AskHN: How to fund a DevBootcamp in a smaller city? | Hacker News Reader

AskHN: How to fund a DevBootcamp in a smaller city?

2 pointsgremlinsinc3 comments

I live in Dayton, a largely .Net town, not too many web app companies around, and not many specializing in Rails - I want to change that - but one caveat is that I'm currently underemployed as a PHP developer @ $15/hour, so w/ little money how can I start this endeavor, tried reaching out to companies to sponsor, but all I got was a lousy t-shirt from Stripe(no offense, very thankful for that lol..but won't pay the startup costs..)

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These bootcamps can pretty much fund themselves if put together properly. Putting together a curriculum, finding a space, in a nutshell just putting together a business plan.

From there I would set a price for the class and start doing pre-registration, do a limited 10 seat first class and have people sign up if interested. An instructor you can bring on board for a contract price for the duration of the bootcamp.

I have seen this work out successful many times in the recent 6 months. Also if your looking for something that is more for the community and less for the profit, take a look at http://www.meetup.com/codecrewny/. These guys do meetups to go through the JS in 6-8 weeks curriculum (http://javascriptissexy.com/how-to-learn-javascript-properly)

Since Rails is not prevalent, it's a great time to seize the opportunity of building that following.

In about 5 minutes I found 5 companies in Dayton who use open source tech for web development[1]. I also found a web developer meetup group that's been going for 6 years, has more than 350 members, and has a meeting in a couple of weeks[2]. And a dynamic languages (e.g. Ruby) group with 46 members meeting the week after that[3].

And I'm thousands of miles away in the UK.

There are people out there who can help. Get in touch with them. Don't try to do it all yourself. Many, many people will volunteer time.

[1] http://boldmove.co, http://www.volotechnologies.com, http://atomicinteractive.com, http://www.designchemistry.com, http://www.bitstormweb.com

[2] http://www.meetup.com/dayton-web-developers/

[3] http://www.meetup.com/Dayton-Dynamic-Languages-User-Group/

Suggest you find a bar, restaurant, or office that will be willing for you to meet up, invite some tech people to do something techy (maybe give talks on what you've been working on). Companies are more likely to sponsor if you've got an audience, no real reason for Stripe etc. to give resources to every town that asks for them especially if you've not got any other people interested. Once you've got something of an audience then you've got a chance of reaching out to others who might be interested in a bootcamp. You might want to focus on PHP given that you're able to find in employment in PHP (and presumably not in Rails) or even in .Net if that's what people are doing locally. If you can't get a few techy people for drinks then you're unlikely to persuade people to come for a full bootcamp.

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