The Iceberg Principle #4: Blooming in tech with Austen Allred

The very first time ZayZoon’s president Tate Hackert met Austen in June of 2018, Austen pulled out one of Tate’s business cards.

Tate was confused. He hadn’t given out any business cards yet.  

Turns out there was a hole in Tate’s pocket and like a trail of breadcrumbs, Austen followed the cards into the meeting.

Since then, Tate’s bought new pants—and Austen has also done some exciting things.

From missionary work in the middle of the 2008 financial crisis to CEO of a thriving tech company, Austen was a perfect subject for our Iceberg Principle series.  

Working in Ukraine

After growing up in a small mining town in Utah, Austen served his church on a mission to the Ukraine. Like all male Mormons, he received a letter at 19 telling him where he would be doing his work. Due to cultural differences in the area, Austen knew his work would be hard but he embraced that challenge and spent 3 months, non-stop learning the language and preparing for his journey.

Austen would feel accomplished if he was able to convert even one person to his religion at the time but says above all else, this journey was one of self-discovery.

eBay hustling

During his time in Ukraine, Austen learned the importance of long-term goal-setting and growth hacking.

“When I think of growth, I think of what motivates people, what excites people, how do you cause somebody to do the thing that you need them to do? The growth hacking aspect of that is how do you identify what that message is and then touch the right person at the right time with the right message.”

At a young age, Austen constantly found himself building things like websites and other entrepreneurial endeavors but quickly realized that building a cool product was only half the battle. The real challenge was getting the word out there and finding the right people in the right places.

He quickly fell in love with the idea of driving traffic to certain pages and experimenting with SEO. He started out making random web pages from scratch with the hopes of driving as much traffic as possible to them but quickly ran into two problems:

What is something that is actually interesting and people will want to look at?

And once you have that thing, how do you get people to see it and how do you scale that?

Some of his earliest experiments included building his own news sites but he quickly got into flipping iPods in the early days of eBay.

Before eBay had the sophisticated algorithm it uses today, you would have to sift through thousands of listings with many great offers going unnoticed due to poor descriptions and search engine optimization.

This is where Austen saw a great opportunity. Buy the iPods with poor descriptions at a lower cost and make more detailed listings of the same iPod to sell at a profit.

Bloomtech

His idea for Bloomtech stemmed from a conversation he had with a friend who, at the time, was in tremendous student loan debt and trying to figure out how to make money as a developer.

They came to the simple conclusion that when it comes to writing code, the best way to bring value is to either start a product or get a job but then Austen asked him this:

“What if we just became really good at helping people learn to code enough to get a job?”

After a lot of iteration and customer interviews, that became Lambda School which would eventually evolve into Bloomtech.

The original concept was pretty simple. Find a dedicated community of devs and offer them a short, three-month, interactive coding boot camp from the comfort of their own home. An option that was not available at the time.  

They had their service figured out and the value it could bring, the next big step was finding the right people. After some research on Reddit, Austen realized that the posts with the most engagement and pull offered some sort of free resources where people could learn—so Austen did just that.

Before even having a brand name or website, Austen went to Reddit to offer people a type form page that they could fill out to get signed up for a free boot camp where they would get brought up to speed and learn the basics.

For the first live class ever, they were able to get 8,000 people online and they quickly realized how strong the demand for an online, interactive course was. After that first session, they learned of over 100 people willing to spend $7,000 to $10,000 on their course.

Austen and his partner quit their jobs and got right to work.

As things started to pick up, they knew people out there willing to spend good money on their course but the biggest problem was that a lot of the people looking for a course like this didn’t have the right capital to get involved.

This is when the business model that Bloomtech would become famous for was born.

Offer an option to take the course for free, with the promise of paying back the tuition at a higher price—but not until they’ve secured a job that pays $50,000 or more.

Austen’s Story Highlights

Hearing Austen’s story was a pleasure and it’s always great getting to learn from insightful minds that join us on The Iceberg Principle.

From his time in Ukraine doing missionary work to his time in Silicon Valley raising over $100 million in VC, Austen has lived a very illustrious life. One that is hard to capture in a blog. 

Full recording:

If you’d like to learn more and sign up for Iceberg Principle, a series of interactive conversations with people like Austen that we host every month, click here.