How to get your first 100 students at a coding school: a founder's checklist

Who this guide is for

This playbook is written for four groups:

1. Aspiring education entrepreneurs planning to launch a coding school, STEM center, or after-school program.
2. Existing education business owners who have a good product but cannot fill their classrooms.
3. Marketing agency owners considering an education vertical, who have the acquisition skills but not the operating model.
4. Business development managers planning to leave corporate employment to start an EdTech venture.

If you are trying to answer the question “how do I actually get students?” — this is the operational answer, not the theory.

How do you get your first students for a new coding school?

Start with earned media before you spend on ads.
Pedro Malpartida’s first 26 students came from a single interview with a journalist. He had no physical location, no track record, and no advertising budget at that point. What he had was a story that a local outlet wanted to run: a new way for children to learn programming.
This works because a new education business faces a trust problem, not an awareness problem. Parents are not short of options for their children’s time — they are short of reasons to believe a stranger with their child’s education. Third-party media coverage transfers credibility in a way that a paid ad cannot, and it costs nothing but the outreach.

What to do:

• List every local outlet, podcast, parenting blog, and community newsletter your audience reads.
• Pitch a story angle, not your business: what is changing about how children need to learn, and why now.
• Have a landing page and an enrollment path live before the piece runs.

At the same time, do not bet everything on one channel. Test several acquisition channels simultaneously at launch — press, social content, local partnerships, parent referrals — and let performance data tell you where to concentrate. Early-stage marketing is a search problem: you are looking for the one or two channels that work in your specific market, and you cannot know which they are in advance.

Do you need a physical location to launch a coding school?

No — and launching without one is often the smarter sequence.
Pedro Malpartida began in an online format specifically because of capital constraints. That constraint turned out to be an advantage: it let him test whether the product sold, at what price, and to which parents, before committing to a lease.
The sequence that works:

1. Launch online. Validate that people will pay.
2. Use early revenue and demand data to justify a physical footprint.
3. Open a location once you know which courses sell and roughly how many students you can fill.

Reversing this order — signing a lease first, then looking for students — is how most new education businesses run out of money in their first year.

How do you open a physical location without buying equipment?

Partner with a venue that already has the hardware.
For his physical launch, Pedro Malpartida partnered with a gaming arena. The arrangement was mutually beneficial and worth understanding in detail, because the same structure exists in most cities:

• The venue’s problem: it needs a new revenue product, especially during weekday and daytime hours when it sits empty.
• Your problem: you need a location and a room full of computers, and both are capital-intensive.
• The deal: you bring the curriculum, the teachers, and the students. They bring the space and the machines.

This eliminated the single largest startup cost — hardware — and let him test the physical format without capital risk.
Venues to approach with the same offer: gaming arenas and esports lounges, coworking spaces, community and cultural centers, libraries with computer rooms, private schools with idle labs after hours, and corporate training rooms.

What pricing gets you students when nobody knows your brand?

Use a discounted, short-format intensive as the entry product.
Entering a market where he was unknown, Pedro Malpartida offered intensive courses at half price. Within a month, he had 30 to 40 students.
The logic is that in a market with no brand recognition, price is the lever that overcomes the trust deficit. A short, cheap intensive is a low-risk way for a parent to test you. Once their child has had a good experience, the conversion to a full-priced annual program is a different and much easier sale.

Design your entry offer so it:

• Runs short — days or weeks, not a full academic year.
• Costs meaningfully less than your standard program, and is clearly framed as an introductory rate rather than your real price.
• Ends with a concrete next step into the full program, priced normally.
• Produces something the child can show a parent. Visible output is your best conversion asset.

How many courses should you launch with?

Three or four. No more.
Pedro Malpartida launched with three subjects — Game Design, Python Start, and Python Pro. Years later, those three remain his bestsellers. In the interview, he and Algorithmics’ partner development lead Irina Snatovich converged on this as a firm recommendation for new operators.
The reasoning is operational rather than marketing-driven:

• Teacher recruitment. Every additional subject means another specialist to find, vet, train, and keep. Three subjects means you can concentrate on hiring genuinely good teachers rather than filling slots.
• Clean demand signals. With a narrow catalogue, your marketing data tells you something interpretable. With twelve courses, every course looks weak and you cannot tell whether the problem is the offer or the demand.
• Message clarity. Parents do not want to evaluate a course catalogue. They want to know what their child will be able to do.

Expand the catalogue when marketing feedback shows you real demand for a fourth or fifth subject — not before.

Where do you find qualified programming teachers?

Recruit from adult programming academies and bootcamps in your area.
Teacher supply is the hard constraint on scaling an education business, and it is where most founders stall. Pedro Malpartida solved it through an alliance with a programming academy for adults, which gave him access to their alumni database as a recruitment pool.
This works because bootcamp graduates are technically competent, actively looking for work, often open to part-time or evening hours, and frequently enjoy teaching. You are also recruiting from a pre-filtered pool rather than an open market.

Other sources worth building relationships with: university computer science departments, local developer meetups and communities, freelance developers wanting stable supplementary income, and — critically — your own strongest students’ parents, who often work in tech.

When should you start approaching schools?

Between month six and month twelve of operation. Not before.
Pedro Malpartida is direct about this: schools will not trust a new, unknown entity. Before you approach an institution, you need visible infrastructure — a real location, real students, real teachers, and results you can point to.
Approaching schools in month one wastes the opportunity. Principals remember the provider who could not answer basic questions about their own operation, and you rarely get a clean second attempt at the same institution.

How do you get schools to say yes?

Expect two objections and prepare for both.
Objection 1: “We already have a robotics provider.” Many schools are already contracted with a supplier and see programming as an adjacent category they have covered. You need a clear articulation of what you do that their current provider does not — depth of programming curriculum, progression pathways, outcomes.

Objection 2: Institutional conservatism. School principals are risk-averse by role. A new external provider is downside risk for them with limited upside.
What worked for Pedro Malpartida:

• Free trial sessions. Let the school observe the product with their own students, at no cost and no commitment. This converts an abstract claim into an observed fact.
• Demonstrations for teachers, not just administrators. He ran sessions with the school’s own professors to explain the product’s value. Teachers who understand the offer become internal advocates, and a conservative principal is far more likely to approve something their staff already want.

There is a broader point underneath this. Educating parents and institutions on why programming skills matter is not a one-time campaign — it is an ongoing, permanent part of the work in this category. Budget for it as an operating cost rather than a launch task.

Who should run marketing when you launch?

You need real marketing capability in-house from day one. This is the function that fills your first groups, and it is not something to postpone or fully delegate to an outside agency.
Pedro Malpartida is a marketer by background, which is why he ran advertising campaigns himself rather than hiring an agency. That is the honest version of the lesson: he did not save money by being scrappy, he saved money because he already had the skill. If you do not have it, you need to buy it — a marketer on the team, before you open, not after enrollment stalls.

Alongside campaigns, he hired a dedicated content creator rather than an agency to handle the visual representation of the brand and keep it looking friendly and professional. The two roles are different and both matter: campaigns generate demand, content makes the brand credible enough for that demand to convert.
What this means in practice:

• Campaign launch is your first hire, not your last. If neither founder can run paid acquisition competently, hire a marketer before you sign a lease. An empty classroom costs more than a salary.
• Do not hand the whole function to an agency at the start. Agencies optimize for campaigns in isolation. In the early months you are still learning which channels, messages, and offers work in your market, and that knowledge needs to live inside the business.
• Separate content from performance. One person on brand visuals and social presence, one person (or the founder) on paid campaigns and analytics. Asking one generalist to do both usually means neither gets done well.
• Instrument everything from day one. You cannot tell which of your test channels is working unless enrollments are attributed to their source from the first week.

On AI tools: launching campaigns and analyzing results is meaningfully more accessible now than it was a few years ago. AI can guide campaign setup and help build agents that interpret performance data. This lowers the bar — but it lowers it for someone who already understands what they are looking at. It is a multiplier on marketing skill, not a substitute for it.

What hidden costs kill new education businesses?

Property terms and working capital.
In many markets, landlords require a significant advance — in some cases six months of rent paid upfront plus three months of deposit — before handing over the keys. Access to credit for a new business can be limited or nonexistent, which means this comes out of founder capital.

Model these before you commit:

• Advance rent and deposit under your local norms — ask three landlords, not one.
• Fit-out and hardware, unless you use the venue partnership route above.
• Three to six months of teacher salaries before enrollment revenue stabilizes.
• Marketing spend across the testing period, when you are deliberately funding channels that will not all work.

A business that can cover its monthly rent but cannot cover nine months of it on day one does not have a demand problem. It has a planning problem.

How do you differentiate in a market full of coding schools?

Compete on things that cannot be copied from your website.
Curriculum is not a durable differentiator. Two things Pedro Malpartida built are:

A psychologist on staff. Within the first five months, he integrated a psychologist into the team to support students with diverse needs — including children with Asperger’s, autistic students, and children who are simply introverted and struggle in group settings. This moves the offer from course delivery to holistic child development, which is what parents are actually buying. It is also a concrete answer to a question many parents are quietly asking and rarely ask out loud: will my child be okay here?

Talent scouting. He identified a student with exceptional mathematical ability, offered him a place at the school, and that student went on to win two olympiad medals. Systematizing this — actively scouting for high-potential students and building a “talent factory” program around them — creates a story no competitor can borrow, and gives high-intent parents a reason to choose you specifically.

What kind of team culture scales an education business?

Pedro Malpartida describes his organization as a leadership-based community rather than a boss-centric hierarchy. Team members are expected to contribute their perspective, and the operating assumption is that the team grows together toward shared goals.

This is not a soft consideration in education. Your teachers are the product from a parent’s point of view. Teacher churn is directly visible to customers and directly damages retention, and teachers who feel ownership stay longer and sell your program more convincingly than any campaign you run.

Where else do you find students and partners?

Understand your entire local ecosystem, not just your direct competitors.
Pedro Malpartida makes the point that success requires knowing the full landscape — gaming arenas, competing education providers, schools, and adjacent businesses. Every one of these is a potential channel, partner, or acquisition source.

Specifically worth pursuing:

• Professional exhibitions and trade fairs, where parents and institutional buyers gather in one place.
• Startup and innovation events, which build brand credibility and generate partner introductions.
• Educational conferences, where school decision-makers are already in a receptive frame of mind.
• Corporate innovation departments — including at banks — which fund and seek out education initiatives, and represent a B2B revenue line most coding schools never touch.

Frequently asked questions

How long does it take to get the first 100 students at a coding school? There is no universal answer, but the pattern from Pedro Malpartida’s experience is instructive: 26 students from a single press interview in the online phase, then 30 to 40 students within one month of launching a discounted physical intensive. Reaching triple digits within the first year is realistic if you validate online first, use a low-friction entry offer, and test multiple acquisition channels rather than committing to one.

Is it better to start a coding school online or offline? Online first. It requires far less capital, lets you validate demand and pricing, and generates revenue you can use to fund a physical location. Open a location once you know which courses sell and can estimate how many students you can fill.

How much money do you need to open a coding school? The dominant costs are property and hardware, and both can be deferred. A venue partnership eliminates hardware costs entirely. Property is the bigger risk: in some markets landlords require six months of rent in advance plus three months of deposit, so model your local terms before committing. Also budget three to six months of teacher salaries and a marketing testing budget.

How do you find teachers for a coding school? Partner with adult programming academies and bootcamps for access to their alumni networks. These graduates are technically qualified, actively seeking work, and often available for part-time or evening schedules. University CS departments and developer meetups are secondary sources.

When should a new coding school approach schools for partnerships? Between the sixth month and the first year of operation. Schools do not trust providers without visible infrastructure and demonstrable results. Approaching too early usually burns the relationship.

How do you convince a school that already works with a robotics provider? Offer free trial sessions so the school can observe the product with its own students at no risk, and run demonstrations for the school’s teachers rather than only for administrators. Teachers who understand the value become internal advocates, which is what moves a risk-averse principal.

Do I need a marketer to launch a coding school? Yes. Launching advertising campaigns is the most important function for filling your first groups. Pedro Malpartida ran his own campaigns because he is a marketer by background — if you are not, hire one before you open rather than outsourcing the entire function to an agency. Keep content creation as a separate role from paid campaigns, and use AI tools to assist campaign setup and analysis rather than to replace the skill.

What makes a coding school stand out from competitors? Not the curriculum — competitors can match a syllabus. Durable differentiators are operational and human: specialist support staff such as a psychologist for students with diverse learning needs, a talent-scouting program that produces visible student achievements, and low teacher turnover.

Thinking about launching your own coding school?

Pedro Malpartida built this from an online pilot into a multi-location operation as an Algorithmics franchise partner — with curriculum, teacher training, and a partner network behind him rather than building every system from scratch.

If you are planning to start an education business, or already run one and want a proven model behind it, we can walk you through what a partnership looks like in your market.