About

Link to Website

I founded Coder One on the insight that tech companies who didn't have a strong brand presence in the tech comunity were struggling to hire engineering talent during the 2020 pandemic digital boom.

Within 6 months, I secured Pre-Seed VC funding from Antler, sponsorship from Australian employers (Black Nova Group, Secure Code Warrior, Finder, Lab17, and Crew Talent Advisory), and built and launched our MVP competition - The AI Sports Challenge. It was one of APAC's biggest online programming competitions, attended by over 400 engineers across 20 countries. Participants loved the gamified challenge and production quality. Sponsors loved having their employer brand associated with nurturing the Australian tech community.

Despite the early traction, we quickly learned that 'employer branding' was a difficult metric to track ROI for, and therefore difficult to sell. We experimented with different customer segments, B2C, and pivoting into educational / preskilling markets with varying levels of success. Eventually in 2022, the tech market took a turn for the worse. Along with failing to find the type of Product/Market Fit that we required as a VC-backed startup, we decided to wind down the company.

The Coder One competition is still available as an open-source playground on GitHub.

Key skills:

Front-end (React/TS) and no-code (Webflow, Zapier, Memberstack, Airtable)
GTM & sales
Growing a Discord community to 800+ engineers
Content marketing and SEO (peaking at ~10K unique visitors p.m.)
Graphic design and social media marketing