From Dropout to 18% Monthly Growth: Building Cody with Barak Glanz

Hello. Please meet today's guest, Barack Glanz. What if learning to code felt more like a daily habit rather than a course you're supposed to finish? You know what I mean?

What if learning to code could feel less like homework and more like a game you actually want to play every day? My guest today cracked that code literally. Barack Glanz is the co founder and CMO of COTI, a coding education platform that's been growing 18% per month, month over month, for nearly three years. But here's what makes his story especially remarkable.

He started his first bachelor's degree at 13 years old, dropped out of both that and high school by 16, served five years as an officer in the Israeli navy, and built several ventures that, in his words, failed quite horribly. But Barack kept trying. And when he and his co founders launched Cody as bootstrapped students with no money, no investors, and no safety net, they found something that clicked by taking inspiration from Duolingo and optimizing for daily habit formation.

Instead of making big promises about landing jobs, they've built a platform with the best retention in their sector. And they did it by targeting customers halfway around the world from their Tel Aviv headquarters. In this episode, Barack shares how he found scalable customer acquisition channels through guerrilla marketing, why he doesn't promise users they'll become developers, and where his grit comes from. After years of what he calls learning experiences, let's dive in.

Well, hello, Barack, and welcome to the podcast. Hello. I'm glad to be here. Very excited to start.

Good. And we're all going to admire your, you know, incredible studio that Google has loaned you. That's wonderful. Yeah.

And it's a sound fin to Google for startups for letting me use their studio. Yes. All right, context, setting. Where are you originally from and where do you live now?

So I'm originally from Israel, and I also live in Israel right now. I live in Tel Aviv. And you've spent time in Haifa as well, right? You were at the Technion for a while.

Yes, so I did my bachelor at the Technion at Tel Aviv. So I'm a computer scientist over there. You know, we call that the MIT of the Middle East. Yeah, it's kind of like.

Like it. Yeah. Did you ever. Were you ever at mit?

Did you go to mit? I mean, did you visit or anything? No, no, never there. Yeah.

Well, I'm in the same. Well, I'm not in Cambridge, but I'm just outside of Boston and spent lots and lots of time at mit. And those are some smart kids over There, let me tell you. All right, so I bet you you've got a startup now, but tell us a little bit about what you were doing and sort of before, you know, the.

Your. Your current startup, which is called. Well, tell us what it's called. It's.

It's on your shirt too. Yeah, it's called Cody. So before Cody, I did a bunch of stuff, as you mentioned briefly. I studied computer science.

I used to work for. For Facebook, for Meta Fintech in Tel Aviv. I built a few ventures in different sectors. All of them failed quite horribly, to be honest, but it was a very valuable experience.

Yeah, so you learn. You learned a lot from those failures. Yeah, they're not failures. They're not failures.

Yeah, it depends how you define failure. Yeah, I don't define it that way because I had a bunch that did that too. Yeah, did you. Did what was the thing that you focused on when you were doing your mandatory service in.

In the idf? Yeah, so I served in the Israeli Navy for like, five years. I was an officer. And yeah, honestly, I wouldn't want to elaborate that much about my service since it's also pretty classified.

But, yeah, here in. Here in Israel, it's. It's mandatory to. To serve.

And while I was there, I also did my best, you know, as long as I'm in the system. Well, my question really about that is that so often the young Israeli people I've talked to learned some extremely valuable things in their service that then they could apply in. In what they started to do in their career. Is that true for you?

I mean, or was the navy just too far away from the kinds of things you're. You've been trying to do? Well, obviously it's pretty far away, but being a commander, I learned how to lead people. Well, when you're in the army, people just see you as a leader, if you earn it.

Now, being a founder, I just pay people to do their job right. So employees work mainly because they are being paid for it. In the army, your soldiers don't get paid that much, so you need to find, like, creative ways to give them motivation. And I guess five years of being a commander, I realized how to be a better leader.

And this applies now when I'm managing people in the tech world. Sure, absolutely. I can see that. All right, so, Cody, you got it started, but what was the thing that you saw a need for this new company?

And usually entrepreneurs like us that start something believe that if we're successful, what we're doing will change the world. What was the thing that led you to start it and how will it change the world? Okay, so that's a good question. So I guess there were a few things that led to the decision to create Cody.

So as you know, the world is changing and there is this problem of the shortening attention span of humans. Right. We can't focus for a long time on the same thing. People are doing tasks and they lose interest very fast.

So I noticed this behavior problem that repeated itself across several ventures. And also another thing that me and my friends noticed when we were students, that it's kind of hard to learn how to program without actually doing it right? It's like you don't learn how to do plumbing just from a book. You need to actually do it.

So it's kind of the same thing. So we wanted to build this online platform focused on teaching code in a practice driven way. And really our vision is to turn coding into a daily hobby. Right.

So we gave it a try. It started small and it went pretty well. We started Bootstrap, by the way, as students. So we didn't have a lot of money, but we just had this focus.

Well, this behavioral problem that, that I mentioned that we, we were sure that it's something that we can tackle. I just wanted to, to help people study code. I guess most people don't quit because coding is too hard. They quit because it never becomes a part of their day.

I just wanted to take all, all of those insights and, and try to really answer the question, what if learning to code felt more like a daily habit rather than a course you're supposed to finish? You know what I mean? So, so you didn't even get some money from like friends and family to help get you started? It was, I mean, no.

Students don't have any money. I mean, none. Right? Students don't have money.

Right. So we started just like that. And well, I'm the CMO of Cody, by the way, so I'm in charge of all of the marketing. And I started with what I call guerrilla marketing.

So with no resources, honestly with, with not that much knowledge or experience in marketing, I just did what, what felt right. And I just tried to bring some customers just to, just to test the, the idea to make sure that there's a real pain that we're solving and people actually show willingness to pay for it. And it just worked really, really well. So we went all in.

We all quit our jobs. And so you found a lighthouse customer, the kind of customer that would help you define, you know, a minimum viable product that other people would pay for. And did you find that like right down the street in, somewhere else in, in Israel, or did you go broader than Israel? So I think only like 0.

2% of our customers are from Israel. We don't really target Israel as a market. The vast majority of our customers are from the States. And yeah, I guess doing SAS B2C company, it's, it's like very, very risky venture because it's hard to raise money.

It's hard to really understand that what you're doing is, is the right thing. And even if the product you're building is, is great, it's very hard to acquire a lot of customers. It's not enough to have a good charisma. You need to come up with like several ways to optimize your funnels and to scale.

And it's, it's really hard. So you really need to make sure that you're building the right thing before you start to invest too much money into it or too much effort into building the product. Yeah, absolutely. I mean that's, that's kind of the point of trying to find a lighthouse customer.

And it sounds like you described a minute ago, you found the right kind of people that would give you feedback as to whether this is a product that, that they and others would pay for. And that's exactly how I recommend people try to start and not try to raise, I mean, friends and family is a low risk for you anyway way to raise a little bit of money. And I always, I always do that. And then that gives me enough to get the product prototype at least up and then, and I don't try to get a seed round or anything like that or a, until I'm absolutely sure I've got multiple customers that will pay.

And, and you did that instinctively. You knew in your gut that that was how to do it. Sorry for the interruption, but in addition to the podcast, you might also be interested in the online program I've created for startup founders called who says you can't start up in it? I have tried to capture everything I've learned in the course of founding and running nine startups over 37 years.

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Can you tell us a little bit about how you found those first few customers, however many thousand miles away the states are? Yeah, so it wasn't easy. So it's also not enough to find the customers. It's also important to find a way to find the customers, I hope.

Yeah, no, that makes total sense. Yeah. So I will try to clarify. You might find someone across the street that is willing to pay money for your product, but that's not real validation because several customers across the street will never be enough.

You want, you want tens of millions of customers, right? So I tried to find a scalable way to, to acquire customers and I just tried a lot of them. I tried, I tried Reddit, I tried Quora, I tried Facebook, I tried Google, I tried social media, I tried doing videos myself, I tried newsletters, blogs, a lot of things. And slowly I just, I just found what, what works right at the beginning, by the way, it was influencer marketing on TikTok.

That, that, what works for us at the beginning now. Now obviously we do a lot of things, but that was like our first funnel that worked. Tell us a little bit about the actual product. So, yeah, sure.

Is it, is it trying to teach you a, a specific programming language? So in general, as I mentioned, our vision to, is to turn code learning into a daily hobby. And regarding the specific programming languages we teach the top 10 programming languages, well, I guess what differentiates us from our competitors, and I think that's the reason why we find so much success in scaling everything, is because we optimize for consistency. We take a lot of inspiration from Duolingo and well, most coding platforms, most of our competitors, they, they optimize for depth.

They promise you you will find a job, you'll become a developer, you'll become a data scientist, whatever. We don't promise that. I just want to give you this very casual experience of bite sized challenges that you do every day. And I want to create this feedback loop that makes your progress very visible.

Even on your busy day. You can come just for five minutes, complete a challenge, keep your streak and come back tomorrow. And that's, that's kind of like our focus, if that makes sense. Yeah, especially when you compare it to Duolingo.

Because I haven't taken a course with Duolingo, but my wife is constantly moving up and up and up in French language training through that and she does it every single day and she's quite disciplined about it. But sometimes you're right, she only spends 10 or 15 minutes maybe. And it's funny that the little sounds that the thing makes. Yeah, I can tell those start to reinforce, you know, it's, it's funny because we use that.

Well, we use this. We have this, these little squeeze balls that make a very interesting sound like a chipmunk. And instead of calling our dogs or giving them a little cookie when we're out in the woods, you just squeeze that ball. And it's incredible how that has become this strong feedback.

And I don't mean to compare, you know, humans to dogs, but by God, it's the same thing that sound gives her. She smiles and she goes, I got it. Exactly. It.

It really reminds me of a story I've heard about Nintendo that they developed the game Super Mario and they found out that the sound when you collect a coin. You played Mario, right? Yeah, everyone played Mario. So the sound where.

When you collect the coins, this is one of the things that give you a lot of dopamine during your gameplay. So you really want to collect all the coins, even though it doesn't really affect your score or whatever, but people still collect the coins because it makes the sound and it gives them the dopamine. So do you think the Nintendo people studied and researched that and carefully craft that sound or do you think they just got incredibly lucky that, that that happened? I think being lucky counts, right?

Luck counts, sure. I think they. Well, I, I don't know if they studied this thing in depth, but I, I'm. Well, I think the best practice is to just test several sounds, like with any feature you.

We just want to test several things and pick the. The ones that is best performing. Right. And I mean, they have huge studios and stuff.

I, I'm pretty sure that they paid some attention to that. We are all right. And we are a very small company. Back, back to the, the heart of the product.

So you said top 10 programming languages. So obviously you're going to teach people Java, JavaScript, C. Yeah. And what about a functional programming language is.

I'm not sure if there, if there's one that's in the top 10 like Haskell or there's several others. They're really hard. I find them really hard to learn. And I've never successfully gotten past, you know, the simplest thing in a book on Haskell.

Yeah, Honestly, I don't know. I don't think we support any of those languages just because there is not that much demand. Right. We follow.

We follow. Well, because I am. I've done many startups, at least three, maybe four in cybersecurity, the imperative programming languages, which includes Java and C, they are very prone to some very bad bugs that become cybersecurity attack points. And so One of the reasons that a lot of people are, that I know are starting to switch to something like Haskell is that you can't create a buffer overflow bug in Haskell.

And that's, and that's the number one most common exploit that the bad guys use is to attack a buffer overflow. That's right. So you've told us about how hard it was to figure out how to find customers. So that, and, and sort of what's the right mechanism to do that and that, you know, you started with.

The thing that started to work for you a little bit at the beginning was, was TikTok. And now you've got something that's, that's working. You're, you're, you're getting customers at an increasing rate now. Yeah.

Can you describe briefly what that mechanism is? Is it you are, you do using HubSpot or you. Some. What are you using to make that happen?

Yeah. Okay, so first of all, I would say that Coti is almost three years old and since we started selling, we are growing about 18% each month on average. And it doesn't come easy, right? It comes, it must make you feel so good though.

That's huge. Yeah, it's, it is huge. But there are no shortcuts. It, it comes with, with, with hard work.

So to whomever listening the. I'm going to share something that worked for me, but it might not work for you that well. Rapid growth comes with hard work. That, that's what I'm saying.

So the thing that worked for me right now, something like 70% of my customers are coming from performance marketing, from paid ads, either Facebook ads or Google Ads. That's like 17% of the revenue. Something like 20% of the revenue comes from influencer marketing, TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, whatever. And something like 10% is coming organically from our social media or things like that.

SEO. That's how it looks like today. I hope I answered. And are you finding that your customer acquisition cost, as you grow so rapidly, is it staying the same or is it coming down?

Because with volume you tend to get more and more efficient, it kind of staying the same? There are a few, a few ways to look at it. So the more you grow, the more efficient you are. So.

Well, logic tells that the customer acquisition cost will go down. Right. But think about it like that. You have your entire market and at the beginning you market to the low hanging fruits, to the people who are the easiest to sell to, and then to the people who are least likely to pay and Slowly you start to market to people who are more expensive to acquire.

So I don't know. We are not seeing an increase in acquisition cost. We're all. But we're also not seeing a decrease.

We are seeing an increase in the metrics inside the product. So people are paying us for longer and people are using the product more, so the lifetime value increases. So. Yeah.

And I guess the fact that the scale grows so rapidly and the acquisition cost stays roughly the same, it's perfect. So your margins are. Yeah, the margins are getting pretty good. Yeah.

Hi. The podcast you are listening to is a companion to my recent book, Tech Startup Toolkit, how to Launch Strong and Exit Big. This is the book I wish I'd had as I was founding and running eight startups over 35 years. I tell the unvarnished truth about what went right and especially about what went wrong.

You could get it from all the usual booksellers. I hope you like it. It's a true labor of love. Now back to the show and can you tell because they are interacting with your.

Your back end, you can tell how your retention is working and it sounds like your retention of these customers is pretty good. It is, yeah. It's pretty much. It's pretty much the best in the sector.

I think what's on your roadmap is, is it going to be adding more, more programming languages? What do you do with Kodi as it continues to be. So all the metrics sound really good. Where does it go?

Okay, yeah, that's. That's a good question. So I see kind of like a problem with, with similar companies that they focus too much on the beginner level of users because this is the largest audience. Right.

But once you stop being a beginner, just quit the platform and you go do something else. So in coding education, this often looks like someone's doing a programming course online and then they go build their own thing and they stop using the coding education platform or they go find a job and they don't need it anymore, whatever. So long term, I see Kodi becoming the place people stay, not just to start coding, but to keep building. I hope it makes sense.

I just want to close that loop. Instead of people going away once they are no longer beginners, I want to let them be do projects. I want to let them do some creations and ownership. Everything happening inside the same ecosystem, everything happening inside Codi.

This will really makes a difference. Well, personally, I see the value and this is my vision and what really drives me right now is seeing people who never thought of themselves as technical. Right. People like my mom showing up every day and building confidence, actually showing progress.

So yeah, I guess if I can turn coding into something people identified with, not just something they, that everyone try once, that that's a real win. I hope I answered. You did. And I have a follow on question.

Yeah. Is there an opportunity for you to have an additional B2B business model where you, because you've got these companies with hundreds and many with thousands of programmers and if the company felt like, hey, this is a tool that I can, that is not, I don't have to force it down people's throats because it's so fun to use, but they make it available to their programmers and they also incentivize them that they have opportunity for advancement in the company if they get through this level in Kodi.

And, and now they're able to. So basically the company is using your tool to improve the skill levels, the level of all their programmers. I'll give you an example. I was, a year or so ago, a very large defense contractor asked me to come in and evaluate how they're doing.

They already knew that they had a quality problem in their software. And so they were trying to ask me to examine why is that and what can they do about it. And I found a lot of reasons, including that their skill level of their staff was programming staff. And more importantly, and this is maybe another opportunity for you is their QA team.

They, they were not doing enough testing. There's a great misconception that QA people don't have to learn code, don't have to be coders, but they do, because how do they, they test by writing little programs constantly, little this and that and, and try to, you know, break whatever it is that they're trying to test. And I just think you've got so many opportunities. A B2B and also the, this other type of developer, the one that loves to test more than to create.

They're a, they're, they're a different beast and they're, and they're serious professionals in their own right. So you're right. And we're actually, we're actually doing it so Google Cloud, by the way, are one of our customers. So they bought licenses for they, their employees to upscale.

So it is something that we do, but it's not a, it's not such a big focus for us because I think in terms of revenue, B2B sales are, I think it's less than 5% of our revenue. It's, it's not that I don't see the potential. I do, but right now it's not our focus. Just because I see.

I see more potential in the, in the other funnels. Yeah, but, but those are all good points. Well, let me ask one, One last question, and it's about the word grit. Grit is defined by words like determination and resolve and courage.

Stick to it. Ness. And some other terms as well. And I've never known a startup founder like you who doesn't have a lot of grit.

And so my question really is, where do you think your grit to do all this to, you know, to have those, what you call failures and I call learning experiences. And now here you are, Cody's, you know, taking off like a rocket ship. But it all took a lot of grit. And where does your grit come from?

I guess it just comes from trying a lot of things. And I consider myself a trier. When I was a kid, when I was 13 years old, I started my first bachelor's. Did I tell you that?

I don't think so, no. Yeah, so I started my first bachelor, it was in applied mathematics. And I actually quit in the last year. I was 16, something like that.

And it felt, at the time, it felt like a big failure. You know, I quit because I wasn't mature enough. I didn't really know what, what I was doing. I didn't really want to become a mathematician.

But before I quit the bachelor's, I also quit high school because I thought it'll make the bachelor easier, right? That I don't need to do both school and also math degree simultaneously. So essentially I found myself without high school and without university. At the time, it felt like a failure.

I don't know, I'm a dropout. I don't even have a degree. I don't know what direction I want to take my career or my studies, whatever. And I just had a.

Essentially, I guess if you, if you'll be too afraid of failures, you will never try challenging things. And if you will never try challenging things, you will never achieve, like, impressive stuff. Right. On the other hand, if you will not be afraid of failures at all, you will just walk aimlessly in those very challenging journeys called startup building.

Right? So I guess what happened is I just kept trying things, kept trying challenging things, building companies, until something really clicked. I think it's. I think it's.

So let me, let me tell you about. So I know a guy who, he did graduate from high school, but then, then got some sort of associate's degree in acupuncture. So he's got an associate degree in acupuncture and he taught himself how to program. But what's really incredible about him, and I think that I'm guessing there's an analogy here between him and you, he can, he can design a complex system without writing anything down on paper or in the computer.

He can. I mean, a very complicated system. He. And he does it by walking around the block.

And. And I said to him one time, I think you've walked around the block that you live on so much that you've put divots in the sidewalk. And then he finally says, okay, I got it. It all works.

And he starts to lay it out and he changed our product. And there's a specific example here of what he did. So we have a hardware based cybersecurity product that protects a processor from getting attacked. And it has to be down in the hardware so it itself can't be attacked, and so that it can keep up with the processor that's way faster than software can go.

And our problem was, is that it was too big on the chip. It was way too big. And the customers were balking and saying, I can't use this. It's way, way too big.

And I have a limited amount of silicon. And so we took a year to figure out, what do we have to do? What do we have to do? And he came up with this solution and it made our product 87% smaller.

And now we were well within the range that customers would like. And it's the most incredible thing to watch. Here's a guy, no degree, no advanced degree, no formal training in computer science or any kind of engineering. And he saved the company single handedly.

Wow. Yeah. Well, listen, this has been so much fun to learn about this incredible tool, this incredible platform. I'm going to have to get it.

I want to play with it. Go ahead. It's free. I hope someday you'll help me learn a functional programming language.

All right, I'll put it. And you're yet another reason. I have about five reasons that I have to come to Israel, and you're another reason. And let me know when you do.

I will. Thank you so much for being on this podcast. Thank you for having me. It was a pleasure.

All right, founders, here's your toolkit from today's conversation with Barack Glanz. Toolkit number one. Validate the channel, not just the customer. Finding someone willing to pay isn't quite enough.

You need to find a scalable way to find customers. Barack tested Reddit, Facebook, Google newsletters and influencer marketing until he found what actually worked at scale. Don't celebrate early sales until you've proven the acquisition path can grow with you. Toolkit number two Optimize for consistency over promises.

Instead of promising users they'd land jobs as developers, Cody focused on making coding a five minute daily habit. Sometimes the winning strategy isn't to offer more, it's to lower the barrier so people actually show up every day. And toolkit number three Treat fear of failure as your compass. Barack said it perfectly.

If you're too afraid of failure, you'll never try challenging things. And if you never try challenging things, you'll never achieve anything impressive. Keep trying until something clicks. Now go test one new customer acquisition channel this week that you've been avoiding and give it a real shot.

And that is our show with Barack. The show notes contain useful resources and links. Please follow and rate us@podchaser.com designing successful startups.

Also, please share and like us on your social media channels. This is Jothi Rosenberg saying TTFN ta ta for now.