Nana Janashia: The Power of Focus

Nana Janashia is a pioneering force in DevOps education and founder of TechWorld with Nana, a seven-figure training powerhouse that's transformed how people learn DevOps engineering.

Listen as we explore Nana's remarkable path from teaching English in Georgia to building a global tech education platform with over 1 million YouTube subscribers. She shares invaluable insights on structuring complex technical content, maintaining laser-sharp focus in business, and the critical importance of deeply understanding your customers.

Transcript

Intro: [00:00:00] From Silicon Valley, the heart of startup land, it's Getting2Alpha. The show about creating innovative, compelling experiences that people love. And now, here's your host, game designer, entrepreneur, and startup coach, Amy Jo Kim.

Amy Jo: Nana Janashia is the founder of TechWorld With Nana, a YouTube channel and training platform that's revolutionized DevOps education. Born in post Soviet Georgia and now living in Austria. Nana used her technical expertise and communication skills to build a seven figure training powerhouse with millions of followers.

Nana: I saw the demand of super experienced engineers even feeling really afraid of the complexity of DevOps. In DevOps, you have to integrate every tool with every other tool. And that part is actually the most difficult to research because you're not going to find easily the answers to those questions [00:01:00] online. That's also the main reason why working DevOps engineers are actually doing the bootcamp because those are the links that they're missing.

Amy Jo: Join me as we explore Nana's remarkable journey from software engineer to educational pioneer and learn how she built a thriving business by focusing on what truly matters, delivering a top notch DevOps education that changes people's lives. 

Hey folks. Welcome. I'm here with Nana Janashia. Did I pronounce that right, Nana? 

Nana: Perfect. Yes. 

Amy Jo: Awesome. It's really great to see you here, and I am incredibly excited about chatting today. Thank you for being here, Nana. 

Nana: Thanks for having me. 

Amy Jo: So you are a DevOps specialist, trainer, and also consultant. And I think a lot of people here have no idea what it takes to build up the kind of social [00:02:00] presence and business that you've done.

So we're going to dive into it deep today and really understand something. We're going to dive into that and understand more about the mind of an online business person and just how the heck you did that. So, I'd like to start with just a brief snapshot of your business.

You run Tech World for Nana, which is both a YouTube channel and a DevOps training platform. Just give us a brief overview of where that business is at right now and where you're headed, and then we'll wind it back and figure out how you got here. 

Nana: Yeah. So, This is something that four years ago, I would have never imagined that would be a part of my full time job and focus.

So what we have built for the last four years, basically currently, with the current status ended up, the social media brand which is specifically around [00:03:00] DevOps and cloud about the fields that I kind of stumbled into as a software developer, software engineer back then.

And I just discovered that I love DevOps in terms of its characteristics that are different from other IT professions. And I turned my passion into, I loved learning this super complex things about DevOps and I loved explaining it to people because I saw the demand of like super experienced engineers, even feeling really afraid of the complexity of DevOps.

So that turned into what we have now, the TechWorld with Nana YouTube channel. And the interesting part is that when we started building actually we didn't start building, we just posted a few videos. But at that time we were working on a startup. So my, and my co founder's goal was to actually build a, like a tech startup, right?

Which, you know, had nothing to do with DevOps training. It was like a completely different field. So we [00:04:00] were already thinking in terms of we want to build a business because I always wanted to be an entrepreneur. I had my first attempt at business when I was 19 years old, and I just knew that I loved it apart from engineering so we took TechWorld of Nana and the thing that we saw was working very effortlessly. And we basically added like a back end to it, like a business which turned into an educational program because again, I saw the need for people learning different technologies here and there, but there was no, like, a full complete educational program to actually make you DevOps engineer. So that's what we created. And I remember when I was creating this bootcamp, there was no roadmap. Like there was nothing like this out there. So I had to create the blueprint because there was no blueprint that I could use for myself.

So obviously it was more challenging, but then I realized, Okay, maybe this is the opportunity for us to build something that is unique and we're early in the market. And by the way, this was shock to me. This was [00:05:00] surprise to our text advisor, everyone who was looking and reviewing our finances.

And I know this is very rare for businesses that in the very first year, like literally from zero, we basically made a revenue in seven figures, which, as I said, we were not focusing on numbers and it kind of happened. We had like this product market fit and we had intuitively created a product that was like super demanded, super valuable.

And that was basically how we started. And then we kind of sustained that success over the last few years. 

Amy Jo: That's so exciting. So let's wind it back now and talk about how you got here. You grew up in Georgia, correct? 

Nana: Yes. Yeah. 

Amy Jo: And then you emigrated to Austria. 

Nana: Exactly. 

Amy Jo: Yeah. So tell us the story of how you first got interested in this and what was available to you in Georgia for education.

And then how [00:06:00] you ended up, and why you came to Austria. And I'd love to hear about the pivot points along the way, those moments where you went, Oh, I'm going to do this. And it changed the course of your life. 

Nana: Yeah. So I think I had a lot of turning points throughout my life which You know, back then was off, of course, difficult because, you know, when you're in your 20s, like making this type of like huge life changes and shifts can be difficult.

But in retrospect, it just enriched my experience and maybe like super independent and also risk taking because I was literally changing my life or making like this really big decisions every few years. So basically I grew up in Georgia. I went to school there.

I entered university. And in the first year of university, I actually won. It was like a scholarship program funded by U. S. government for the students in post Soviet Union countries. Obviously you had to learn English but there was like a baseline. And they [00:07:00] had this psychological test, because they were testing for your ambitious, independent thinking and this type of stuff.

And it was a tough competition because everybody wanted to win the program. And I was lucky enough to be one of the finalists. So I studied in U.S. for one year. Which was first time in my entire life abroad, outside of this little country of Georgia. It was like expanding my perspective to this wide world basically.

And it was a pretty life changing experience for me because I also met a lot of foreign exchange students. And it was really expanding my mind to having it limited to this rather small country. And when I got back from there, I had this drive in me because I knew I need to do something.

I wanted to get out and study in Europe or U.S. back then. And when I was around 20 years old or so, or 19, when I got back and I remember it was almost impossible for student or [00:08:00] for people like me in Georgia to basically go to study in Europe. Like we had huge complications with visa.

I knew I couldn't go back to U.S. I basically just gave up for two years. And I tried to build my career in Georgia. And funny enough, I was actually working as a teacher in Georgia when I got back. I was teaching for foreign students when they want to study in Europe or U.S. in English.

There are these programs called TOEFL and IELTS. So it's actually instructor of those programs. And after two years of teaching, I loved teaching, by the way. I loved explaining stuff to students. I loved seeing their success. But, these are the things that don't really develop.

So it was kind of same old every single day. So after two years, I was really bored. And I saw that nothing was like, I wasn't growing personally. So, I started my first business in Georgia. And then pretty soon after, I actually decided to again make like a [00:09:00] big change in my life and moved to Austria.

And I saw an opportunity, even though I remember it was like super hard. I spent literally a few nights trying to figure out how can I get to Europe, like how can I get the visa? How can I get the funding? How can I get admitted to a university? Like, how do manage all these things?

And I finally managed, I came to Vienna and I was studying business administration, nothing related to tech or it, like I had zero idea about IT space in general. And again, as a non European citizen, I had no work visa. I was not allowed to work here, but I had to somehow sustain myself and pay for my expenses.

So I realized if I want to stay here, I need to learn a skillset that is going to get me a job here and a work permit. And that was software engineering, and I literally, I had zero idea of what is software engineering. What is IT? [00:10:00] What is any of this? I applied to university.

I just knew that I'm gonna get a job if I study this. That was literally my only motivation. I didn't even know if I would be interested when I started studying because I had zero reference and in second semester of my studies, I got an internship, then I became a junior software developer, then senior within two years, and then basically just continued from there.

Amy Jo: Wow. You're brave to go off all on your own to the U. S., move to Austria, figure out how to make it work. Is that something that showed up when you were really young? Were you like trying new things and your parents were like, be careful? I'm just wondering, because this is something that a lot of people struggle with, is risk. Taking calculated risks. 

Nana: I think that the motivation for me to change was much bigger than the [00:11:00] fear of the risk. Because I remember when I came to Vienna, I didn't have an apartment, like everything was in German. So I couldn't even rent an apartment. So I literally just came here and I used the couch surfing.

And I was sharing room with a bunch of students until I found an apartment. And I remember, I was in the airport and I'm flying to a country that I have no contacts, I don't know anybody there. I don't know the language. I don't even have an apartment to stay at. Like it was pretty scary. But as I said, because my motivation was so high, like I knew this is what I need to do. Like I need to get out because as much as I love my country, I knew just intuitively that the opportunities I had there were much more limited than if I moved to Europe in general. And I wouldn't have like 10th of the success if I hadn't moved to Europe. So that was a very smart and correct decision. And because I was so [00:12:00] convinced, I was willing to take on the risk and deal with that fear.

And also it wasn't easy when I moved, like I had to settle in with no language skills. So the first two months were pretty tough psychologically as well, before I got used to it. But I knew I'm doing the right thing. So I knew I had to just go through with it.

Amy Jo: You've built a pretty impressive machine. There's these three main parts that you described earlier. There's your YouTube channel where you offer incredible free education and also glimpses into your life, vlogs, that sort of thing. Then you have your training. courses and your boot camp, which you developed and deliver, I believe on Teachable, correct?

Nana: Yes. 

Amy Jo: So you use YouTube, you use Teachable, and then you've also developed the third linchpin of this incredible triad, which is your support community, man [00:13:00] by experience engineers. I know there's a lot of messiness into how this came together, but can you describe how you kind of generated these pieces and put them together and how you decided which platforms to select?

Nana: Yeah, that's a good question. So we definitely started with YouTube. And that was our main attention. We didn't do anything else for, I think, first seven to eight months, like creating videos as as valuable as possible. And we didn't use any other social media. It was just YouTube.

And we didn't even think about monetizing anything for seven to eight months. Because both me and Nicole, my co founder, we just knew that if we continue doing this and if we don't take our attention away from it, it will become so powerful and so valuable that like monetization or building like additional social media channels or whatever, that would be no problem in the future.

So [00:14:00] we put all our focus on YouTube. And then we started building the LinkedIn community because we realized, okay, maybe it's not really smart to be attached to just one single platform. And we, basically just started sharing YouTube videos on LinkedIn and we grew there also pretty fast.

And then we started, I think after seven to eight months we started thinking about, okay, you know, how do we create something valuable that could turn it into a business? And the first thing that we did, and we basically just asked our community, what do you guys want? And the first thing we created for his product, so to say, was our course, it was like a small little course about advanced topic.

And it was pretty successful. People really got value from it because again, it was more advanced and very specific. So there were no comparative courses out there. So people got value from it. But then, I remember we were discussing like, I didn't want to do just start creating courses because there were like hundreds of courses [00:15:00] on Udemy and on different platforms.

I don't want to just create another course because I didn't think that would be as valuable of a problem to solve. And that's how I came up with an idea of creating this bootcamp. So basically the value I saw was what if I take someone who has like literally fear of DevOps, who is completely overwhelmed, who has no idea where to start, how to start, what to learn, and I had this experience myself, so I knew and I take them and I just prepared. I give them all the information they need so that they can literally start doing what I'm doing, which was being a DevOps engineer and I knew that would be much more valuable than just individual courses on different tools.

And especially in DevOps, you have to combine the tools. So it was the major thing like, how do you combine 13 different tools? And I just built it all in the curriculum. And that was also, again, it was very correct move because it was exactly the thing [00:16:00] that people were missing and searching for, and was missing like generally out there on the market as I said. I tried to search for like curriculum or roadmap something to use as a blueprint for the creation and I couldn't find anything. AI wasn't developed back then to the point that I could ask any such questions.

So I just created the curriculum myself with my experience, with lots of research and talking to other engineers. And then I created the entire content around it. And then we basically decided that's our main value that we are providing. And yeah, that became the backbone of the business basically.

Amy Jo: And then how did you set up your support community and choose the platform?

Nana: Yeah, so we started with select. The technical decisions were actually you know, me and Nikki were discussing a lot about it because there's so many tiny details involved in setting this thing up. You have like this overwhelming number of small decisions that you have to make in addition to the large ones.

So we're [00:17:00] thinking, okay, where should we host it? And we had to analyze a thousand different platforms. Then we start with Slack as a messaging platform because you know, I was actually giving life support to students every day. And then as you do, you start with whatever MVP and then we discovered that Slack was not really for the community because you have a limit in messages and the messages disappear after two months.

And we again, after a long discussion we moved everything to Discord and now I'm happy that we don't have to make decisions and this type of decisions anymore. We like the streamlined thing where everything works pretty smoothly. So we have the teachable where the it allows us to structure the contents in a way that students can follow like step by step without losing the flow and structure.

And then on Discord, they can just hop on and ask any questions and get support. And then we have email automation, like running in parallel where we send basically. It's like a personal motivator and a accompanying [00:18:00] email sequence that gives students additional motivation, information, valuable insights and stuff like that.

Amy Jo: What emailer program do you use? 

Nana: We use MailChimp. 

Amy Jo: Nice. So Nana, one of the things that personally impresses the hell out of me, working with you, listening to you, watching you grow your business is your ability to focus and not get distracted by bright, shiny objects.

I too have a YouTube channel, and I have courses and trainings we offer, and I have a community. And I know over the last couple of years, the bright shiny objects come at you fast and furious. Oh, should I do a live cohort based course? That seems to be the thing. Everyone says that pre recorded courses are dead.

Oh, should I do events? Should I do this? Should I do that? There's so much distraction out there. [00:19:00] And here you are focusing on a very small number of things and doing them incredibly well. Can you talk a bit just about how do you pull that off if it's a struggle for you to focus and how you bring yourself back to the discipline of just doing a small number of things well?

Nana: Well, I'm happy that it looks like that from the outside. It is a constant battle because I literally have like tens of new ideas every single day. And so I think by default, most of us are fascinated by, especially if you're an entrepreneur, if you are someone who loves building things, who loves solving problems, it's like a blessing and a curse at the same time, because you have this creative mind, but it also gives you too many ideas and you can't focus on at the same time.

So I think one of the big things that helped me was a painful lesson learned which was before we started YouTube channel, [00:20:00] actually while we were working on the startup. So I was working as a full time engineer and then Nikki and I were building this real estate app for a digital broker or whatever.

And then we were working on a mobile app at the same time and we were learning and studying real estate investment. And I remember we were working after the work hours on the weekends on holidays. Like we were just completely immersed in that stuff. And I think after 10 months or so, I remember when I do planning, I try to always zoom out and see like, okay, I've worked for six months or 10 months, where am I now compared to 10 months ago?

And I remember we're super stressed and we're doing a lot of stuff and we had, we have zero free time. And I zoom out and I try to analyze, okay, how much have we accomplished? And I see that none of our projects have progressed. And nothing has moved. And that kind of made me frustrated because I knew that we were working super hard.

And then [00:21:00] I'm looking at the results and I'm seeing zero progress. And I had to take a honest look at myself and our strategy and way of working. And we kind of discussed it out and we were like, we can't continue like this, we have to choose one. And we have to just focus on that one and at least to the point where it's either automated or it's successful.

So we kind of branch out. And I made myself a promise that I would stick to that because I just saw literally in front of me that even like as exciting as it was to work on multiple things and ideas at the same time, I just saw that nothing would work like that. And I just wanted something to work.

And that's why we always try to, because the default behavior and thinking is not that. So I try to force myself all the time. Bringing myself back to, okay, now we have too many ideas. We need to focus. And I always have the times that I [00:22:00] plan inexplicably, where I try to remove as many tasks from my daily thinking basically as possible and I always think how can I make this leaner?

How can I remove ideas? How can I remove things? How do we focus like with our products as well? Because we created the bootcamp and we created three courses and another bootcamp. And I decided if we want to grow this thing and scale it, which is my next step, we need to choose one of them and focus on that one for maybe a year.

And then once that is scaled, then we can move on to the next one instead of doing all five at once. And but even though still, I have lots of ideas and lots of things that I could do. And I have this a notion page, which is called Nana's ideas. And I basically store them away because it also keeps me excited because I know when I have time and when my time is freed up, then I'm just going to go there and take one [00:23:00] of the ideas that I'm excited about to work next.

So I have to discipline myself. It's not It's an easy task.

Amy Jo: Well, having a brain dump page where you can put those is a really great tip. We do that as well. So one of the biggest challenges for anybody who's running a training business with paid courses and has a YouTube channel for lead gen is how much you give away on YouTube and what you put behind the paywall.

What I've noticed about your channel and anyone who hasn't. Checked out tech world with Nana. It's got one point over 1. 1 million YouTube subscribers amazing channel What you'll see there is that Nana has these hour long, 50 minute introduction to all kinds of IT tech and DevOps tech that are incredible that she just gives away.

So [00:24:00] how do you walk that line? Have there been moments where you felt like you made a mistake and gave away too much? Because clearly, it's working.

Nana: Yeah. So fortunately enough, first of all, I never felt like, Oh my God, why did we give this out for free? Like never did I have this moment? And I think it's a mindset thing.

I'm like, I don't take this for granted. I'm super happy that I never had like this. I would call it like a leg mindset where I was like, Oh, maybe like we should not post it there and we shouldn't give value on YouTube channel to keep it for selling. Like I never had that. And Nikki as well.

Basically what I thought intuitively for me was, I'm going to put the best, the most valuable content on YouTube because the YouTube audience for me and channel was as important as the paid courses because it was not just the monetary. On YouTube was just a different type of reward.

So that was equally important to me. And I also kind of knew, if [00:25:00] someone gets so much value, like if they decide to because the bootcamp is still a different type of training, you can't really get that in that structure on YouTube. If someone really wants to become a DevOps engineer, they may choose to do the DevOps bootcamp.

So fortunately, I never had that doubt or that thinking of, Oh, maybe we shouldn't give it away. And until now, like when we do the planning for YouTube, we never ever discuss and consider, oh, maybe we should keep this away from YouTube. And in our paid courses, we start thinking what is the most valuable thing we can post on YouTube?

And we just do it. And Sometimes we think like, Oh, that would be great for the students. We just add it to the bootcamp or add it to the email sequence, but we still post it like on YouTube channel.

Amy Jo: So what's then the main difference between what's on your YouTube channel and what's in your bootcamp?

Nana: So the main thing is, and it's also something that differentiates our bootcamp from the courses is that like in DevOps engineering, when you learn different [00:26:00] technologies, you can learn them in isolation, which gives you like a certain scope of knowledge and you can use that technology like in that scope, but like in DevOps, you have to integrate every tool with every other tool.

So when that integration point comes in your task, for example, at work you're a software engineer, DevOps engineer. Now you have to integrate that tool with every other tool. Like five other technologies, you are stuck. And that part is actually the most difficult to research because you're not going to find easily the answers to, to those questions online.

You can find a bunch of information about different AWS services or Kubernetes features. You can find all this information pretty easily. Like, we have videos, there are blog articles, there's documentation. But the integration between the tools, It is like the most, most important and least available information out there.

And that's exactly like what we have in the bootcamp because we also can [00:27:00] split it. We tell students like, you can't just start in the middle. You have to start from the start because every other lecture meets the previous one because we're building out the entire thing and you cannot do it in videos.

You cannot do it in courses. And even if you go to official documentation, like a Kubernetes documentation is not going to cover how Kubernetes is integrated with 100 other tools, right? Because they're just focused on Kubernetes. So that's the main differentiator. That's also the main reason why working DevOps engineers are actually doing the bootcamp because those are those the links that they're missing.

Amy Jo: So let me jump on that. When Nana and I worked together, I recruited and then interviewed a number of students in three cohorts, students who hadn't yet joined the bootcamp, students in the middle of the bootcamp and graduates as well. And what we learned is completely backing up what you said.

What was fascinating to me and somewhat surprising was [00:28:00] that not only folks fairly new to DevOps were getting value out of the bootcamp, but experienced engineers were coming in there and getting promotions and getting the ability to fire their consultants and just take over the job themselves. And that's pretty extraordinary.

One of the breadth of expertise that you're able to truly serve. And one of the things that we heard over and over again in these interviews was that they built up trust in your ability to explain complicated technical concepts very clearly. And part of why they trusted you enough to buy the boot camp and get trained by you was this somewhat extraordinary ability to really explain something in the way someone could not just understand, but then remember and spit back during an interview, [00:29:00] during a meeting with their boss, etc. Some of this is clearly innate. You're a gifted communicator. But I'm guessing there's a lot of hard work that goes on behind the scenes to organize information that well.

Can you talk a little bit about your process for organizing how you present this very complex info? 

Nana: So that is actually probably the most difficult part of every single course and bootcamp that we created. Not the contents itself but structuring. So basically I had to answer two questions with every single curriculum.

The first one was in which order do I teach which technologies? And to what extent? Because it had to be in depth because generally like I don't see any point in teaching something on a shallow level because when you start working like what are you gonna do like you then you need to go find some other tutorials and stuff so that [00:30:00] doesn't make sense. So in depth but not like, unnecessary details, but still like the conceptual behind the scenes.

The actual understanding and the order is probably even more difficult because let's say you, you need to learn, a combination of four technologies and you need to understand, okay, this feature needs this one or understanding of the other feature of that technology. So how do you build like the step by step so that with every new feature or every new lecture.

It's like building Lego constructs, right? So you have all these pieces together, and then you have to build them in a certain sequence, right? Because you need the foundation before you start building on top of it. And that is probably the most difficult part of structuring the courses and bootcamps, because I had to rearrange. I remember it was a CK course, the Kubernetes [00:31:00] Administrator course, I wrote out the entire curriculum and I had to rearrange it probably 10 times, the lectures because of the order because like this feature needed that other feature. But it also depending on the other one so it had to like and I had to split sometimes I literally split the concept because I knew the part of the concept was required for. So this feature, but the other one had to be introduced a little bit later.

And the goal for me was I didn't want to interrupt a flow. So when a student goes through the learning experience, I want every next step to make complete sense for them. Thinking like, wait a minute, I don't have this information. I'm lacking this information. So now I have to go look for this because I don't understand this missing piece.

So I never want to interrupt that flow. I want every additional one to be like, Oh, okay. That's how it is. Okay. Now that's how it like adding an additional Lego piece. So that at some point, like you see the building is forming step [00:32:00] by step. And I probably spend 30 percent of the course or bootcamp creation time on structure and curriculum and reordering and reshuffling the order.

And then the rest of it. And once I have that in place, then I know, okay now we're good. Now we can go. 

Amy Jo: So you do a lot of iteration on your curriculum, it sounds like. 

Nana: Yeah. Yes. Yeah. That is probably the hardest part. I remember when we were creating DevSecOps, which is the more advanced so we had the first part, which was already huge.

And then I was working on the second part and I hired because I had my knowledge and experience, but I also realized that every company does it differently and, you know, large companies do stuff differently that the team structure is often very different as well in companies and the roles.

And so I hired an expert. And we prepared the entire structure of part two, and then I looked at it and there were just holes in there that [00:33:00] were cutting the flow and I could not like we set together and we couldn't figure out how to fill them in because it was just already set up. And I literally just crossed out the entire thing preparation of maybe like three months and I hired another engineer who was also an expert and I was like, let's do this from scratch. And then we had to perfect it to the level, and I'm so happy we did that because I just felt the difference of how it turned out. I was like, okay, this is good. Now we can release this one. 

Amy Jo: Wow. It's so interesting to hear what goes into that. And again, because I ran all these interviews, I know how good that course is. Your DevSecOps course? People absolutely love it. And that's what went into it. It's like a duck. It looks on the surface like everything's placid, but you're paddling furiously underneath.

So folks, we'll be getting to your questions in just a moment. So, Nana, you [00:34:00] already shared a really valuable mistake that you learned from, which was trying to do too many things at once. It's part of what gave you this passion for focus and, you know, really getting one thing done well.

It's easy to look at you and go, Oh, she's got it all together. Look at that business. Look at that YouTube channel. Of course, there's all kinds of struggles. So is there another mistake or struggle over the last few years that you felt you learned a lot from that had an impact on you? 

Nana: In terms of business and how we do things, and this actually ties back to the project that we did together.

And I wish that we started, you know, you don't know everything when you're studying. Like we literally didn't know what we were doing. So we were trying to do our best. So the biggest learning for the past basically I started thinking about it in the last few months because the first four years we were only focus on [00:35:00] creating content and creating the courses and programs.

And basically once we were done with the programs, I started thinking, how do we make our impact larger and how do we scale this? Because I realized that even though we have a lot of subscribers on YouTube, like people still didn't know about our program.

So we were like, are we like too shy and low key about talking about our programs? Like we need to kind of promote more. And when I started thinking about it, I realized, and this is probably like number one, and I watched a few Y Combinator videos. And I know this is the number one thing that startups fail at is like, I did not have an insight of who our students were and I knew that we were solving like I knew the value of the problem we were solving, but I just didn't have the details on it.

So it was like we had this thousands of students. And I just, and we had everything automated, which is great, but I realized it was like a completely dark room for me, [00:36:00] and I had zero visibility into who are the people that we are helping so much? Do we know their stories? You know, do we know their backgrounds?

Do we even know like what they're doing after with our programs? And I remember I literally locked myself in in my office. And I just started researching. I was like, is this an important part of the business and how can we figure this out? And I stumbled upon like customer discovery and product market fit.

And I just tried to consume as much as possible because I knew that it was wrong not to know who you were really solving problems for, and that was actually when I saw an interview with the YC Combinator CEO and who was interviewing you and you were talking about customer discovery and the value of understanding like the psychographics and the nuances and details.

And I was like, that is exactly what we need, because it was like, like I wanted to move forward and there was this huge rock [00:37:00] basically standing in front of me. That was a huge obstacle that was not letting me go through. And I knew that every other step then depended on that rock to be kind of cleared away.

And I reached out and we did this project together and it was like shedding the light in this dark room where the fact that I understood how much value the students were getting. We literally didn't have this information. We kind of saw messages and emails somewhere, but like more deep understanding.

And, I think if with this knowledge that I have now, I would have started done this from day one, like literally even before we launched that was bootcamp to understand who are the people who are actually benefiting the most from our program, and I would have done it before creating any other courses or programs, actually because then we would have just molded the program and did the made the improvements to create even more value and solve their problems.

And that was like about communicating with them and [00:38:00] actually talking to them and asking questions as you did. So that was probably the number one thing. And I know now, like when I think about new ideas and products and courses, I knew that would be the first step before I design the curriculum and create something to understand, okay, who are the people that will get the most value? What is the problem that they have? And how can I not think about me as an engineer, Oh, this is a cool topic that I want to to cover, but rather, you know, what problem do I want to solve for these specific software engineers or for network engineers or whoever they are.

And that was definitely my biggest learning as an entrepreneur, as a businesswoman. Because I was more focused on the engineering part and not the business part.

Amy Jo: Thank you. That's great to hear.

Q&A Session

Amy Jo: So we've got some questions from the audience, and I want to make sure we have time for those. So Scott, could you please read the questions in order? 

Scott: Sure. Thanks. First, we have a couple of questions from Nalini [00:39:00] Gupta wondering what's your team size? And do you have plans to make a video course on AI machine learning? 

Nana: So it was actually also from one of the interviews that you did, Amy Jo. So, one of our DevOps bootcamp students mentioned. I'm talking about the team size of TechWorld of Nana, he said like he was the DevOps Bootcamp student.

So he said from his perspective, like everything was running like a well oiled machine, so everything was like super structured and clear and clean. And I was really proud of that because like our team is super small and we're trying to do a lot of things, but keeping things lean, basically, so, Me and Niki, my co founder started doing this two of us, basically, the first entire year.

And then the first hire we had was a support, a DevOps engineer who was helping students on Slack, basically, answering their questions. And then we hired two more engineers to help us again, like with support and courses and customer service basically to [00:40:00] reply to the email.

So we're six people in total. And the second question about AI, I know it is the hot new topic. And again, I was thinking, is it really valuable to create a course on AI, which, like, I don't know, hundreds of people are doing and I tried to think of more valuable thing that nobody else or maybe less people are fewer people are focusing on, and we actually, or this is one of my ideas in my idea dump or bucket that I probably will work on in the future, which is basically an AI tutor which can help engineers or accompany them at work.

So compared to ChatGPT, where you have to go proactively and say, Hey, teach me this, explain to me that, to have like an AI based platform that acts as your teacher. So that gives you the guidance, the roadmap, the exercises, the text, the tasks to practice, gives you feedback. So that's more of the [00:41:00] product that I'm thinking in terms of AI rather than the course.

Scott: Awesome. So we also have a question from Rodrigo. What is the right way to start? Because you have both courses and bootcamps, which should he take first? 

Nana: So the bootcamp has a completely different purpose, which is If you want to learn the DevOps profession, for example now after the last project we did, I understand finally who we are serving.

And we have this very seasoned, experienced engineers who have been in traditional engineering roles. And they want to learn devops because it's just a new requirement on the job market and that's exactly where what bootcamp is for or if you want to become a devops engineer because passionate about it. Or if you're a software engineer and you want to learn devops because you need it for the job. The courses are more like, you need to learn a specific technology, like you're an engineer already, or you're a DevOps engineer and you need Kubernetes knowledge, or you need to learn CICD.

So, these are two [00:42:00] very different purposes. So, everyone who wants to like completely shift to DevOps, that's the bootcamp. And the courses are usually like supportive things. So for example, our devs boot camp students, they need Kubernetes that work. So they do the course and in addition.

Amy Jo: Fascinating. So I have another question building on what you just talked about with AI. And by the way, I love your approach to AI, which is build a tool versus a course. I think it's hard to do a course in AI right now because it's changing so fast. It's just so crazy. What are some of the other trends in the DevOps world and the larger IT world that are on your horizon other than AI?

What are you paying attention to? Is there any thing that you see emerging that you think might be interesting? 

Nana: I mean, DevOps generally has been emerging and changing and developing every week. And generally, I love this type of dynamics and development a lot, because I'm a very curious person.

[00:43:00] So, you know, I love seeing, oh what is this new concept? So I think that the one that I believe will continue to grow. It is relatively new concept, but it's already something that people are familiar with is platform engineering. And that was like a very logical development or next step of DevOps.

And I think it's not as popular and mainstream yet. But for me, it is just very logical. So basically, to explain in very simple terms, DevOps is like having this engineer who knows a gazillion things, right? Basically, every single IT field and there they have to be expert in every single technology in every team.

But it's very inefficient and sure you have people like me who love to learn a hundred technologies, but you also have people who want to just specialize and they don't want to deal with a new tool every single week. And having that requirement in every single project and team is also super inefficient.

So platform [00:44:00] engineering was basically a natural response to that where they were like, let's build company wide knowledge of DevOps and not only build the knowledge in people, but also build that knowledge into the platform so that the rest of the teams don't have to deal with DevOps or not as much.

And that's the part of platform engineering that, as I said, it makes a lot of sense and it's not as mainstream and I think it will continue to develop and become as popular as devops. And a lot of platform engineering actually builds on devops knowledge because it's the administration part of the tools. So it's just a different naming of the same role, basically. 

Amy Jo: Fantastic. You heard it here first, folks. Platform engineering. Another follow up question. Going back to what we talked about earlier. What do you know now? What do you have in your head about your customers that you didn't have before we did our project together?

What were some of the [00:45:00] takeaways that you now use as you shape new products and think about what videos to make? 

Nana: So I think the biggest takeaway was for me to really clearly formulate who the so called target group. So who are the people that we were serving and who we were solving the problem for.

And then we identified that we have like lots of different backgrounds and times, but I was able to kind of group them together based on the findings and identify that each of those people have different requirements. So, it lets us now, and this is actually going to be in our next step, what it lets us do for the customers or for the students themselves is if one group, for example, is interested in job market and helping with the CV and applying and kind of, getting ready for the interviews or getting ready for the job itself. We can create content for that target group specifically that solves their problem that we didn't know before because we [00:46:00] didn't really understand the target group.

Then we have another one. Who doesn't care about the CV and job because they're already like working DevOps engineers who have like Sometimes lead engineering roles. So, they don't need help in CV. They are working already. So for them something else is more important. So what we can do now is based on like this different backgrounds, we can add to the existing technical skill set.

These additional things that will make even easier for them to achieve their goals. And again, if you don't know this background, if you don't have this knowledge of customers, you cannot make this type of improvements of your product. You cannot make this type improvements of your like general offerings.

So I'm happy that we have this information now because it just makes it super clear for us to decide, okay, this is what we're going to do next. This is what we're going to offer next because I understood how important that information is. We also want to expand [00:47:00] our team actually to have someone who will be literally dedicated to talking and communicating with our customers every single day through various channels and various communication methods because I just saw how important that is for us to improve our products, to understand the customers and to communicate that also better to people from the same target groups on social media, basically outside, who sometimes don't even know what our bootcamps or programs offer.

Amy Jo: Again, fantastic. So we're heading into the end of our time together and I'd like, thank you all for hanging out. Thank you so much for joining us, Nana. This was fascinating. I really admire you and enjoy you and look forward to continuing to get to know you even better through your channel and all the work you're doing.

Nana: Thank you so much. Thanks. 

Amy Jo: Thank you so much for being here, you got to be here for the full, exciting, deep dive into the mind and astonishing [00:48:00] ability to focus and communicate of Nana Janashia.

Outro: Thanks for listening to Getting2Alpha with Amy Jo Kim, the shows that help you innovate faster and smarter. Be sure to check out our website, getting2alpha.com. That's getting[number]2alpha.com for more great resources and podcast episodes.