Community Coders

Kaito Cunningham was a 19-year-old first-year university student at Simon Fraser University when he started Community Coders. His motivation was unconventional—he didn't have a deep "why" but rather wanted to try something new, inspired by the glamorous entrepreneurship content he saw on Instagram and LinkedIn. However, as he reflected on his own high school experience flipping burgers, he realized students like him would have valued the flexibility, pay, and resume-building opportunity of coding projects or social media management. This insight became the real driving force: providing young adults with meaningful work experience.

The idea came together in a hackathon competition, where Kaito and two university friends won the top prize. They started meeting once a week, then gradually shifted to working on it daily after classes, juggling both friendship and business partnerships.

Their first concrete move was a two-week summer coding bootcamp in August 2018. The team bootstrapped aggressively—they used school classrooms for free, rented laptops from the local library, and learned code alongside their students. In week one, high school students learned HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. In week two, they tackled real client projects for businesses in real estate, law, and construction.

They made approximately $3,000 from this pilot by charging businesses for the work and collecting a small student fee. While modest, Kaito found it eye-opening to see revenue generated "from nothing." However, he admits a critical mistake: they didn't treat the pilot as a proper experiment with hypotheses and KPIs. They collected only qualitative data, which later led to a problematic pivot decision.

Their business model was straightforward: charge businesses (e.g., $1,000 for a website), pay students $750, and keep $250 as an intermediary fee. Getting those first customers required aggressive outreach. The team went door-to-door, cold called, posted on personal social media (especially LinkedIn), and ran Facebook ads. Cold calling and door-to-door proved ineffective—their conversion rates were extremely low, and the pitch confused local business owners: "How the hell does coding apply to me?" The branding was also a liability: the name "Community Coders" positioned them as education-focused, not as a digital marketing and web development service.

What actually worked: partnerships with organizations like the League of Innovators and SFU Venture Connections. By hosting events and workshops for motivated high school students, they recruited heavily—about 20% of students who attended joined their Facebook group. Personal social media presence also drove credibility and referrals, though referrals became their best customer acquisition channel—ironically making their lack of early customers a chicken-and-egg problem.

The on-the-ground, one-on-one relationship building with students worked brilliantly. Events and offline partnerships were their most effective marketing channel. However, cold calling, door-to-door, Facebook ads, SEO, and Google Ads all failed. They struggled with online visibility ("if you search up coding there's so much other stuff") and couldn't differentiate on price since they wanted to pay students fairly.

The real problem: they had too many interested students but couldn't get enough business clients. This imbalance killed the model. Kaito also made poor product decisions—pivoting toward a software platform without having developers on the team, attempting to learn C++ when no-code tools existed, and wasting 2 weeks learning JavaScript for a pivot that wasn't validated. When they went full-time on the venture, despite maximum effort, they couldn't make it work. Stagnation set in, team morale dropped, and Kaito felt the mental toll acutely.

After approximately 2 years (1 full-time, 1 part-time), they shut down Community Coders. Total expenses were roughly $35,000 against $20,000 in revenue—a $15,000 loss. More than financial, the cost was emotional and mental; Kaito struggled with imposter syndrome and the social stigma of "failure," though he's now reframing it as a learning investment.

The core lessons: find a profitable, repeatable customer acquisition method early; document your journey publicly (personal brand beats company brand at stage zero); understand that building a business is a 5+ year commitment; and use no-code tools rather than learning programming languages. Kaito has since joined Ernst & Young as an assurance intern and started a new project called Spred—a workflow management tool for clothing resellers—which he's pitching at entrepreneurship competitions.