From Pivot to Phenomenon: Farza's Entrepreneurial Spirit and the buildspace Revolution

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Courses and trainings have been integral components of the educational landscape for decades. However, amidst these established practices, there was a void that needed to be filled. Approximately 3.5 years ago Farza stepped in and revolutionized the education industry by introducing Buildspace.

Buildspace has emerged as a game-changer, completely transforming the way people acquire knowledge and achieve results. In this article, we will delve into the captivating story behind Buildspace and Farza's remarkable entrepreneurial journey. Additionally, we will also explore some excellent strategies that propelled Buildspace's meteoric rise, resulting in a remarkable valuation of 100 million dollars within a short span of 3.5 years.

Buildspace, according to Farza is a “Hogwarts for builders” or “A school for people who don’t wanna get a job”. Basically, what buildspace does is they organize building sprints where people can build whatever they want over the period of 6 weeks. This brings in a motivated community and at the end a sense of accomplishment for people participating in the build. The best part is that participation is absolutely free.

Buildspace makes money through their sponsorship model. They also earned money from web3 companies when someone hired one of their builders. They are also establishing IRL buildspace centres and earning money from governments who pay them to establish a buildspace in their city, similar to how universities and innovation hubs are funded. In just one year after launch, they had $2M yearly run-rate.

Buildspace has had over 300k builders on their website. Here is a quick tweet plugin from Farza displaying the diversity of the users

They have opened an in-real-life school in San Francisco which they plan to use to help people build and ship their products. They just ended their 6-week cohorts and it was a massive success. Here is a tweet by Farza post their N&WS3 (nights and weekend Season 3) success.

In this case study on Buildspace, we will look at Farza’s and Buildspace’s Joruney and some top growth drivers which helped them raise $10M led by a16z at a $100M valuation.

Jumping directly into the journey without background about Farza would not be fair. Farza has been a creative person at heart. When he turned 13, he wanted a job for quick cash. He found one at a gym close by and they paid him $11/hr. But his dad was of the belief that he could do better and didn’t allow him to do any of these jobs.

Farza discovered a Polo RL shirt while his parents were going through old clothes and considering donating them. He recognized its worth and decided to sell it online for $9. This was the beginning of his entrepreneurial journey. By the age of 15, he was earning an incredible $100,000 by selling DVDs, clothes, and what not.

Before founding Buildspace in 2019, he did variety of activities ranging from filming many YouTube videos for his channel to serving as the CTO of an acquired firm. Here's an overview of his own journey prior to buildspace.

Also, just before starting buildspace/Zip school. He used to dropship Christian bracelets on amazon. Here is funny tweet by him for the same.

Around the end of 2019, he started working on Zipschool which is buildspace today. Farza attributes a lot of success of buildspace to Furqan and f.inc. He mentions in one of his podcasts that “The majority of the ideas originated at Furquan House where 5 people worked on different product ideas. The companies that started that day five years ago are now worth nearly half a billion dollars.”

Buildspace began as Zipschool and evolved multiple times before becoming the company it is today. They are profitable as of now and have two primary domains, web3 and ML/AI. They want to open more centers throughout the world and support other domains in the future.

Here is a sneak peek into the journey and pivots which they have made over time.

Lets dig into the nitty-gritty of it in the following section where we go deep on:

Farza is a firm believer in starting and doing things quickly. He believes that if the product doesn’t work, try to make it work if it still doesn’t work, Pivot.

Before they came up with buildspace, they made multiple pivots in their journey. Here is an image from Farza’s newsletter where he mentions their timeline and the pivots that they made.

None of these were a complete failure, but after spending a considerable amount of time in the industry and talking to 100s of users, they realized that the growth or the learnings that they gained from this was juice not worth the squeeze. Hence, they made a market pivot and moved from K-5 students to developers.

Here is a tweet from Farza where he adds his YC-19 application video and emphasizes on following iterative approach while building startups.

After this, Farza narrowed down to 4 niches in his mind and wanted to pick one and dive into it. He was deciding between:

He quickly put this up on this twitter and Web3 was the one that got the most interest so he decided to go forward with Web3.

Buildspace has different kinds of “builds“. Builds are basically quick starter courses that get you started with any domain. The builds by buildspace were super successful. They provided very high-quality, easy-to-follow, and concise content that helped almost anyone to get started.

All these things significantly helped buildspace and reach remarkable numbers. However, in June 2022, they saw a significant drop in number of users. They saw around a 60% drop in their traffic. And they didn’t knew what to do.

By December 22, they grew again and the reason behind this was as Farza puts it “The last 2 months we just fought smarter + harder -- we're shipping more and being 10X more intentional about the output.“

Today, buildspace has had around 300k+ builders and is valued at $100M. The strategic pivots and sticking to the iterative and quick shipping approach played a prominent role in reaching these numbers.

Farza believes that following the problem-solving approach while building a startup isn’t always the right way. He believes, that one should follow what they genuinely like and eventually figure out how it can solve a problem. In one of his podcasts, he mentions that if he had initially thought, about the specifics of how and what problems buildspace solves, he wouldn’t have even started in the first place.

His mentality is “Before trying to make others happy, make yourself happy. Create things that you love”. This is the current core mentality of the product at buildspace. Here is a portion from their nights and weekends season 4 application page.

It also reflects in his tweets about raising a seed round and growing buildspace itself. Here is an example:

Buildspace's expansion strategy was mainly reliant on being hyper-specific with their target consumers. Buildspace saw the value of adapting their learning courses to the requirements of their students by focusing on students between the ages of 18 and 22 in the United States at the start.

They exactly knew who their target users were and they always worked around that. Once they aced this acquisition channel, they moved on to other things and international user-base. From getting initial users from CS clubs at various universities to 300k+ users, they have always followed hyper-specific approaches.

Buildspace actually cares about cultivating and sustaining a positive culture. Farza does not want Buildspace to become a corporate behemoth. Farza says in one of his podcasts that when one employee delivered a standard corporate email-type response, he asked him, "Is this how you talk to a friend?" The culture they are trying to foster at Buildspace is evident in these small incidents. This continues to reflect in their hiring strategies.

Here is a tweet by Farza that says a lot about Buildspace’s culture.

Buildspace is definitely a lot more than a company. It is a community, culture, and most importantly a catalyst that has helped tens and thousands of users efficiently learn and ship products. There is a lot that can be said about buildspace and the outstanding entrepreneurial spirit of Farza. However, we will wrap up this issue by adding some key learnings and tips from Farza that would immensely help founders in their journey.

(ps. would highly recommend following Farza on Twitter. He posts invaluable insights there)

That’s all for today. This edition took us about 25 hours of effort, If you think your friends or colleagues would like this, please share this link. Thanks for reading and don’t be shy to leave your comment if you have any. Also, please consider following us on Twitter (Keval Jagani, Meet Shukla) and sharing this newsletter.