Avocademy

Avocademy is an online education and mentoring provider that teaches user experience and user interface (UX/UI) design to people with no prior design background and supports them through the job search. Its core path has three stages: a Design Foundations / UX-UI Foundations program lasting 8 to 16 weeks with unlimited mentorship and portfolio work and no experience required; a Career Services / Career Jumpstart stage of roughly three months covering advanced design skills, a library of projects or real client projects, developer handoff and resume and portfolio optimization; and up to 12 months of job search support including live interview preparation, job search cohorts and connections to hiring partners, backed by a job guarantee subject to published terms.

The curriculum is delivered through video lessons, reading materials, structured activities and one-on-one mentorship, and spans introduction to UX/UI, user research, ideation, UX design (information architecture, user flows, wireframing), UI design (design systems, style guides, high-fidelity mockups, prototyping and usability testing) and portfolio building. Alongside the general UX/UI Design Career Accelerator, the company offers a UX Design course for AI Products that adds AI-specific material such as human-centered AI and user-AI trust, prompt engineering and human-in-the-loop machine learning, designing AI interfaces, AI explainability, system personas and usability testing for AI, culminating in an end-to-end AI product project and a certificate in Designing for AI Products. The company also markets an introductory UX/UI course, free resources, a blog, YouTube content, scholarships and UX design masterclasses, and states that it positions AI as a design partner rather than a replacement for designers.

Founding story

Founder Maca Baigorria trained as an engineer and worked as a mechanical engineer at Boeing before leaving the role, moving from Seattle back to Miami and enrolling in an engineering master's program, during which she discovered UX/UI design and shifted toward business and entrepreneurship coursework. She has also described working at IBM and PwC. She spent a year teaching herself UX/UI design and built a portfolio through freelance jobs found on Craigslist, later moving into a design management role where she mentored junior designers. Observing that existing design programs cost roughly $10,000-$15,000 and sometimes $24,000 and ran six months to a year, and speaking with people on Reddit dissatisfied with those costs, she created a shorter, lower-cost program with mentorship. She began building the curriculum more than two years before a mid-2021 interview and ran a beta before the COVID-19 pandemic. Co-founder Alexandra Amico moved from systems engineering to product management.

Business model

Avocademy sells paid online design education directly to individual learners. The Foundations program is priced at $2,997, with a $500 rebate for students who finish in under 16 weeks, bringing the total to $2,497; the UX Design course for AI Products is listed at $2,997 per student. Instalment financing is offered through Affirm, with monthly payments starting at about $103.88 over 6, 12, 24 or 36 months (for example $103.88/month over 36 months on a $2,997 purchase at 14.99% APR, with rates quoted as 10-36% APR subject to eligibility). Instruction is delivered by a mentor network the company describes as 100+ mentors across time zones, and the offering is backed by a job guarantee under published terms.

Tuition paid per student for its programs ($2,997 for the Foundations program, discounted to $2,497 for early completion; $2,997 for the AI products course), with third-party consumer financing through Affirm rather than in-house lending. The founder has described the company as bootstrapped, self-funded and profitable. An affiliate program and a "Hire our Grads" channel are also referenced.

Traction

The company reports having placed first-time designers at more than 300 companies, a 90% placement rate based on its 2023 United States Career Jumpstart Program graduate survey, and a network of over 100 mentors. Third-party review scores displayed on its site are 4.81 (381 reviews), 4.8 (176 reviews) and 4.6 (143 reviews). Its founder stated in a 2021 interview that entry-level graduate roles paid at least around $55,000 with some students landing $95,000 starting salaries, that completion rates were strong and that students were being hired within a year of starting; current marketing cites jobs paying $85K per year. Team size is listed at 6.

Latest developments

Recent additions include a UX Design course for AI Products offering an 8-week (20 hrs/week) or 16-week (10 hrs/week) track at $2,997 with unlimited mentorship, live speaker events with AI experts, a portfolio-ready AI design project and a certificate in Designing for AI Products; a restructured Career Services stage with a project library, developer handoff and portfolio and resume optimization; and new job search cohorts providing mentor-led group support, monthly Q&As and community.