dropped a banana milkshake on my cherry mx keys
Yo!
Quick Update
We had 200 unique students this week. Up from 75 last week. The changes I made were: more classes and more teachers and more topics. For example, we taught an art class this week and kids (aged 4-7) got to draw + write a story around a dog they drew :)! I actually found the art teacher on Twitch streaming on the “Art” section. Kids actually got to show the class their work at the end to, here’s one:
I also taught a class on rocket science for students aged 8-12. They were so hype by the end. It was a ton of fun. I mentioned near the end I was a programmer and the kids got so hyped you shoulda seen them.
I got emails like the one below.
Kids literally ran to their parents after and told them to email me.
We also ran a class this week with over 50 concurrents where the student has video/audio off. Hopefully next week, we’ll run a class with 100 concurrents :).
Again, my goal isn’t to create small, video chat classes. My goal is to make each class feel like Bill Nye + a Twitch stream. 1000+ kids in a single stream all learning from a high-quality teacher all while interacting via chat + other things like live quizzes and polls.
1000 kids in a class paying $2 > 25 kids in a class each paying $20.
Next week my main focus is to put together more of a schedule of teachers, class times, and topics. I have parents who are down to pay me between $40-$60 a month but they want to see the times + schedule they can signup for beforehand. Makes sense.
Also, I ran surveys. 24 responses.
New Name + Updated Direction
So, I’ve been working on ZipHomeschool for over 6 months now 🎉.
I started in December 2019 by building software for homeschoolers to help them follow the laws of their state. The idea here was to become an “infrastructure” company for full-time homeschoolers. After a lot of iteration, we’ve arrived at the current focus: large, live-streamed classes aimed at students 4-12 with a focus on non-traditional topics (ex. video-editing, photography, space, marine science, etc). The vision hasn’t really changed. I want to make it easier for students to learn about the thing things they want to learn about and give them some structure to do that. Homeschooling (where the parent is a big part of the process) was one way to make that happen. But, I think we’re iterating toward a better way that push the world faster in the direction I want to see it go.
Since we’re moving away from classical homeschooling, I’m renaming the company from ziphomeschool.co to shorthop.so. Note: nothing on domain yet.
A “short hop” in Super Smash Bros Melee is just a much smaller jump. Here’s Falco doing two short hop lasers.
Learning should feel a lot like hopping in between different projects/topics as you please.
Wow Farza!!! Great metaphor!! You’re such a poet!!!
I was actually talking with my Mom about this. In 2008, 12 year-old me would spend 4 weeks selling stuff on eBay, then 3 months learning to edit videos + grow my YouTube vlog channel, then another 2 weeks on eBay, etc. I didn’t have much structure and my parents didn’t really know what to do with me. But…damn, if I had some more structure around my projects or at least some sort of community to collab/learn from or a teacher for those non-traditional topics…that would have been amazing. I would have felt 10X less weird.
Oh, and why the .so domain? Well, 1) .com was taken 2) in C and C++ a .so is a shared object library. It lets multiple executables share the same library instance. For example, if there are a set of functions that many different programs will share then they can just call the .so file vs implementing the same function individually. With ShortHop, it’s the same thing but for knowledge! I’m building this shared library of topics many people can have concurrent access to.
Anyways, I know none of this shit matters.
But, being a solo founder is hard and if a new name + vague metaphor can give me some momentum then awesome I’ll take that :).