April 2015
Teaching Plan
HBS Case Collection

Codecademy: Monetizing a Movement?

By: Jeffrey J. Bussgang and Lisa Mazzanti

Format:Print
| Language:English
| Pages:10

Abstract

This is a Teaching Plan for the case on Codecademy, an open-platform, online community for learning computer programming, launched in 2011. By 2014, the company had raised a total of $12.5 million in funding and was, on many fronts, an overwhelming success. However, there were still no revenues. The founders decided it was time to experiment with different monetization strategies before deciding on a way forward. Although they wanted to avoid being prematurely pressured into decisions that went against their open-platform philosophy, they also knew that in order to fulfill their mission to democratize education, they had to eventually build a revenue-generating business. But what business model should they pursue, and what monetization experiments should they run?