eating multigrain chocolate chunk bars in the lambo
Zip
It was a good, busy week. I took the anger + disappointment at myself/my company from last week, made a plan, and went at it.
Shout out too Morgan, G, and Samarth, Vida, and Candacee for helping me move fast. Y’all are awesome. I wouldn’t be able to do this alone. Great things are made w/ a team.
Finally shipped the lesson product here. Feel free to try it out. It’s pretty early. Feels like the product is finally at a spot where I have a base I can keep building on.
Things are progressing rather fast, generally.
Phone calls w/ users. Funds hitting me up to invest. Coding all the time + adding cool new shit. We now have 7 teachers making content for us. It’s all sorta chugging along. Working with three other part-time engineers on cool new features as well.
Sign-ups rolling in all the time.
Don’t get it twisted, though, we still don’t have PMF. The product is still kinda garbage but is slowly garnering a community of users who love it, especially as it improves.
How are we going to get to PMF? I’m just going to be aggressive. Add new users into the funnel every week, figure out what they like, what they don’t, measure everything, iterate, then pour in users again.
By the time August rolls around (school season), I want to have a great product that I’ve iterated toward that parents will use + pay for.
Next Week
I have three learning goals for next week:
How important is it for parents to be able to browse a library of modules and customize? The general vibe I’m getting is that parents want to feel “like superheroes” to their kids. One potential user even said: “I want my kid to look at me like Elon Musk and if your product can help me get there that’s worth way more to be than $30 a month”. Right now, Zip just gives parents an auto-made plan of activities made by teachers. This may not be the right call. Instead, what if parents could add in content manually? Ex. if your 2nd grader is really into model rockets, then, there should be a way for you easily drop in activities to your Zip Planner related to that interest that will help you as the parent teach the topic. Going to figure out how important this is this week and build a small feature to test it.
Does anyone care about live teacher sessions? The answer will likely be yes, but need to test it, and then figure out if it’s something we want to focus on. I think being the dashboard for a parent when it comes to their child + all things around their home education is appealing and live sessions could fit into that. Unsure right now, need to test. We have a teacher ready to go Wednesday and she’s teaching a session on space for 5-11 year olds.
Why do parents leave? I haven’t spoken to parents who left and never came back. This is a good opportunity to reel them in w/ a $10 gift card or something and see what drove them away. Did they not get it? Were they low intent? Do they want something different? Whats that thing?
Optimism
Generally, I’ve never felt more optimistic about the future. I’m not talking about my personal future or Zip. Just the future in general. Tons of industries that have become more and more inefficient over the last couple of decades are finally being shaken up and their problems that have been building up for years are becoming clear to the public. K-12 education, universities, medicine, physical offices, etc.
That’s amazing. Because, once those problems become clear to everyone it means we someone can finally build products to fix them + quickly gain some early traction while the problems are super visible.
Sunsama
This is a shoutout to a product that’s changing how I work. It’s called Sunsama. It’s like Trello + Google Calendar built w/ a few key philosophies in mind. I’m a big believer in planning my day. I generally don’t start working until I have a list of action items that are extremely important.
Sunsama has this habit built in. It doesn’t even let me see my tasks until I plan my day.
It’s made me a lot of cognizant of where my days go. August is extremely important for Zip. Every day counts. Sunsama makes it such that every day does count, and if doesn’t I can troubleshoot and figure out where I went wrong + improve.
Sign-up w/ my referral link here.