Scrimba podcast alt text

What is Scrimba?

Scrimba (YC S20) is a coding course platform with over 120K monthly active students. It's based on a new video format that makes the screencasts fully interactive for students, and easier to create for teachers.

What is the Scrimba podcast?

The Scrimba Podcast is a top-ranking technology podcast for aspiring coders looking to transition into tech. At the time of this writing, there are currently 103 episodes, generating 14,000+ downloads per month.

Here are some of my favourite episodes to give you a sense for what the show is all about. One week I interview a recently-hired Scrimba student. The next week, I interview an experienced professional about their career advice:

Key accomplishments & responsibilities

I started the Scrimba podcast from scratch in 2020. Here are my key accomplishments to date,

  • 🏆 103 episodes
  • 🏆 14,000+ downloads a month
  • 🏆 Developed an engaging and evergreen format that keeps listeners coming back
  • 🏆 Record Scrimba success stories that inspire students to convert to Scrimba and stick around for longer
  • 🏆 Elevated Scrimba’s brand by positioning Scrimba alongside student’s favorite teachers and creators
  • 🏆 Hire and collaborate with a senior-level editor and producer
  • 🏆 Developed a content repurposing strategy to remix recordings into short-form social media content
  • 🏆 Adapt a template to code and deploy the Scrimba Podcast website myself

In my role as Content Lead, it's my responsibility to:

  • Publish an episode every week (haven't missed a week in 89+ weeks)
  • Source and reach out to my own guests
  • Make newly-hired students who have never been on a podcast before feel comfortable and bring out the best in them

The business problem

When it comes to learning how to code, students are spoiled for choice. Great for students really! But for a coding course platform like Scrimba, it can be tricky to keep students subscribed and manage churn.

When I joined Scrimba in 2020, Per (Scrimba CEO and co-founder) and I collaborated on a series of experiments to identify high impact initiatives to keep students engaged and reduce churn.

A company effort

After running several experiments, I learned Scrimba students are more than willing to jump on a call, share their learnings, and probably rave about their experience with Scrimba a little bit 🕺🏻. That's when the epithany hit. We could record those conversations as success stories and publish them as a podcast!

The hypothesis went something like this,

A company effort

All we had to do now was prove the hypotheses! There was just one problem...

I had no idea how to start a podcast.

Solution: A podcast is born

Yeah, that's right. Another one!

Now, at this point I had never made a podcast before but I knew I could figure that out.

For the first few episode, I recorded using my laptop microphone and edited the episodes myself in Adobe Premiere:

A company effort

I don't think it was up to NPRs standards 😅! But it was good enough to start learning and iterating on the positioning of the podcast.

A few months later, we arrived at a podcast elevator pitch and format that hooks our listeners:

My editor, Jan, and I collaborated closely to make the format as good as it can possibly be and develop an efficient workflow:

A company effort

We haven't missed a weekly episode in 89+ weeks are still going strong!

Tools I use

  • How to start a podcast in 2023
  • My home podcast recording setup
  • How to ask better questions in a podcast interview