We figure that at startups, you either make shit or sell shit. With engineers and product designers, we have makers. With growth and sales folks, we have sellers. So yeah, all the ingredients are there.
I think traction is about understanding underlying human psychology / user intent. At the end of it all, it is still humans who are using these products (for now at least :)
Someone who deeply understands customer interviews and needs-finding will do a better job of scoping the right product to build, and someone who understands what drives human behavior will do better at distributing the product.
In an unpaid internship, you typically get very little professional development - if the company can't pay you, then they probably don't have the resources to have a staffer support your learning either. With Tradecraft, we have paid experienced instructors (with your tuition money) to be there to help you to learn from your project work by giving guidance and feedback. We believe that this will give you the best of both worlds -- the transfer of knowledge that happens in a classroom, the assimilation of knowledge that happens on the job, and a feedback loop between the two.
Disclosure: I'm one of the Founders of Tradecraft
We're particularly excited to have students do real work for real companies, which isn't really possible at Dev Bootcamp. If you're only 3 weeks into Rails, you can't do much useful work, but 3 weeks into sales training, you can do lots of helpful lead generation and learn in the process.