Adrien and Maxime, two friends who met in San Francisco, they bother joined Molotov after Le Wagon's FullStack program before launching
Mozza, their own Mobile Growth Agency.
What led you to enroll with Le Wagon?
Adrien: Two years ago, I was growth marketer at
Good.Co in San Francisco. At that time, I did not have any tech background to communicate with the dev team and it was very frustrating for me. I could not understand what was at stake when we were making technical decisions. Because of that, I did not have enough responsibilities in my job. Beside, I was depending on developers even to implement a very small feature or make some basic changes in the code. I met Mathieu Ripert in San Francisco. He was one of the initial co-founders of Le Wagon. We spoke about the FullStack program, and I decided to jump in within the night !
Max: Same story for me! I was working at PayPal as product manager. I had lots of small side-projects. For my projects or in my job, I was really feeling limited because of my lack of coding skills.
How did you hear about the Fullstack program?
Adrien: After I discussed with Mathieu, I dug a bit, got in touch with several former students. Le Wagon seemed to be a very complete program. That's what I needed - both backend and frontend skills. For that, the FullStack program was just perfect.
Max: After finishing Le Wagon, Adrien was so enthusiastic about it. I had no choice but to jump in the next batch!
Did you encounter any difficulties or challenges during the bootcamp?
Adrien: You work in a new environment, with new tools and a new mindset. That makes a lot of new things to grasp. Sometimes, you can feel a bit lost and wonder where the program will lead you. But you should not ask yourself too many questions and just go for it. The curriculum is well crafted and everything becomes clear at the end. Then you have the big picture and you feel very powerful.
Max: Yes of course! The program is very challenging. But week after week, you learn to understand your error messages, read the documentations of a gem or an API, iterate and refactor your code. From this point, coding just becomes an awesome skill to express your creativity and develop products.
Why would you recommend Le Wagon over other similar learning programs?
Adrien: Le Wagon has an amazing tech community. They have close links with major accelerators. Every week, very successful entrepreneurs come to discuss and network with the class. And the alumni community is the best you can find. Le Wagon's team is now opening in new cities (Amsterdam, Lisbon, soon Berlin). This will give an additional flavor to this community that is already very exciting to be part of.
Max: The program is very smart. Every day brings you an essential block of tech. Beside that, there's a unique atmosphere and you just love to wake up early and join you coding buddies for a hard day of tech challenges.
What's the best thing in Le Wagon's experience?
Max: Their ruby training and challenges are very close to "industry" code. I have shown my code to ruby developer friends and they were just impressed by the level I reached in only 9 weeks.
Adrien: All the additional culture they give about startup technical workflow, SAAS tools, the way of using APIs, and develop a prototype with a very smart methodology.
What did you do immediately after the bootcamp?
Adrien: I travelled for 3 months as a digital nomad (in Spain, Kenya and Israel) - working remotely as a growth consultant for several startups. And in April I joined Molotov as their growth marketing lead. Molotov is a startup founded by an amazing team that raised 11 million dollars to build the future of TV.
Max: I kept on improving my game
MakiWars which I developed during
project weeks at Le Wagon. I participate in the next FullStack batch in Paris as teacher assistant. That was great and very useful for me to help new students solve problems I had to solve few weeks before. Then I joined Adrien at Molotov to get in charge of the product. I don't regret this choice a single day: it's an awesome product, very technical also. A challenging and exciting adventure!
What are you up to now?
Adrien & Max: We launched our own Mobile Growth Agency to help promising startups improve their application and grow faster :)
