Collin Stewart: Welcome back to the Predictable revenue. Podcast I'm your host, Colin Stewart. And today I'm joined by Jason Fletcher. He's the founder and CEO over@devpipeline.com. And we're going to talk product market fit before we jump in. This episode is brought to you by predictable revenues. Founder coaching program founders. Let's be real
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Collin Stewart: scaling. A company is tough. You're juggling product revenue hiring a million other things. But what if you had a proven framework and expert guidance to help you navigate the chaos. That's where our founder coaching program comes in. Whether you're trying to find your 1st customers or fine tune. Your go to market. We're here to help you build a business that scales well, predictably.
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Collin Stewart: Jason. Welcome to the show. Thanks for joining us.
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Jason Fletcher: Hey? Thanks, Colin! Happy to be here.
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Collin Stewart: Happy to have you. I'm curious. I'd love to dive in to Dev Pipeline. Talk to me about where the idea came from.
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Jason Fletcher: Yeah, that's
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Jason Fletcher: kind of a long time coming. Actually, I it started really as a kind of a personal response to what I saw as a broken system.
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Jason Fletcher: I've been doing software development since the eighties
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Jason Fletcher: when we got the commodore 64 for Christmas, and I and I just fell in love with computers. I fell in love with development, and as my schooling and career progressed throughout my life, I started to kind of move into positions of hiring developers and and training developers.
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Jason Fletcher: And I, I'm a college graduate, 1st generation college graduate from my family. And I don't
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Jason Fletcher: wanna sound like, I'm picking on the college system because I believe it has a place, and I believe that it serves a purpose. But I saw that there were people coming out of college that lacked experience. I saw companies struggling to hire people that that, you know were qualified companies don't have the capabilities really to to Upskill and to train their own people.
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Jason Fletcher: And so I thought, There's there's got to be a better way to do this. I saw that there were companies kind of sprouting up like boot camps. Online trainings, things like that where they're trying to solve the problem. But they're doing it at almost a get rich, quick kind of methodology and 12 weeks for a boot camp just wasn't enough time to really learn what they were supposed to learn. So
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Jason Fletcher: with this, this gap of
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Jason Fletcher: over a million jobs being unfilled in the tech sector every year, and all the colleges and training programs only accounting for about 60,000 graduates every year we were never gonna fill that. So I thought, how how do we get people qualified to be software developers and help provide that talent to companies. And so.
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Jason Fletcher: as companies were struggling to hire and people couldn't break in, I said, Well, I know software development. I know training. How about if we
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Jason Fletcher: blend the 2? And we start our own apprenticeship.
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Jason Fletcher: And you know, it really is
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Jason Fletcher: kind of a centuries old model that we're applying to software development.
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Jason Fletcher: And and so that's where that's where really the idea of Dev pipeline came from.
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Collin Stewart: So you had this idea. How do you go about validating it and testing it like what? What came between 1st customer and decision to do something about the gap you saw in the market.
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Jason Fletcher: Yeah, the validation was actually just getting in and doing it.
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Jason Fletcher: We hire. I hired
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Jason Fletcher: 3 boot camp graduates. They weren't qualified to get jobs. They they had no confidence. They could get a job. So I said, Okay, I'll just hire them. We'll go out and find projects to work on.
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Jason Fletcher: and that turned into 6 developers, and then it turned into 8 developers. And by that point we were validating with higher education. We formed a partnership with a college down at Ephram, Utah, called Snow College, and we started to develop our own curriculum at that point.
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Jason Fletcher: instead of relying on their training from before we were going to provide that training as well as the on the job training that apprenticeship model. And so our validation really came just by starting.
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Jason Fletcher: And I thought, Hey, I've got the resources to start it, and we've got people who need it. Let's just go and figure it out as we go, and that really has come from. You know that that
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Jason Fletcher: that method has worked out for us because we've seen
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Jason Fletcher: more and more developers come or wanting to be developers, people who
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Jason Fletcher: are not employed, people who are underemployed, people who've always wanted to get into tech, or it's relatively new for them. And we have companies that are in dire need of developers and companies that are in dire need of development services. And so as we've
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Jason Fletcher: as we've just gone forward, we've. It's almost as if
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Jason Fletcher: both sides have come out of the woodworks for us. And we're the number one. In fact, for a while we're the only software development full stack apprenticeship in Utah.
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Jason Fletcher: and we have customers outside of the State of Utah. We have customers in the State of Utah, and as we grew
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Jason Fletcher: we actually found a lot of success in the rural communities. So there's a community out East in Utah called vernal, and primarily vernal, is
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Jason Fletcher: oil and gas, and so what you see is when oil and gas is doing well. Vernal's got 20,000 people in town
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Jason Fletcher: when vernal, when oil and gas is down. There's about 10,000 people in town, and businesses are struggling because it's not just the oil and gas businesses now that are struggling, it's the restaurants. It's the supermarkets. It's the hardware stores. Everybody is struggling. And so they've always been looking for ways to diversify their economy. So as we've brought this program to Vernal. They embraced it wholeheartedly.
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Jason Fletcher: The county has scholarship money for individuals who live in the county who want to take the program, and the companies there are just hungry for local talent. So it's worked out really well for us.
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Collin Stewart: You'll have to forgive me. Because when I 1st looked at your website, I saw Dev pipeline.
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Collin Stewart: I assumed he was referring to software pipeline. And then my brain went, okay, another dev shop. But this sounds. It does sound like you do some of that outsource development. But the apprenticeship program really sounds unique. Help me understand specifically what that looks like. Just because I feel like it'll help add some more color to the rest of what we're going to talk about.
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Jason Fletcher: Yeah, absolutely. The the name Dev pipeline refers to developer pipeline. So we are a pipeline for software developers.
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Jason Fletcher: The the work that we do for clients is is part of the formula, but the primary goal of our company is to help build careers. So we work primarily with department of workforce services vocational rehab. We work with apprenticeship Utah. And there's groups here in Utah that government groups that work with what they call Utah at risk youth.
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Jason Fletcher: I like California's term. They call them opportunity youth.
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Jason Fletcher: And so we work with these groups to find those who are maybe disenfranchised find immigrants find people who are underemployed or unemployed.
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Jason Fletcher: whose opportunities just don't exist. And so our primary focus is on the training and the apprenticeship. And sometimes that apprenticeship is with us. We hire them. They work on client work, they work on projects that we're building. And sometimes it's they're hired by our employer partners. So the goal really is.
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Jason Fletcher: can we take someone who doesn't have a job in tech and maybe doesn't have those skills and help them build that career?
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Jason Fletcher: And if if you kind of sum it up in. In one story I would say there was a there was a lady. Her name was Silvana. She was a Bulgarian immigrant came to the United States she had kids, and she was got the only job she could get which was a
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Jason Fletcher: medical tech at a hospital.
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Jason Fletcher: She hated it she? She was working long hours low pay. She really didn't like it, but she was doing it because she was providing for her family.
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Collin Stewart: She decided she wanted to do more. She wanted to to do.
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Jason Fletcher: She wanted to have a career and something that was exciting to her, and software development was exciting to her. So we found out about her story, and how much she was putting in for her family. She literally was just
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Jason Fletcher: all day, every day with raising her kids, going to work long hours and burning the candle at both ends, and we ended up scholarshipping her entirely, so she didn't have to pay anything for the program.
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Jason Fletcher: I remember I was teaching the coding foundations course, and
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Jason Fletcher: she showed up to class one morning, and she was just in tears. And this was probably 3 weeks into the program, and I thought, Oh, no.
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Jason Fletcher: she's not gonna make it. She was explaining how she was just up all night. She was trying to get this to work, couldn't get it to work, and it was frustrating for her, especially when she's already low on sleep. And
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Jason Fletcher: and
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Jason Fletcher: I remember she fought through it, and she was doing better by the time the program was over. It's a 45 week program.
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Jason Fletcher: and by the time the program was 2 weeks from ending. She called me, and she said, I want you to know. I just got a job offer.
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Jason Fletcher: and I said, Tell me about it.
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Jason Fletcher: she said, well, I thought, I'll just start applying. So she applied to Lee County, Florida, which is where she lives
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Jason Fletcher: to be a junior software developer. They were gonna pay between 45 and $55,000, she thought. I'll just shoot for the moon and go for 50.
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Jason Fletcher: And
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Jason Fletcher: they interviewed her, and then they interviewed her with some senior developers, and they came back, and they were so impressed with her they offered her a better position at 65,000 a year, and
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Jason Fletcher: that just made my heart sing. That's that's the whole reason we do this. And you know, my favorite quote from her was, before dev pipeline.
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Jason Fletcher: We rented a house. Now we own our home, and I drive a Tesla. That was. That was her direct quote, and I thought, oh, that's that's great! What a wonderful lady! And now she's gone on to get a degree in machine learning. And she's working in AI.
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Jason Fletcher: And so that's really, why we why we do what we do.
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Collin Stewart: I'm, and I normally don't go deep on products. I'm just annoyingly curious. And I can't stop asking questions. Hence, why a podcast is a fit for me, because otherwise I just annoy everybody else around me. And so they're like, channel the questions here. It's a 45 week program. Is that full time, part time in class, not in class, or like virtual.
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Jason Fletcher: So yeah, we have the, we have a 3 semester program, 15 weeks each semester. The 1st 15 weeks is 4 HA day, 5 days a week. So it's part time
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Jason Fletcher: so some people will come in. They've got a job. They're they're working in a full time job or a part time job, or they're all in on this when they graduate from that 1st 15 week course, then they qualify for the apprenticeship, and either us or one of our one of our employer partners will hire them, and then they'll be in a in a half time, so they'll be 4 HA day in class, 4 HA day at the job
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Jason Fletcher: and by the 3rd certificate in. So that's the front end web development course, the back End web development course. At this point they're about
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Jason Fletcher: 75% of their time is working.
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Jason Fletcher: So they it really is kind of the shift towards the practical learning on the job, the application of what they were learning in class.
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Collin Stewart: Interesting.
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Collin Stewart: I've a friend of mine started a coding boot camp, and they do the 12 week thing. I think they've got a pretty great program. It is full time. It is 12 weeks.
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Collin Stewart: There's only so much you can learn. Mid 12 weeks.
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Jason Fletcher: Yeah, you're absolutely right. If you look at it. You think I've got to learn enough to be successful in a career in 12 weeks. And that's just really hard. There are individuals who are very successful going through boot camps. We find that those same people, many of those same people would probably also be successful doing it on their own.
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Jason Fletcher: because it really does take a commitment
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Jason Fletcher: to it to be successful at anything in software development, and those who are taking the boot camps and being successful. Those are the ones that are really driven. Those are the ones that are doing things above and beyond what the program requires. And you know that it's they're getting a love for it in the boot camp. And then they're teaching themselves. They're going on, and they're learning more. And our our motto here at Dev Pipeline is, own your journey.
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Jason Fletcher: you know. We we try to provide everything they need to be successful from a curriculum perspective, from the experience, from mentorship, from opportunities and connections with industry players. But if they're not owning their journey, we can't force success on them.
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Collin Stewart: It definitely is one of those things that you have to opt in. You have to. You really have to want to do it, and you have to put the time in and commit. I've been kind of on the verge of like I've done coding classes. I've done some part fractions of boot camps. I've done self-guided things throughout the years, and I've never. I've never had 3 months where all I could do is code, and so I've never made it quite over that hump. I use Windsurf and I can do some damage and write some absolutely horrific code.
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Collin Stewart: Yeah, but
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Collin Stewart: it does the thing. So I'm like, maybe I don't have to get over the hump. I'm sure.
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Jason Fletcher: AI is making things a lot easier, too. So you're you're, you know. Maybe someday
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Jason Fletcher: I do kind of feel like a caveman that stumbled across the Internet. You know.
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Collin Stewart: So I did want to. I did want to ask the you started validating it. You validate it by just doing it, which I love, I mean as a services business. That's kind of the model.
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Collin Stewart: Where did your 1st customers come from? Were you doing like? Were you doing services before and thought, Hey, this is the model. Let's try it out, or you just kind of went for it.
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Jason Fletcher: No, we it. We just kind of went for it. And I said, You know, we'll
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Jason Fletcher: we'll build our own products until customers show up, and the developers, your or or developer wannabes. I guess the
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Jason Fletcher: they're easy to find. They come to us.
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Jason Fletcher: We don't do any sort of marketing or anything like that, and they find us through
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Jason Fletcher: the government websites. They find us through word of mouth. They find us a lot of different ways, but
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Jason Fletcher: it was the employer. Partnerships, the employer clients, right? They those are the ones that came mostly by word of mouth. It's oh, I hear you do software. And so our 1st customers really literally came from the office next door, where they had need for something to be built. And they said, Well, you guys do this? Yeah, sure, we can do that. And you know, when we kind of moved into these rural communities, the the next customers, just
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Jason Fletcher: we're all word of mouth. It was, this person knows this person. And they need software. Okay, we can do that.
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Jason Fletcher: And that's really how we've driven most of our marketing. We don't. We don't do a lot of marketing. We don't do a lot of events
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Jason Fletcher: but we just do good work, and people pass us on.
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Collin Stewart: If you had told me before this interview that your customer act, your primary customer acquisition Channel, would be moving into rural communities
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Collin Stewart: as your primary customer acquisition channel for finding development software development work I would have. I would have bet, any amount of money that that was not true.
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Collin Stewart: That is just. I love it like it's the craziest customer acquisition channel I've ever heard. And I'm I'm a big fan that's wild.
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Jason Fletcher: You know, it's interesting because we there was a Co. A company out in in Vernal that we we met, and the reason they called us is because they had tried to hire a senior developer.
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Jason Fletcher: and they offered them a lot of money. They moved out there lasted 2 weeks, and they were like, I'm not living here, and they moved out.
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Jason Fletcher: Now you don't have to go very far. You throw a rock in Vernal, and you'll hit somebody who wants to stay in Vernal, who loves the community, who grew up there, who loves it.
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Collin Stewart: So.
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Jason Fletcher: The problem is, they don't have a lot of resources for software development in vernal. So getting someone to move there or to have remote workers is very difficult. So originally, they said.
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Jason Fletcher: Can you do the work for us because we can't hire somebody? And we said, Sure we can do the work. But in the meantime, how about if you take your people, put them through our program?
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Jason Fletcher: And so they sent one of their tech support guys through the Dev Pipeline program, and he became a software developer for them. They have since hired 2 of our other developers, 2 of our apprentices that have gone through our program. So their entire Dev team right now is dev pipeline trained, and the benefits they get from having that local talent
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Jason Fletcher: having somebody who loves the community. Who's gonna stay there? Who's who's not gonna be? I'm out for a better, greener pasture, whatever it's you can't put a price on that.
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Collin Stewart: That's really incredible.
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Collin Stewart: So 1st customers came from.
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Collin Stewart: you know your initial network from the partners from the building next door. Next, customers came from opening up rural communities.
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Jason Fletcher: Yeah.
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Collin Stewart: And that's the and the the channel. The primary channel is referrals.
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Jason Fletcher: Referrals. It's been word of mouth and reputation. People start to appreciate how we work. You know, transparency is a big deal with us. Quality is a big deal with us. Our mission is a big deal with our customers, and when you look at the this, what we provide by being local.
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Jason Fletcher: Both from a language perspective as well as time zone perspectives. Communication is massive. We do, not just agile development. Here at dev pipeline. We also do, you know, regular sprints and regular demos. So our customers are never feeling like they're just writing something on a piece of paper and throwing it over the wall and waiting for something to come back.
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Jason Fletcher: And that's huge when you're outsourcing software development.
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Jason Fletcher: And from the perspective of working closely with these customers. We're on site with them. We're not, you know, 2,000 miles away. We know they have an issue. We're in their building, and that's that's big. That's a big deal for them.
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Collin Stewart: It's interesting. And so you haven't gone much outside of the communities. It's all been local. You're
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Collin Stewart: you could drive to all your customers, offices.
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Jason Fletcher: Almost all of them. Yes, yeah, almost all of them. We do have some that are more remote than than than some of the rural companies. We do some work in California. We do some work in Idaho, but you know, for the most part most of our customers are local.
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Collin Stewart: Gotcha.
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Collin Stewart: Talk to me about the moment that you realized you might have product market fit here.
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Jason Fletcher: That's a great question. You know it. A lot of it has to do with
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Jason Fletcher: kind of both sides of the equation. If you think about what our mission is with helping build careers in tech and bridging that technology gap? I have to say that that's kind of the product. Right? That's the the changed life is the real product. And and when we hear back from apprentices that say, You know, this has changed everything for us my whole family. This is open doors. I never would have had opened. That's that's massive.
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Jason Fletcher: and that validates that part of it for us, and when our clients that we're working with say, Wow, it's really refreshing to work with a company that listens, and that actually helps us
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Jason Fletcher: with not just getting it done, but also getting the right thing done.
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Jason Fletcher: That's that's been the validation for me is just seeing both parts of that equation match up to see that the work we do for a customer is good enough. They want to hire our people to continue working with them.
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Jason Fletcher: And for for me, that's that's the fit.
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Collin Stewart: That's really, I mean, that's really great.
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Collin Stewart: The the thing with services. And one of the, you know, when I looked at the sound I was like is this, is this a great fit? But the reason why I thought you'd be interesting to have on here is the the differentiation in the model.
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Collin Stewart: There are anybody can start a any developer. I mean, I could start a software development company. It wouldn't be very good. It would be
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Collin Stewart: very likely the worst software development company that has ever been started. Just me and Windsurf vibecoding away just absolute garbage. But anybody could start an agency.
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Collin Stewart: What I love about
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Collin Stewart: Dev Pipeline is the model. Yes, you theoretically could. But this kind of creates a bit of a moat for you that I couldn't go and create this. I mean, I could try. But I would have to. You know, you get to build the year program. You need to find somebody that has the training. So you've got some.
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Collin Stewart: you know, differentiated folks. You've got a differentiated model that's really hard to copy. This is one of the 1st services businesses I've ran into that has a bit of a moat.
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Jason Fletcher: Yeah, that's a that's a great point. I think. You know, for those that that might think about copying what we're doing. I say, bring it on, because that's we're not gonna compete necessarily this. This is such a big problem that if there's more people solving it, the more the better. In my opinion. You know, it's just such a a huge issue to solve. There's so many people to help. There's so many
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Jason Fletcher: minds to shift. I think if we look back at the history of hiring, there's been this idea that a college degree is kind of a magic golden ticket to getting a job.
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Jason Fletcher: And that's not the case anymore. If we look at college graduate, we've had several college graduates come into our program
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Jason Fletcher: because they couldn't get a job out of college. And so they go through our 45 week program and learn, get the on the job training and the experience. And then they can go launch and get a job, because they now have that experience, that application, knowledge and those things. And we're still kind of seeing a slow shift in companies willing to hire. So there's almost this golden ticket mentality in companies. Still, I see these wonderful hiring
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Jason Fletcher: posts, their their job postings. They say things like we need someone with 3 years of experience in this technology that's only been around for one.
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Jason Fletcher: And you know, it's it's a little bit ridiculous. It's we we kind of have fun with it, but
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Jason Fletcher: there really is a almost a wall that's been put up that says if you don't have a college degree, and then you don't qualify. And really most of that is artificial. Some of the best developers I've ever worked with have no college degree.
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Jason Fletcher: And again, if college is an option for someone, I would say, go for it. It's a great, well rounded education. Make sure you tie that that experience with.
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Jason Fletcher: you know, real world experience like an internship part time job, something in the industry. So when you graduate, you're not just showing a paper, you're showing experience behind that
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Jason Fletcher: you know, but a lot of that comes down to to kind of what my my core belief is. And and I think that if we were to talk about education as a whole. I think it's a little bit
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Jason Fletcher: stagnant.
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Jason Fletcher: We have believed for so long in education that
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Jason Fletcher: that time needs to be fixed.
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Jason Fletcher: And if time is the fixed constant in the equation, that means our outcomes are variable. Now as someone with Adhd who struggled in school as a kid. You know this kind of is very personal for me. But I see that we tell kids you need to be in class for this long, this many hours a day, this many days a week, this many weeks a year. And then we're going to just kind of see how everybody does with that.
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Jason Fletcher: And while there has been some innovation in that model, it's
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Jason Fletcher: primarily the same as it was, you know, 50 years ago.
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Jason Fletcher: and I think that there's got to be a shift at some point to what we're trying to accomplish, which is
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Jason Fletcher: true competency based education, which is.
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Jason Fletcher: we want to take and make time the variable. We want to fix the outcome. And we can do that by tracking the competencies.
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Jason Fletcher: And so we're currently it's kind of the the next big thing is is this competency tracking platform, and it's assessment tracking improvement and and reporting.
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Jason Fletcher: But it allows us as a as a company and as an organization to truly measure that someone's getting it
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Jason Fletcher: so that we're not kind of doing the the 10 min university, if you will, which is that in 10 min you could learn everything. You're gonna remember, after 5 years
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Jason Fletcher: past college.
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Jason Fletcher: like, you know. There's a big joke about it. But the truth is, if you don't apply what you're learning, you're not gonna learn, you have to actually do
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Jason Fletcher: in order to learn. And that's really where our college experience for those of us that have gone. It's it's like that's
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Jason Fletcher: that was for some of us
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Jason Fletcher: 25 years ago. And if we look at 25 years ago. What am I gonna remember about my humanities class
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Jason Fletcher: 25 years. If I'm not in the humanities, I'm not. Gonna remember a whole lot. So
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Jason Fletcher: how do we focus on what's important and give experience and and hands-on doing in that?
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Jason Fletcher: That's what we focus on.
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Collin Stewart: Amazing.
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Collin Stewart: it's been super interesting getting a chance to kind of hear about the story. And a little bit you kind of hinted with the competency piece of what comes next. I am curious, though, you know, is this from a Dev pipeline perspective? Is this a global? You know domination? You're going to be in every rural community in the world, or just taking over Utah. Or
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Collin Stewart: it's a yeah great question. I think that for us it's it's about.
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Jason Fletcher: Growing and helping as many people as we can. So if I could grow this and have it in every you know, rural community in Utah and even expand into other countries. I'm happy to do it, because as long as we're doing that and staying grounded on our mission, which is helping people build their lives through these careers. Then I'm happy to to grow as big as we need to. I think our apprenticeship model is
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Jason Fletcher: is unique.
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Jason Fletcher: It's unique in that.
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Jason Fletcher: There's not a lot of companies that are set up to actually do what we do
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Jason Fletcher: that aren't set up to really provide that apprenticeship
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Jason Fletcher: from, you know, basically really junior to, you know, mid level to to somebody who's prepared to to actually make a contribution in a company.
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Jason Fletcher: And there's
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Jason Fletcher: there's probably the sky's the limit on this for me. This isn't about scaling for revenue. It's about scaling for purpose, and the revenue comes.
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Jason Fletcher: you know, as long as you're pushing in the same direction as Henry Ford said. As long as we're all pushing the same direction, success will take care of itself.
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Jason Fletcher: and so we're moving into more communities, more employer partners.
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Jason Fletcher: Scaling up our our competency tool is kind of next on the docket.
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Collin Stewart: I love it.
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Collin Stewart: If somebody is listening and they want to learn more about you, Dev Pipeline, or just pick your brain. What's the best way for them to reach out.
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Jason Fletcher: Yeah, they can reach out on our website, www, dot dev pipeline.com. That's like developer pipeline. And or they can, they can email me at jason@devpipeline.com.
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Jason Fletcher: We also have kind of the general info@devpipeline.com. If people are interested in learning more about the apprenticeship program.
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Jason Fletcher: They'll probably hear back quicker on that one just because my inbox gets so full. But but yeah, happy to talk to anybody who has any questions about it.
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Collin Stewart: Right on, Jason. Thank you so much for coming on the show and and sharing the deaf pipeline story. I really enjoyed it.
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Jason Fletcher: Hey? Thank you. Colin.
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Collin Stewart: And thanks to everybody for listening, we'll catch you all next time.