The Code Warrior Project: A Free Idea for Christmas

by Duane N. Burghard
© 2014

This week's essay was going to be about two political reforms I believe in, and I actually wrote the whole thing and I may eventually even publish it here on my blog. But with barely 24 hours to go before my self imposed deadline of posting one essay per week, I finally faced something I have at least strongly suspected about myself for a while but have had trouble acknowledging; I hate writing about politics.

This is a real bummer for me because, well, I was a Political Science major. I've studied politics pretty extensively for a VERY long time. And I know a good deal about it. Heck I ran for the United States House of Representatives ... TWICE. I have many very well thought out and rational opinions on a large variety of social and political topics, and I truly don't mind sharing them or engaging in intelligent discussions about issues of substance (they're important conversations to have, and sharing the knowledge I have and gaining knowledge I don't have is one of the most important things to me in life).

But the truth is that I kind of hate even talking about politics now. The hyper-partisan divides and insanely angry, vitriolic bullshit that seem to be a required add on to virtually *every* discussion or debate have left me sad and tired, and I'm frankly REALLY tired of being sad and tired.

But with that said, I've always loved writing. I don't think I realized how much I loved it until I started writing a group of short stories and books I'm currently working on over the last year or so (and then of course this blog in just the last few weeks). But as I wrote this other blog entry, I realized that it was depressing the crap out of me to write it.

So, at the last minute, I'm going to do something else.

This is likely my last essay before Christmas this year, so I'm going to give all of you a present, do with it what you will.


I'm what's called a serial entrepreneur. I can't help it. I'm the guy who can't even walk by a window washer on the street without working out the business model for his business before I get to the next corner. It's simply what my brain *does*. I've started a ridiculous *seventeen* businesses in my life, and the truth is that, at any given moment I'm dreaming up and planning out 2-3 more in my head. Dozens more businesses than I have started simply never made it beyond a couple of pieces of paper, and hundreds more just never made it out of my head, but they're all there and constantly flowing.

So as I was complaining to my wife (after having finished my essay that I wasn't happy with on political reforms) I suddenly had these rapid fire thoughts in succession (welcome to my consciousness, please watch your step): Look, if you're not happy writing about politics, then don't. Write about something that makes you happy. What makes you happy? Cool ideas. Political ideas can be cool. Yes, but they're usually too controversial and the solutions are so hard and it's largely just depressing to think about. OK, fine, so what do you like? I like business ideas. Great, you've got a crapload of those, write about one of those. Hey, even better, it's Christmas, how about you literally give one away! Just tell everybody about one of the business ideas you've got churning around in your head. Maybe someone will turn it into something amazing.

So Merry Christmas! Your gift this year is an idea. I call it The Code Warrior Project (or Code Warriors for short).

Like many of my ideas, it came as the result of a bunch of different inputs. One of those inputs was an "Hour Of Code" event last fall (if you go to hourofcode.com you'll see that nearly 80 *million* people have now participated in one of these events). My daughters Taylor and Jordan participated at one of the events at an Apple Store late last year (one of 10 million girls to participate in 2013 ... to put that in perspective, that's more girls than have done any programming in computer science in the previous 70 years!).

Anyway, also in my neighborhood when we moved in (August 2013) was the remnants of a business called "Mathnasium," (a math tutoring business) and while they obviously didn't make it, I sure liked their idea, I just felt it was a little too narrow. My idea is to create a business with a broader focus and multiple functions. In the afternoons, evenings and on weekends, the business would exist to serve primarily grade 6-12 students (with tutoring, classes, and a study center focused on all of STEM and computer science). In the daytime hours, the cubicles along with their equipment and bandwidth could be rented out as workstations. Locations could be in strip malls near large high schools. I made some basic assumptions (about $80K in buildout and equipment expenses, $2,800/month in rent $500/utilities, and $3,500/month for everything from advertising to toilet paper) and I threw in a blanket of $8K/month for payroll (and this assumes you can find some lower cost high end high school or college kids as some of your tutor staff), and for roughly $15K/month in expenses, you're in business.

At that rate, you'd need 150 "members" (who would obviously get special benefits) at $100/month or 750 paid hours at $20/hour (which would be an average of just short of four people for every hour of a 50 hour week). Obviously, hitting your revenue target would involve a combination of two sources. You could also manage a math tutor help line for something like $1.50/minute (the tutors would be contractees (use RingCentral or some other similar system to coordinate routing ... the option tree would route the call based on subject not the grade)). In theory, you could partner with area schools so that the work of the tutoring and class staff effectively complimented the school's work when appropriate (some classes would exist for tutoring kids who needed extra assistance with those classes, some classes would be focused on teaching them something outside of their school work entirely (e.g. coding) and some would be for doing more advanced work for kids who were insufficiently challenged).

You could also attempt to leverage relationships with some of the corporate sponsors of the Hour Of Code. That's a "long shot" because you're talking about penetrating the bureaucracies of large corporations, getting to the right person and then being able to convince them to partner with you in a meaningful and profitable way, but as in football, it's a good thing to throw a deep pass every now and then.

All of this requires a lot of work and a non-trivial amount of startup capital, but if it succeeded, you'd be doing something cool and you'd make a living.

Of course, there's another way that a version of this business model might appear in a town near you someday. A few months ago when my wife was out of town, I went to dinner with Taylor, Jordan and one of Jordan's friends. We intentionally chose Macaroni Grill that evening for two reasons; it was one of Jordan's favorites, and it is across the street from a really nice Barnes & Noble Store on the north side of Tucson, which was our scheduled Friday evening entertainment that night (yes, we are that boring and that *is* entertainment for us).

I like books, I like bookstores, and I always have. On our occasional trips to this particularly nice Barnes & Noble, I tend to check up on a few science magazines, and then browse through the business, computer and science book areas ... every now and then I drift over to science fiction (although what passes for sci-fi today is usually pretty depressing in that it's clearly not aimed at me and isn't the kind of science fiction that really turns my brain on), and then I settle down in the cafe and get some work done while the kids peruse and otherwise have fun in the store (passing 60-90 minutes in this store in this way is very easy and goes very quickly). But on this night in particular, I was struck by something I noticed in the store (which is really just further proof that the business part of my brain is literally ALWAYS on). Barnes & Noble has a business problem, and I'm not talking about Amazon, eBooks or anything like that. The company does a very good job catering to young children. There's a special area of the store carved out just for them, with rows of special shelves, even a different branding and look. It has special furniture and a stage area for book readings and chairs for children to gather around in. Barnes & Noble does kids well. And then I looked at the rest of the store, and I thought, Barnes & Noble does adults pretty well too. You've got the coffee shop, you've got all those books and other products in all those relevant topics intelligently organized and all set to cater to a variety of interests. But Barnes & Noble doesn't do teenagers very well. Sure there's a young adult and youth section, and there are study books for school ... but it's thrown in with the adults, it's nowhere special, and that's the message I see it sending to teens; you're nowhere special.

Now let's go back to my business model idea. Suppose you were to dedicate some of that retail space (and there's a cost to that for sure which they would need to model out) and you made that an area dedicated to that grade 6-12 demographic ... but you paid special attention to the grade 9-12 kids. It occurs to me that an ever increasing number of children are now taking AP courses, and virtually ALL of them are taking standardized tests like the PSAT, SAT, and ACT. Suppose you offered study sessions that were relevant to those classes and/or those exams. They could even be free because the store could use it as a means of marketing the myriad preparation materials or course materials that the store sells. Many parents today are falling all over themselves to spend money to give their children a competitive advantage in this increasingly competitive (and let's be honest about what that really means, it means wage stratified) world. This would not only be an excellent marketing tool, there's even a bit of legitimate altruism to it, AND, perhaps most importantly, their *brand* would stay relevant to those kids as they move between childhood and adulthood (they would lose fewer of them as customers over time).

Now, you'd need a pretty visionary leader at Barnes & Noble (or whoever, wouldn't have to be them, I just thought of them because that's where I got the idea) to buy off on this idea, and, as with all things worth doing, there would be a LOT of work between approval and implementation, but I think that the rewards might very well be worth it.

So there's your idea. If you want another one, or five or ten more, you can always email me (they pop out of my head like popcorn out of a machine at the movie theater ... and just like the popcorn, some of it's good, some of it's not). I like this one in particular because the older I get the more I like the ideas that will do something I think is cool (which is usually defined as making the world a better place in some way). I hope you like it to, and I hope to see it somewhere beyond my head someday. If you're the person to do it, good luck and thanks. And even if you're not, Merry Christmas!