harry potter drinks cafe con leche
I read an awesome quote this morning. It’s from a book called “Skin In The Game” by a dude named Taleb.
“Never pay for complexity of presentation when all you need is results”.
This quote hits pretty hard on so many levels.
Don’t pay for an expensive, fancy gym filled with useless equipment when all you need is a barbell and some running shoes. Don’t spend weeks upon weeks building a beautiful UI for your startup’s mobile app when all you need a couple thousand WAUs. Don’t waste your time (and achieve crippling debt) attending a university with this idea that you need the “name” to get ahead in life when all you really want to do is pursue some passion of yours.
Books
Read two really good books this week. Highly recommend both.
What You Do Is Who You Are by Ben Horowitz
I’ve been pretty obsessed with how to build company culture. I fully believe stuff like product and market don’t matter as much as the culture you create. The right culture can win any market and can build any product.
Pixar Storytelling by Dean Movshovitz
I read this because I wanted to apply the ideas Pixar uses to entertain millions to education. I wanted to figure out why going to school couldn’t be just as much fun as watching Wall-E or Finding Nemo. Safe to say, I have tons of new ideas after reading this book :).
ZipSchool
Highlight this week was just talking to my users. Spoke to 15 parents and 4 kids (I usually ask the parent to put their kid on the phone if they let me haha). It’s insane how fanatical parents and their kids are about Zip.
Kids literally wake their parents up in the morning to help them set setup Zip so they don’t miss a class.
When new classes are announced, parents and kids pick classes together and its become a ritual in their homes.
Most kids (above age 4) require 0 supervision while on Zip and parents can go do their thing and feel guilt-free knowing they’re learning from the best. Kids usually require a break after 30-40 min.
So many parents told me their kid has never given a shit about school and now they’re obsessed with learning because Zip showed them there is more to learning than reading, writing, and math.
I could on and on and on. I have 11 hours of conversations I recorded.
Grew WAUs 32% last week. Classes all average above 200 concurrents now. Peaked at 560 concurrents last week on this new series I came up with called “Doctor Training” that parents and kids seem to be obsessed with.
Week 2 retention results still filling up, but, looks like we’re losing about 6-8 points right now. W0 -> W1 = 56.5%. W1 -> W2 = ~48%. Lots of room for improvement. Why the heck did we lose 8 points. Gonna ping those folks and find out. Reached out to one user already who dropped off and it was because she only uses Zip when she has her daughter for certain weeks (divorced family). So, when she visits her Dad her daughter doesn’t use Zip.
Will keep talking to users and learn more.
But, in any case. Feeling good. Starting to see the path to 1 billion users form in my head.