Stacking the Bricks
Alex Hillman and Amy Hoy met at SXSW in 2007 and stayed in touch as Amy moved to Vienna. On Christmas 2009, sitting in Amy's kitchen, they had a conversation that sparked the idea for Stacking the Bricks. It was post-recession America, and everyone was obsessed with venture capital and startups, but Alex and Amy noticed their creative friends didn't know how to sell products themselves. They realized there was an untapped market: talented builders who needed to learn business skills.
Before teaming up, Amy had launched Freckle (later Noko), a time-tracking SaaS, and had been selling three-hour consulting calls explaining her process—people kept asking for more. When Alex and Amy decided to formalize this into a course called "Year of Hustle: Zero to Launch" (later renamed 30x500), they pre-sold it for $300-$500 to Amy's newsletter subscribers and conference call participants. The first version was entirely written content. They had a huge advantage: Amy had been writing about software design and development for years, building trust within the developer and designer community.
The early written course was loved by students, but Alex and Amy discovered a critical problem: most students weren't actually implementing what they learned. Information alone wasn't enough. Inspired by Kathy Sierra's teaching methodology, they completely restructured the course to focus on practice-able skills. They launched a 2-day intensive "Bootcamp" format with live instruction, short videos, and guided exercises with real-time feedback. Students became much more successful, but after 2.5 years, they realized the live format was unsustainable for them and inaccessible for students in different time zones or with family commitments.
In 2015, they converted the live bootcamp into a self-guided course with 40+ hours of pre-recorded video lessons, interactive exercises, guided practice, and an online community. The course enrolls thousands of students and opens quarterly. Their marketing strategy centers on authentic community engagement and educational content—podcasts, blog posts, and tools—rather than traditional advertising (they tested paid ads with mediocre results). Alex emphasizes that being a helpful community member, not just promoting when you have something to sell, drives trust and sales. Today, they continue operating Stacking the Bricks alongside Alex's other business, Indy Hall, a coworking community he founded in 2006.
- •They identified a real market gap: talented builders didn't know how to monetize their skills without venture capital, creating strong demand for their specific teaching niche.
- •They built an audience before the product, leveraging Amy's years of trust-building in the developer and designer community, which gave them immediate distribution.
- •They iterated ruthlessly based on student outcomes, not just satisfaction—realizing theory wasn't enough and rebuilding the entire course to emphasize practice and implementation.
- •They chose sustainable teaching methods over rapid scaling, pivoting away from live bootcamps that drained them to a scalable self-guided format that actually worked.
- •They became genuine community members rather than mercenary marketers, earning trust through helpful content and participation before ever promoting, creating sustainable organic growth.
- 1.Start by pre-selling your course or product to a small warm audience (email list or existing customers) at a lower price point ($300-$500) to validate demand and generate initial revenue before full development.
- 2.If teaching or selling expertise, spend years building trust in your target community first through writing, speaking, and authentic participation before launching a monetized product.
- 3.Design your product around outcomes and practice, not just information delivery—create exercises, feedback loops, and accountability structures that force implementation, not passive consumption.
- 4.Test different delivery formats and be willing to completely rebuild if a format isn't sustainable or accessible; live bootcamps to self-guided courses to hybrid models are all valid iterations.
- 5.Focus your marketing on creating genuinely helpful educational content (podcasts, blog posts, tools) and being an active, non-promotional community member; trust and visibility will drive enrollment without paid ads.
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