Listen: Julia Taylor and the Rise of GeekPack

Julia Taylor didn't set out to create an e-learning business for women; she was just trying to find a job that she could perform regardless of where the military stationed her husband. In 2014, she stumbled across website building and began teaching herself to code. The journey wasn't easy. There was no curriculum, no benchmarks, and no community. Sometimes when she'd ask a question, the responses—usually by men—were derogatory. She pushed on and eventually founded GeekPack, a company that not only teaches women to code, but also provides a supportive, online community for learning and professional development. 

Today, GeekPack is known for its signature product WP Rockstar—an in-depth Wordpress tutorial—live coding challenges, and advice on starting your own business, including how to look for clients online and marketing. 

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About Julia Taylor, Founder of GeekPack in Durango

Julia Taylor is a (former) military wife, self-taught web developer, lover of location independence, and a passionate advocate for women in tech! In the pursuit of her own career and career progression, she taught herself how to code. Julia recently participated in the Southwest Colorado Accelerator Program for Entrepreneurs (SCAPE) in Durango and will soon join the Colorado SBDC Tech Venture Accelerator for Women. She now lives at the base of the La Plata Mountains near Durango, CO. 

Transcript

Margaret: I’m Margaret Hedderman and this is the 31st episode that I’ve produced for the Startup Colorado Podcast. You may ask yourself, why is it important to celebrate the number 31? Well, it’s honestly because I hadn’t realized that 30 episodes had gone by during our last show. But that’s neither here nor there. What’s important is that since launching this series in 2020, we’ve illuminated the stories of dozens of entrepreneurs building businesses in rural communities, sometimes despite all odds.

So, if you haven’t yet, I encourage you to dig through our catalog of previous episodes and see what’s happening in rural Colorado. You can find our podcast, our community for rural entrepreneurs, and free resources at StartupColorado.org.

Now, on with the show.

Today’s episode features GeekPack, a Durango-based e-learning company that not only teaches women to code, but to become business owners themselves.

Julia: Hi. Welcome to scape. I'm Julia.

Margaret: It's great to be here.

Julia: Yeah. Thanks for coming in. So this is SCAPE. We are the Southwest Colorado Accelerator Program. I'm in the 2022 cohort.

Margaret: Julia Taylor, the founder of GeekPack, welcomes me into SCAPE’s offices in North Durango. She’s one of seven regional businesses who took part in the 2022 cohort. When I first heard about GeekPack at last year’s West Slope Startup Week, I knew we had to talk to Julia for the podcast.

Julia: We support women who want to learn to code, but they may not even know that they want to code, they might want to work from home, or they might want to get a promotion, or they might just rescale or upscale. And the learning to code gives them that added benefit from the tech side, but also from a confident side. 

Margaret: GeekPack offers an online community with life lessons conducted in cohorts, free coding challenges, a kids coding bootcamp, and their signature product WP Rockstar, a focused training program for website building.

Julia: So, we focus primarily on WordPress, because it's, it's widely used. 43% of all websites in the world use WordPress. And it's also easily customizable, especially if you know how to code. So, I like to combine the coding knowledge with this platform that everyone uses. And put those two things together. And it makes my students this kind of tech unicorn, where they they're not just they don't just know WordPress, and they could build a website. But when something goes wrong, because it breaks all the time, you get malware, there's hosting issues, there's, you know, lots of issues that come along with WordPress. So, I teach my students the quote, unquote, hard way to figure things out.

Margaret: Now, you might expect that Julia has a long background in tech, but this is actually her second career.

Julia: So back in 2008, I worked for the US Department of Defense. And I was an intelligence officer. And in 2008, I deployed to Afghanistan was my first deployment. And while I was there, I met my now husband, who's British, but he was also in the military at the time.

Margaret: They fell in love, got married, and Julia quit her job, so that she could move to the UK.

Julia: And my career progression really took a nosedive I we got married, became a military wife, which I'm very, very proud of. But my job prospects and things like that were limited because we moved all the time.

Margaret: So, remember, this is way back before remote working was an everyday thing. You know, people went to offices back then, and for Julia that was getting pretty frustrating because they were moving all the time, which meant she was changing jobs pretty regularly. One day, she was doing what she called “a random, 9 to 5 job,” when she came across this thing called coding.

Julia: I've no tech background, I've never done anything techie before, I have a degree in Russian of all things. And we, I came across coding, I Googled this problem I figured it out with Google and with code, and I was just blown away. It was this mind blowing aha moment of, oh, my gosh, I just learned something on Google in five minutes. Could this be the thing, that means I could work remotely from anywhere in the world, no matter where my husband was, was posted.

Margaret: So, she started learning everything she could about coding. On her own, just reading, researching, and asking questions in different forums. Eventually that led to learning how to build websites, and finally starting a web design agency for small businesses.

Julia: So, fast forward, way, fast forward. In 2018, my husband retires the military, and we decide to sell everything and move into an RV and travel around the US full time.

Margaret: Along the way, Julia starts documenting their travels on Instagram. And, low and behold, people start asking her “How the heck are you able to travel full-time? And work?”

Julia: And I tell them, I taught myself how to code, build websites, start a business, and they were just blown away. And that is I want to be able to do that. And this was pre- COVID, before a lot of people were, were working remotely, or were living in RVs. And, and that's what I did, I started teaching women how to code, and so they could build their own business and work from home. And that's really how it all kind of got going.

Margaret: And that’s how Julia started an e-learning company with over 2.9 million dollars in revenue. Easy right?

Yeah, not so much.

Let’s back it up to 2014 when Julia is learning how to code. Because she’s teaching herself, she frequently has questions. Pretty normal, right? Well…

Julia: I had a number of very bad experiences, where I would ask a question in a community, and I would be made fun of. And unfortunately, the most of the time when I was made fun of it was a it was a guy who made fun of me.

Margaret: What did that feel like? Like asking a question and just having somebody instead of being helpful come back at you. And just being mean making fun of you?

Julia: It was awful. I wanted to quit so many times. And it that's why it took me so long to learn. I started learning in 2014… I didn't actually start my business until 2016. So, it took me two years of just learning and being scared to ask a question … And it didn't happen all the time. But it happened enough times to where it really stunted my growth. And I was learning in a vacuum, I didn't have a curriculum, I didn't have a community to ask all the things that literally everything that I've created since then, is everything that I wish that I had.

Margaret: So, it’s a little meta, but it’s kind of like GeekPack’s reason for being is inspired by its own founding story. All of the struggles Julia faced while learning to code and build websites, is why she now helps other women do the same. And it’s why GeekPack doesn’t just provide an educational curriculum, but a community as well.

Julia: With Geek pack, everything that we do, the most important thing is community and making sure that our community members regardless of age, or location, or gender, or any of that, that they are comfortable asking a question, there's no such thing as a stupid question in our community. And, and that that's just been the rule from the beginning.

Margaret: On top coding and community, GeekPack also empowers women to go a step further and build their own businesses.

Julia: We go through how to set up a business, how to find clients, Who's your ideal client avatar, what is your why we go through setting up payment options and how to collect payment and like everything from from start to finish, the entire client process contracts, onboarding, off boarding, getting a testimonial like it is from beginning to end, we cover everything.

Margaret: Since joining SCAPE, Julia’s had her eyes opened to all the possibilities the future may hold for her business..

Julia: Being a part of SCAPE has changed the trajectory of my business because I had no idea any of these opportunities existed. My my entrepreneurial background is solely in the online business space. So knowing that there were investment opportunities, or anything like that, I just I that was not a world that I was in and that I was aware of. 

Margaret: She added…

Julia: I'm really excited about the future because I've I've had the confidence to reach out to a number of very big publicly traded e-learning companies and say, hey, this is what we do. You know, are you interested in a partnership and all the companies I've reached out to have have said, yes, absolutely. So, now I'm in the very fortunate position where I have to pick which one we want to work with. But yeah, starting next year, we're going to massively scale and grow and the only way I've been able to do that and dream this big is because of the mentorship, the education and the confidence that I've had from SCAPE.

Margaret: Since our conversation, Julia has partnered with Udemy and the Wyoming Women’s Business Center, which will be using grant funding to offer GeekPack to their clients. She’s also recently been accepted into the SBDC Tech Venture Accelerator for Women. You can learn more about GeekPack on the shownotes page on our website at StartupColorado.org.

This episode of The Startup Colorado Podcast was produced and edited by Margaret Hedderman. Research help from Elise Ertl. Our theme music was produced by Erin Roberts of Porlolo Music. You can follow us on LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. Email email at [email protected].

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