Students Worldwide Learn Programming From Vernon Company

Oct. 06--VERNON -- Serial entrepreneur Mark Lassoff ran two companies in Austin, a tech-nirvana if there ever was one. But his three-year-old startup LearnToProgram Media, in a low-rent office building in Vernon, is his longest tenure anywhere.

Lassoff, 40, grew up in Trumbull and Wesport, and moved back to Connecticut in 2009, just after he shut down a startup based on the idea of selling branded Internet radio stations.

For a couple of years, he worked as a contract programming trainer, traveling around the country. But after a Javascript class he posted on Udemy.com did well, he decided to launch LearnToProgram.tv.

For six months, he filmed all the courses and also continued to travel as a trainer.

"The in-person training was very lucrative. Supporting the three of us, and then some," Lassoff said.

At the time, he employed his brother and Kevin Hernandez. He said he convinced Hernandez "to drop out of UConn and come join our startup."

"As Employee No. 1, he really grabbed this by the horns," he said of Hernandez, who now runs the day-to-day operations of producing videos. His brother moved on to an insurance company.

LearnToProgram has three products -- online courses, promotional videos designed to sell people on the courses, and books. In the best channel for customer leads, of every 100 people who watch a promotional video, seven end up buying a course. That's gone up over time, he said.

It offers 40 courses, in Java, Python, Ruby on Rails, basics of web page programming, variations of C, how to use GitHub and more. More than 50 percent of students buy a second course after taking one.

This year, 60 percent of gross sales wil l come from individuals taking courses, and half of those students are outside the United States and Canada. After English-speaking North America, India is the second largest market, and the Phillipines is also in the double digits. Pakistan and England are next.

Less than 20 percent of the students are women.

Many students are working in information technology -- on help desks, as network administrators -- and hope to move up, and some want to do a total career change.

That's what Cody Norman, 28, of Philadelphia, did. He had been a mortgage loan officer, and quit to go to a three-month software bootcamp in the Silicon Valley. But while he was still working, he took a half dozen classes with Learn To Program. He tried the first one after getting halfway through free computer science courses at MIT. That was too theoretical, he said, he wanted to learn by doing.

"It was certainly a huge help being able to get the foundation" before going to the bootcamp. There, he learned Ruby on Rails, and a week before graduation, went to work for a startup in Philly as a programmer. That was two months ago.

Customers find Learn To Program through a variety of channels -- on Roku, a streaming video device that connects to your TV; on YouTube; and, most commonly, on Udemy, an online course marketplace.

Phil Mummah, 64, of Palo Alto, had a long career in C programming and managing coders, but hoped to transition to web and mobile application work, which he could do from home.

He looked on Udemy and tried a number of providers. "Some are very good. Some of them are just not that good," he said.

Lassoff's classes, he said, are worth the price. He took a half dozen, always buying them on specials, and spending about $200.

The list price for a typical course is $99, but Lassoff said the average receipt is $39, as there's lots of discounting.

About 15 percent of gross sales are books, either for Kindle or in paperback, printed on demand through an Amazon subsidiary. Currently Lassoff's ebook on Swift, a brand-new programming language for iOS 8 applications, is the top seller in "hot new releases" in Amazon programming guides. The 264-page paperback was 11th.

That means the physical books are selling about 25 a day, and about 55 a day for the Kindle. "They're not going to sell like a Dean Koontz novel," he said.

Swift debuted just a few weeks ago, but Lassoff had access to the language in beta testing for a few months. He said he studied the language after a full day at the office. "I don't have a boundary between my personal life and my professional life," he said. Studying new languages and updates to languages "is my fun time."

Many of the more established publishers won't issue their Swift books for several more months. The flip side of that is that some Amazon reviewers complain of typos, including in the coding examples, where every letter counts.

Books are fastest growing sales segment, and make up 15 percent of gross sales. Lassoff said he intends to hire a sales person to expand bulk sales -- to companies and for-profit schools -- which is also 15 percent of the business.

LearnToProgram has 7 full-time staff and five part-timers, and Lassoff expects six months from now, he'll have 10 to 11 full-time staff. He's not sure where to put them all -- he's renting just 1,600 sq feet in what he jokes is a Class D office building. Renting a bigger space in New Britain might help him with recruiting -- he said it can take three to four months to fill jobs, as some folks don't want to commute east of the river. But he doesn't want to move too far for his current employees, either.

All of his work for the company is unpaid. Lassoff said selling software from his former companies didn't make him rich, but it gave him enough of a cushion that he can afford to live on savings for a few years.

In hindsight, he wishes he had launched the company in New Haven, because there, he could have had programming experts come and film evenings or weekends. In Vernon, he finds he has to fly people in from out of town and put them up for a week in a hotel, which gets expensive.

Lassoff moved to the Hartford area from Bridgeport in 2010, because he needed his brother's help as he was being treated for colon cancer.

The company did $425,000 in gross sales in 2012, $705,000 in 2013, and will do more than $1.2 million this year, he said. His goal is to do at least $2 million next year.

Revenue is not that high -- Udemy, Amazon, Groupon and other partners get a cut -- but the growth trend is strong enough, Lassoff said, that he's already gotten an offer to sell the video library to a larger publisher. He turned it down.

"I think if we keep at it another 18 to 24 months, it'll be worth a lot more," he said. But he might keep LearnToProgram going for four or five years, he said. That's partly because if he sells the assets rather than the company, all his employees would be out of work.

"I couldn't have built this without them, and I wouldn't sell it without them," he said.

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