Hey, and thanks for asking!
It was my co-founder Sindre who got the idea for Scrimba. It grew out of his frustration of how cumbersome the process of creating high quality coding screencasts is.
He needed to create coding screencasts because he had just open sourced the Imba progamming language (imba.io), which he's the creator of. Imba lacked tutorials to get people started.
Sindre tried doing a few video tutorials, but became increasingly frustrated by the awful creation process (recording, editing, exporting, uploading, re-encoring). Concepts he could explain in 3 minutes face to face would take him an hour to explain online.
So instead of creating video tutorials he started building on tool for creating Imba screencasts. This tool would solve the frustrating creation process and also be interactive for the end user.
The first version of Scrimba was actually a community site for the Imba programming language.
However, it quickly became clear that this way of doing tutorials had potential for all other languages as well. By the end of 2016 Sindre, Magnus and I had formed a company around Scrimba.
As for future plans, I'd recommend people to follow our GitHub community repo. We use issues from that repo in our product development process.
But in short, we're going to make it a lot easier for people to teach code online. This involves i.e. both supporting more languages and improving the teacher-student communication (for example make it a easier to give feedback on code).
At its core we're trying to make the online learning experience better than the in-person learning experience.
It's an ambitious goal, but we actually think we can accomplish it :)
Per