Sometimes ambitious business ideas happen organically. Just ask Jonathan Naymark.
Today he’s the general manager of Codecademy for Business, but three years ago, he was the head of partnerships. That’s when he noticed a growing trend at the company that offers free coding classes in 12 different languages: a bunch of inbound requests from companies and their consumer base asking for the same thing.
“They’d say, ‘Hey, can I buy 10 Codecademy memberships for my team?’’” Naymark recalled.
Codecademy wasn’t a B2B company — but that didn’t matter. Naymark didn’t want to turn away potential customers, so he and his colleagues iterated on the fly with the existing consumer product.
“We had an old bulk account creation tool that was broken, so I begged an engineer to fix it and asked our finance team to manually invoice every B2B customer, since our consumer checkout page couldn’t support business buyers,” Naymark said.
Years later, this quick problem-solving laid the groundwork for Codecademy’s ambitious next step: entering the B2B space.
In August 2019, the company soft-launched its B2B product and about a year later, launched out of beta with its first official product offering, Codecademy for Teams. Since its inception, it has been the fastest growing branch of the company, working with 800 companies, not to mention growing the internal team from one to nearly 30 employees.
There’s a lot of excitement with this type of growth — both in revenue and headcount. But there’s also challenges, especially given Codecademy’s direct-to-consumer roots. Built In NYC caught up with Naymark to learn more about what this shift into the B2B space has been like, and what’s on the horizon at Codecademy.
Describe some of the advantages and disadvantages of venturing into this space.
We’re a startup within a startup, which comes with both opportunities and challenges. Fortunately, we’ve been able to build off of Codecademy’s existing brand and customer base (about 25 percent of our business buyers have used Codecademy as a consumer). From a product perspective, our learning platform was already in-market, and we also benefit from being a well-backed startup that just raised $40 million in a Series D round.
While there are advantages to having such strong consumer roots, it can be challenging to work within a business that has already laid its foundation. We’re trying to take a well-run, consumer-facing machine and begin paying attention to an entirely different market and buyer. On the consumer side, we know our customers inside and out. Yet on the business side, we’re still uncovering a lot about our audience and their motivations. The same is true for metrics — we know what’s key for our consumer business, though we’re still defining a lot of those benchmarks for B2B.
While there are certainly unknowns, there is also tremendous opportunity in building those foundations for Codecademy for Business.
How has this shift to B2B affected business?
We grew 350 percent year-over-year in 2020 and are seeing considerable growth in 2021. We work with everyone from Fortune 500s to tech startups to healthcare, finance and media brands, helping them upskill, onboard and grow their teams. While Codecademy for Business is a nascent part of the Codecademy ecosystem, we’re really proud of the impact we’ve made not only on the business, but also on our learners overall. Our work at Codecademy is about empowering learners, whether they’re using the product on their own or through their companies.
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How does this shift affect the headcount at Codecademy?
As our revenue grows, so does the need for B2B talent. We’ve had to create entirely new functions here at Codecademy, including dedicated teams for sales and B2B marketing that we’re continuing to build out.
What’s equally important is that we’re building a product on top of a product. And that requires really amazing product managers and engineers. There are currently opportunities for front-end, back-end and full-stack engineers to join our team. We’re also looking to hire a Director of B2B Product, who will work with me to crystallize and bring to life our long-term product strategy.
On the consumer side, we know our customers inside and out. Yet on the business side, we’re still uncovering a lot about our audience and their motivations.’’
Looking ahead, what are some of the new features that are coming out on the product side?
We’re excited about the fall, which is also our busiest season. Our product team is working on a series of releases over the summer that will really transform how our account managers use the product to get actionable data on what their learners are doing on the platform.
With B2B, we need to prove to buyers that they’re getting value from our product, and that proof needs to be data-driven. We’re launching a significantly more robust reporting tool, as well as new features like single sign-on (SSO) and the ability to assign content.
