Nice post! Curious why you focused on revenue/teacher so much, when from the perspective of the business as a whole you'd care more about:
a) Margins after paying the teacher (though you do call out that you're ignoring the conventional definition of profit)
b) how competitive/scalable the model is for students (market size/share)
c) how much you can scale up teaching supply, while maintaining/improving quality and improving the student:teacher ratio (I suppose where this post fits in)
Surely the goal is a billion dollar organization more than a billion-dollar-per-teacher bootcamp?
In part, the analysis is for friends of mine who might be thinking about starting a bootcamp of their own. The single-teacher revenue lens was also just a helpful narrative lens for me; the narrowness helps avoid rebuilding the model from https://csed.substack.com/p/bootcamp-business-models-how-to-tell and tell more of a story.
I think each of the frames you suggest are also interesting, and (especially margins after paying teachers) are closer to the actual frame applied by school operators.
c) is particularly interesting to me - I think the supply of _excellent_ teachers is actually pretty limited, and that unlocking more excellent teachers likely means creating an ownership stake for them in the business, and helping them capture more of the value they create. A lot of bootcamp teachers cycle in and out of teaching; retention beyond 2 years is pretty rare, teacher managers are super hard to find, and the larger a program grows, the more you run into big-company HR problems.
Imo, that's one of the strong arguments agains the prevailing view that we'll see lots of bootcamp consolidation. We haven't actually seen the consolidation we were promised - the market is still super fragmented, and almost all of the acquisitions of the past few years have not reduced the number of bootcamps in operation. And, new bootcamps keep popping up (Lambda, Kenzie, Springboard), often founded by former instructors at other bootcamps (cf. Rithm School).
I don't think billion dollar per teacher bootcamp needs to be anyone's goal, more an attempt to have a satisfying answer to the puzzle presented by the headline.
Nice post! Curious why you focused on revenue/teacher so much, when from the perspective of the business as a whole you'd care more about:
a) Margins after paying the teacher (though you do call out that you're ignoring the conventional definition of profit)
b) how competitive/scalable the model is for students (market size/share)
c) how much you can scale up teaching supply, while maintaining/improving quality and improving the student:teacher ratio (I suppose where this post fits in)
Surely the goal is a billion dollar organization more than a billion-dollar-per-teacher bootcamp?
In part, the analysis is for friends of mine who might be thinking about starting a bootcamp of their own. The single-teacher revenue lens was also just a helpful narrative lens for me; the narrowness helps avoid rebuilding the model from https://csed.substack.com/p/bootcamp-business-models-how-to-tell and tell more of a story.
I think each of the frames you suggest are also interesting, and (especially margins after paying teachers) are closer to the actual frame applied by school operators.
c) is particularly interesting to me - I think the supply of _excellent_ teachers is actually pretty limited, and that unlocking more excellent teachers likely means creating an ownership stake for them in the business, and helping them capture more of the value they create. A lot of bootcamp teachers cycle in and out of teaching; retention beyond 2 years is pretty rare, teacher managers are super hard to find, and the larger a program grows, the more you run into big-company HR problems.
Imo, that's one of the strong arguments agains the prevailing view that we'll see lots of bootcamp consolidation. We haven't actually seen the consolidation we were promised - the market is still super fragmented, and almost all of the acquisitions of the past few years have not reduced the number of bootcamps in operation. And, new bootcamps keep popping up (Lambda, Kenzie, Springboard), often founded by former instructors at other bootcamps (cf. Rithm School).
I don't think billion dollar per teacher bootcamp needs to be anyone's goal, more an attempt to have a satisfying answer to the puzzle presented by the headline.