The Route of all Evil

2 min read

No, that is not a spelling mistake.

Since the day we started, we have been a not-for-profit initiative, focused on improving the standard of programming in India and improving competitive programming as a sport.

However, we need money in the same way that a student needs money – but instead of asking for it from our parents (that’s Directi) as we have been doing for the last 8 years, or from our friends (that’s you), we have decided to earn it ourselves.

In the last few years, we started reaching out to schools in our pursuit of bringing informatics to the young guns in India, and we realised that having a steady source of income would help us get there faster.

We will be monetising some of our channels to start a self-sufficient revenue stream, in a way a student takes up a part-time job in a call centre to earn some money. We will also try to use the expertise that we have gained in the subject to offer additional paid services that will add more value to those who need it.

More so, we can assure you that you will not be charged for any of our existing services – it will be absolutely free! And we will continue to remain not-for-profit. Yes, that is right. The money that we make will be invested back in the projects rather than in making us (or our parents) rich.

Our focus has always been, still is, and will always be – learning.

That kind of sums it up, but for those who need more clarity on why we are doing this, let me try to explain.

  1. Our parents are not disowning us. They will keep supporting us, but we want to become self-sufficient. CodeChef has been a Directi initiative and will continue to remain so. However, now that the kids at CodeChef have grown up, we believe that we should stand on our own feet. The change that we had envisioned when we started has widened in scope, and so we believe that we will need a lot more resources than what we have right now, and approaching our parents for every single such need seems inappropriate.
  2. Why the sudden need for monetising?As briefly mentioned above, in the last few years we have realised that if we want to transform the problem-solving landscape in India, reaching out to schools is unavoidable. The challenges that we face are:
    1. The school space is far larger than the college space. The number of schools is an order of magnitude larger than the number of colleges.
    2. Schools are not online. A large majority of school students are not connected to the internet.
    3. Awareness in schools about programming is abysmally low.
    4. Schools are ill-equipped with computing facilities.

    To address the above limitations, we will need access to a lot more resources than we presently have.

  3. The goal of this move is to start sustaining ourselves and scale up – earn what we need for our expenses. We believe we can do so.

We are aware that this little blog post may still not give you the clarity you need, which is why you’re welcome to address all your queries to our Twitter handle, using #WhyCodeChefWhy, so that we can better track them and ensure we respond to each and every query.

That is all for now – Code on!

Cheers,
Chef

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4 Replies to “The Route of all Evil”

  1. Always with you guys in whatever you do <3 , we wouldn't have been where we are if not for Codechef. Do consider Wikipedia's approach though, we will give back as much as we can to help the community thrive 🙂

  2. Thanks to Chef for every recipe he taught me !! You are doing a wonderful job of bringing ‘programming skills’ to the schools in India. We , the ‘Codechefers’, are willing to contribute some.

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