This "Scaling a School" series is a topic I will return to intermittently in the newsletter. The goal is to expose some of the tensions involved when scaling a school & explore how different institutions resolve them.

I've worked with many schools and bootcamps over the last decade, and one of the things that has surprised me is that none of them have product-market fit.

To be clear, I don't mean this to say that all schools are bad or that the system is broken. I'm merely trying to find a provocative way of pointing out that they can't have product-market fit. Fundamentally they aren't able to, no school is.

The "strong market demand" from the student isn't for a school and in the bootcamp space specifically, the "strong market demand" is for a pathway to a better job, and plenty of people wake up needing a better one of those.

This pathway (commonly referred to as "an offering" or "course") is the connection between the student and the job, and its basic function is to meet the requirements of both. Once it's able to reliably guide learners to a job it has product-market fit.