#289 - This Year Nearly Broke Me - Here’s What I’m Changing...

There are some major changes coming to Parsity and this podcast. As a listener, I appreciate you sincerely for listening and I want to extend the largest discount we've ever done for our 30 day Javascript program. 

It's usually $49 but I'm reducing it to $10.

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Chapters

• 0:00 Honest Update And Big Changes
• 1:02 Parting Ways And Why The Model Failed
• 3:44 Returning To Parsity’s Core Program
• 6:17 New Curriculum: AI, Cloud, SQL, Next.js
• 8:40 Opening Tracks For Working Developers
• 10:29 Pricing, Discounts, And Access

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:00

Welcome to the Develop Yourself podcast, where we teach you everything you need to land your first job as a software developer by learning to develop yourself, your skills, your network, and more. I'm Brian, your host. So if you're a listener to this show, first of all, thank you very much. And I want to be really transparent with you. And I feel like I owe you an explanation and to let you know about some changes that are coming to the show and to parsity. So yesterday a person reached out to me on LinkedIn. He's a listener of this show and he said, Hey man, you haven't really spoken about Zubin very much lately. He's like, what's going on? And I'm like, ooh, this guy is astute, as I told him in our DM here. So I will just share it with you because I do pride myself on being transparent. And as a listener to this show, I do feel like we have a connection, especially if you've listened to me for you know more than 10 episodes. Some people have been listening to me for a year or more. So I do feel like we have an actual connection, even if I haven't met you face to face. So I owe you an explanation and I want to tell you what's going on and be super duper honest about it. So Zubin and I decided to part ways last month. There is no animosity between us, by the way. We are still friends, we're still talking. Um, but he and I decided that financially it just doesn't work out doing parsity in the particular way we're doing it now, and honestly, just splitting the profits. He and I were working splitting the profits 50-50. That is how we structured the deal with this new version of Parsity that we created. So earlier this year, we partnered up and we thought, you know what? What if we offered like a one-to-one coaching program where we took people in and we coached them personally, gave them a custom curriculum and like coached them through that curriculum? Worked out amazingly well, right? We got around 25 people that joined the program, which honestly was a really good year for Parsity. This program is really, really small. I don't think it'll get past 40 or 50 people, maybe ever. And I don't know if I ever want it to get past that because I'm a full-time software developer myself, and I want everybody to have a really good experience in this program. That being said, those 20 or so people had amazing experiences, but splitting that profit along with the cost to actually run the business and some of the debt obligation that I have as the business owner just doesn't make sense. It doesn't make any money. In fact, I made negative money last year, even after doing that. So going forward right now, today, and if you've been to the Parsity website, you've probably seen this. We are going quote unquote back to original Parsity with some very important changes. Now I want to say this original Parsity has been incredibly successful. So we've had nothing but high success rates for grads, really good reviews, just genuinely a good program that I feel like I can ethically tell you to go to. So why did I make this change? I thought honestly it would get more people in. I thought we could double the amount of people we were serving under this new model. That turned out not to be true. I think there's a lot of reasons for that. This year, AI hype has driven so many people away from software development. And it honestly makes me sad. But there's not much I can do against the AI hype machine. And I'm just one person on one show on LinkedIn writing out there, trying to get people to join this program. I'm trying to compete with places like Triple 10 or other massive coding boot camps that have budgets that would bankrupt me for decades of my life. They spend more than I make in like five years on their marketing. Are they better programs? To be honest, no. They're not better programs. But but I'm not competing with them. I'm not trying to compete with them. I'm trying to compete for the few people that I think will actually get in the program and do very, very well. Anyway, so Parsity goes back to quote unquote being the same with some very important updates. Obviously, the curriculum is always a moving target. So this year I invested in a couple things. One was making an AI curriculum, like a real AI curriculum, like learning retrieval, augmented generation, agents, testing, observability, all that stuff. Quietly last year, I also added a cloud curriculum. I'm also adding a SQL curriculum. I've added Next.js, React, all this stuff that you just need to know nowadays that is a modern tech stack. So that is the biggest quote unquote change. And another change is I want to open up Parsity more for people that are already software developers. I'm doing an experiment with this with a 30-day AI cohort because I do see that there is an underserved population of people, especially that listen to this podcast and I'm connected to, that just want to learn cool stuff and maybe are past the really junior or I'm learning to code stage. So if you're past the learning to code stage, I do want you to know that I am trying to think of programs for you out there, but I'm, again, just one person and I can't take too much attention away from the most vulnerable people in Parsity, which are those who are just trying to start their career. But our AI program in January will be the first uh effort to work with more mid-level senior level developers. It's gonna be amazing. I really can't wait to do this one. And I can't wait to also open it up to Parsity students. We're gonna get all that material for free going forward anyway. So those are the big changes for Parsity. And here's a really special deal for you as a listener to this show. Um, I was gonna do this on like Black Friday because you know it's Black Friday. But if you're listening to this show, I want you to know that I one just want to give you a big discount for being a listener of this show. Because if you're listening at this point in the episode, it probably means you're a pretty engaged listener. And so Parsity is normally$9,200 for um for the year or for eternity, right? I mean, you get in the program, it is yours for life. We don't kick people out, we don't injure access, we don't say, oh no, we can't work with you, even if it's like three years later. Within reason, we will always work with you. But it's usually$9,200, right? And uh we have a$1,400 discount if you complete dev 30. That discount is coming back, and we're still gonna honor that discount. And if you want to go into dev 30, I'm making that$10. And you can use the link in the show notes, or you can just go to parsity.io slash dev30 or go to dev30.xyz and take advantage of that. And you can reach out to me personally if for whatever reason you have trouble finding that. But I want to tell you this if you're a listener of the show, you don't need to do dev 30 at all. You can just take$1,400 off the program, which makes it$7,800, which makes it, I believe, the cheapest program in the United States and definitely the cheapest one with our kind of rating by by by a lot, by a ton. And I don't want to be the cheapest, to be completely honest with you. I don't even like the idea of saying that, but I do like the idea of giving back to people that have listened to this show that maybe were on the fence and are now thinking, okay, can I afford that? Is that worth a career or a job which will get me X more amount of dollars over my lifetime? I would say it's a pretty simple math problem, but this is ultimately up to you. Obviously, we use a loan provider and a partner to do this kind of stuff. So it's not like we take all the money up front in the first place. We have a pretty attractive loan strategy that allows people to come in that normally wouldn't be able to afford a program like this. Now, I've gotten past all the business stuff and I hope that it clears up and explains a lot of what you're going to be seeing and hearing from me. Now, when it comes to the podcast and a bit about my personal life, this year's been really, really trying for me. I joined a small AI startup after working at another small AI startup. I've had more jobs in the last two years than I've ever wanted to. I've gone through a total of four jobs. I got laid off one, joined another one as a director for a month before I left. And then I joined a small startup where I stayed for nine months, then I left. Then I went to another really small startup where I stayed for six months, and now I'm leaving. And guess where I'm going back to? That original startup. I love that startup. It was full of really, really smart people. They've gotten acquired, and now I'm going to join a big old company under them. Really, really excited to start that off. But this year has been super duper trying for me. And during that time, I've pumped out tons of content writing on LinkedIn pretty often. Um, right doing YouTube, which I'm going to get into in a second. I've done a lot of YouTube stuff, and I plan to do way more on YouTube. One, because podcasts are great for keeping deep connections like this. Like if you're listening to this, it's probably because you you know me and you're and you're used to hearing me and you kind of know a lot about me. YouTube, however, is a much better marketing channel. Now, if I want to get more people into Parsity, I'm going to need to focus more on YouTube. That being said, I am going to stop doing two episodes a week on this podcast. I'm a little bit sad and a little bit nervous about this, but I actually think it's going to be better because sometimes I think I was either kind of like trying to figure out what I was going to talk about that week. I oh, I have a ton of topics that I want to talk about, but I felt like a little rushed, if I'm just being honest. I'd rather do much deeper episodes, better ones, not longer. I think the episodes are going to continue to be between like 10 to like 30 minutes max because I don't personally like the idea of one hour long podcasts myself, but I would love to hear from you for sure. Like, please let me know what you would like to hear. So I do think that this podcast is going to be kind of like a buffet of content. Like it's going to be things that I think are interesting to talk about that I genuinely think will help you out, whether you're at the beginner stage or at the more earlier beginning of your career stage. And I do think I want this podcast to continue being a great resource for people to like understand my unfiltered takes on things, get guests that will practically help them do things like either start a business, figure out the best study plans, learn different coding concepts that they otherwise wouldn't be exposed to, give you actual career advice, like not generic junk you could just read on LinkedIn, but actual career advice that I've used that can help you accelerate your career. That's what I want this show to be about. For the YouTube channel, that is going to be more of a top-of-funnel channel, which means I want to get more people into the parsity universe. And so that's going to be more geared towards really, really new developers. That is my goal there. I want to do things like code walkthroughs. I love writing code. I love JavaScript and TypeScript. So I want to do more like tutorials and that kind of stuff and back end 101 or Next.js 101. So if you have ideas for either one of those things, I would really, really love to hear them. And uh that's where this is going to go. So one show a week, that show will be coming out on Monday. I think I have a couple more weeks while I'll do two episodes just because I have so much content sitting in my backlog that I'd like to pump out a little bit. But in general, that's what I want to do. One high quality episode per week. Still writing on LinkedIn. My LinkedIn is going to be more geared towards, I think, more early to mid-career professionals because learning to code people don't really hang out on LinkedIn anymore. LinkedIn has dramatically changed the way its algorithm works. And I need to play the game. Anyway, that that's what's going on. I just spilled all the beans. I told you everything. If you have questions, I hopefully you're connected with me on LinkedIn because I do look at my DMs, I read them all, I try to get to everybody in there. And if you're a listener to this show, please hit me up. If you want to take advantage of any of those discounts, please do. They're good through the end of the year. And I'm not going to like be promoting them a whole bunch on the show because honestly, you know, we're not going to be making a ton of money by giving you these massive discounts. But yeah, I think we have like 10 spots open for the rest of the year. So if you're interested in grabbing one of those spots, grab one of those spots. Other than that, thank you so much for being a listener. I can't tell you really how much I appreciate it or how surreal it is to think that there are people that are listening to me and hopefully getting some real value out of this show, which has always been my intention. So if you can help me improve it in any way by telling me what you'd like to hear, people you'd like to hear from, topics that you think I should be talking about, I really want to hear from you. Thank you so much, and uh, I'll see you around. That'll do it for today's episode of the Develop Yourself podcast. If you're serious about switching careers and becoming a software developer and building complex software and want to work directly with me and my team, go to parsity.io. And if you want more information, feel free to schedule a chat by just clicking the link in the show notes. See you next week.