The hard part is finding something that people might actually want to do. Geocities worked for this because you actually wanted a Geocities website. It would be difficult to start a company with the assumption that you were going to create some new "thing" that people are going to actually want just for the side-effect of their learning to code.
On the other hand, arguably Wordpress, Scratch[1] and even the Chrome, Apple, etc. app stores have already filled this niche in different domains (PHP, kids, browser plugins, apps).
Comments
The hard part is finding something that people might actually want to do. Geocities worked for this because you actually wanted a Geocities website. It would be difficult to start a company with the assumption that you were going to create some new "thing" that people are going to actually want just for the side-effect of their learning to code.
On the other hand, arguably Wordpress, Scratch[1] and even the Chrome, Apple, etc. app stores have already filled this niche in different domains (PHP, kids, browser plugins, apps).
[1] http://scratch.mit.edu/