I am the minority. I'm the one that people are potentially discriminating against. But I've been very fortunate to always have pretty great experiences. People have always been so kind and welcoming and helpful and generous and you know, I just put a big smile on my face and try to show people, 'cause I can't speak the language.

Kim: I'm a nice person. I'm here to appreciate your country. Please help me if I need help or something. And people are always so helpful. And you know, for me, just being in other cultures and being on the other side of things. Makes it so that you just realize how similar we all are. You know, we're all just humans on this planet and sure, we may look different or speak a different language, but at the end of the day, we are so similar.

Kim: We're much more similar than we are different. And I agree with you that I. Investing in people's exposure to that, especially at a younger age, I think would build so much more tolerance and inclusivity that people would just have more empathy for other cultures.

Kim: And, you know, especially in the states, we're just, we're, we're so fortunate. A lot of people are fortunate, a lot of people are disadvantaged, you know, there's everything in this country and, you know, to, to see other countries and what they have or what they don't have. It just gives you a different perspective and you know, gives you gratitude for what you have, you know, makes you realize what could be better.

Kim: So there's all sorts of perspective that you get out of it, but I agree with you that traveling, I mean, for me, it's been just one of the best things that I've ever done as a human.

Sean Weisbrot: I'd like to turn this towards your business and how the pandemic changed it and how you adapted and all of that. So when you were in Bali in the middle of a session and the pandemic hits, right, you probably were in Bali, you probably heard about it January 23rd, January 24th from China.

Sean Weisbrot: What was your immediate thought?

Kim: Well, there was a lot of thoughts. We were just a couple weeks in and you know, at the beginning of our programs, there's. A ton of excitement. The students have all traveled from all over the world to get there and everyone's getting settled in to their apartments and we're all going out for lunch and for dinner every night.

Kim: And, you know, hanging out, doing class and taking breaks in the pool. And we hear about the pandemic and my partner. Ryan and I 15 times a day are talking to each other saying, what should we do about this? Ryan was in the class teaching and we had another teacher, but I was planning the next course. So I'm already thinking ahead, promoting the next course, signing people up for the next course, and planning the course after that too.

Kim: You know, so I'm, we have the class going on, but then we also have everything that's being planned. So I'm thinking, should I cancel this? Future course, and then Ryan and I are like, should we cancel the current course? We talked to the students about it. B lagged behind in case numbers and luckily the pandemic didn't really get that bad there.

Kim: They're having a little bit of an episode right now, but you know, it kind of felt like we were in this little bubble and it wasn't real. We were still just living in paradise. It's beautiful there and the coworking space is beautiful and all of our accommodations were beautiful and the people there are beautiful.

Kim: And so we're still experiencing this really beautiful life. But then hearing the news of how bad things are getting around the world, we were planning on staying. I actually bought a whole bunch of food. I got a whole bunch of toilet paper because I saw all the social media craze of the toilet paper shortages in the us.

Kim: And so I bought a bunch of toilet paper and then lockdown started being announced in the us. At that point, we just, you know, our students wanted to stay. We talked to them about it multiple times. We'd suggested, well, maybe we start having, you know, doing class remote. We're still all in Bali, but let's just stay home.

Kim: Let's stop coming to the coworking space, and they would still go anyway. Even despite our recommendations, and then the lockdown started in Australia and in other countries, and then they were started to be rumored in the us. This was early March, and then international airports started shutting down.

Kim: That's really when things got serious for us because Bali is just a little island in Indonesia and there's no direct flights home from there. You have to fly through China, which was basically off limits or Singapore or Taiwan. We're getting emails from. The US State Department saying that they issued a level four travel advisory, so come home now or maybe just don't come home, and we just couldn't take that risk for our students.

Kim: If it was just me and my partner, we might have stayed, but being responsible for students from all over the world. We had students from the US and from Europe and from Asia. It was heartbreaking. They all wanted to stay and it got to the point where we said, no, we have to leave. And we're all gonna leave tomorrow.

Kim: And we literally all bought tickets and left the next day, and two of our students were from San Francisco, which is where we were flying back to. So we got to have a little going away party at the airport lounge. It was hard to say goodbye to Bali. It was hard to make that decision. You know, we obviously canceled the next course.

Kim: But we also felt this sense of relief of, okay, we're going home. At least we'll be home. Our students will be with their families, or just not stuck in Bali because we didn't know what was gonna happen. And even though the case numbers were seemingly low, it was also kind of coming out that the government was not being a hundred percent transparent about that because they didn't wanna cause a big scare.

Kim: They didn't wanna cause panic. Bali's industry is like 80 to 90% based on tourism. So they didn't want to hurt that. But then Bali ended up shutting down its airport altogether anyway, and we bought our tickets left the next day, and we had friends who were leaving just a couple days after us who got stuck.

Kim: They're from the Netherlands, so the Netherlands sent an airplane and got them out. So we knew that we made the right decision. We then had to take our course online. This is a full-time intensive. Program. And so all of a sudden our teachers are online on Zoom for like 10 hours a day because we had students spanning the globe.

Kim: So we'd have an early morning session that worked for the US and Europe, and then we'd have an evening session that worked for Asia. And so. Our teachers were just strapped and on Zoom more than anyone should ever be on Zoom, and it was hard for the students too to be isolated. Everyone's in lockdown, everyone's stuck in their apartments and.

Kim: Still expected to code every day and keep their head in the game and stay positive. Aside from the pandemic. You know, one of the roles that we play in these travel courses is cheerleader and counselor. You know, we're not just their software engineering teachers, but we're also their tour guides and travel agents.

Kim: You know, we help them with everything because a lot of people quit their jobs. Some people get time off of work and they're able to go back to their jobs afterwards. Or a lot of our students, actually, their companies pay for it. It's like training so that they can get promoted within the company. But a lot of our students quit their jobs to come on these programs, and so, you know, they're going through this big life change and we're there with them every step of the way.

Kim: And so that's just normal in our courses. And then the pandemic just doubled down on it. Where we just really, really, really wanted to support everyone in a technical capacity and an educational capacity, but also an emotional capacity because we do really care about our students and we care about their success, and we care about their wellbeing.

Kim: And if you're trying to change careers into software engineering, it's not easy to do. It's none of it is easy. Learning to code is not easy. Changing careers into software engineering is not easy for most people. Some people can just do it, but you know, for most people it's a hard thing to do. And we definitely tested the limits of our, you know, emotional capacity and just bonded together.

Kim: Luckily, everyone, of course, was really understanding and really accommodating, really grateful for all the work that our teachers were putting in, and it still turned out to be a really great course.

Sean Weisbrot: So I'm curious how you convinced people to take this online as a student? Did you refund their money? Did you go, Hey, actually, like we're going to do this online?

Sean Weisbrot: Did you have to lower the tuition at all to make it more enticing for them to stay on and in the future cohorts, you know, like how did you handle all of that?

Kim: The way that our courses were structured at the time was you learn a programming language and you learn a. Framework and then you learn deployment.

Kim: That's kind of like the trifecta of entry-level software engineering skills for a backend engineer. The first part is learning the programming language, and we already had those courses online and they were a prerequisite for attending the onsite course, so the students that had signed up for the next course we're already taking our online portion of the course, but we did not have the frameworks and the deployment courses online, which is.

Kim: You know those professional level skills that we would teach on site and that we've been teaching on site for years. We had those courses in development, luckily, so by the time the pandemic happened, we were pretty close to launching them, but we didn't have them yet, and so we actually couldn't even offer those people who had signed up for the onsite and online version.

Kim: They did take the programming language version. If they had paid any more than the cost of that, then we'd just refunded them or we'd offer. Other courses that they could take. Some students were grateful and wanted to take online courses and some students said, I'll just wait until the next travel course.

Kim: We actually had a lot of people reaching out about travel courses, you know, as early as May, 2020, and I'm like, have you been reading the news? We're not gonna. Do that for a while. It continued for a little bit and now it's pretty much died off. I think people get it that this is gonna last for longer than we want it to.

Kim: So for those students, you know, they got the online curriculum and then they got whatever else we had or they got a refund, and then basically our team just put our nose to the grindstone and. Busted out those other courses as fast as we could because all of our revenue was onsite revenue. Our online revenue was maybe five to 10% of our annual revenue, and that was only since 2019 because that's when we launched our online courses.

Kim: Part of our ethos is making learning to code really affordable, and even though our onsite courses were much more affordable than the offerings in the US for example. You know, we still couldn't serve people who couldn't afford that, and that's what we really wanted. You know, now you can subscribe to our courses for next to nothing a month and get the same education.

Kim: You know, you don't get that intensive mentorship. But we basically now with our online programs, have something for everyone at all income levels, and that has been. Awesome, because then we still have our global student base. You know, we still have that vibe of making, learning to code accessible and affordable and fun.

Kim: But it took a couple months to get there. Well, it's, we're still working on it, of course, but last year we launched I think like nine courses. We've got all of our advanced stuff online now. So now students can take, we call them career tracks, where it's absolute beginner to. Ready to go get a job. So, you know, it was a mix of planning and COVID just forced it on us.

Kim: We weren't known as an online company and you know, you gotta keep the revenue coming. We were talking about this before the call, like you've got a monthly bill, you got people to pay and services to pay for, and we would just kind of fall back on doing the travel courses 'cause that's what we were known for and that's what we're, what we're good at.

Kim: And. People knew us, people wanted to do it and, and so COVID kind of forced our hand on taking that revenue cut for several months. But it's been building back very strongly and people love it. And we've had a lot of great success stories from our online programs, so we're very pumped that it's all working out.

Sean Weisbrot: It sounds like a good evolution, even though the, you know, the onsite training definitely sounds very interesting. The name Coding Nomads. Also makes it so that you can literally serve anyone around the world at any time that suits them.

Kim: Even with our most basic level subscription, people still get access to a form where they can ask technical questions and they can meet our community.

Kim: And we also do biweekly events where we do trainings and office hours, so we all get on Zoom.