i just drew on the freshly baked apple pie w/ a sharpie
Passionate, massive scale world events really make you question life.
So on Monday morning, I thought: is what I’m building important? Well, duh! Zip is on it’s way to democratizing education for the entire world by creating a place where students can affordably learn full-time about the things they want to learn about right from home.
Well, sure that’s whats in my head :).
So I actually spent Monday - Wednesday just talking to users through phone, email, and text. Spoke to around 50. I wanted them to tell me that what I’m working on is important in their own words. I also did this because I was feeling super confused about what to work on next. So, whenever that happens I schedule like a full day of interviews and by the end I usually know what to work on next.
Well, it worked!
Parents and children were very excited about Zip.
In three user interviews, the parent gave their kid the phone so they could actually tell me directly how they liked the session. Wild. LOL. 3/3 kids loved it and was hyped for the next one :).
I had a ton more direction after Wednesday, armed w/ boat loads of user feedback. Note: Usually I don’t take notes since I never re-read my notes. I record every user interview and listen back to them in the mornings during my walk to Dunkin Donuts.
Basically, I learned that parents really really really like live teacher sessions. To parents it’s like the new tutor. But, instead of driving kids to Kumon + paying huge fees they can find these random teachers/tutors streaming on Facebook/Zoom and have their kids treat it like a tutoring session. One-on-one tutors are a thing of the past.
And guess what. Every single parent I talked to said this new workflow was an upgrade. Cheaper, higher quality education, right from home.
Why would you wanna take your kid to some random tutoring session when they can just learn math from one of the best child math teachers in the world on Zoom?
But, I’m always trying to kill my good ideas. So, I was like - this live teacher thing is a shit idea because the classes are small (20-40 kids) and it’s just to much work I’ll need 1000s of teachers to scale and then quality dips and this would just be like Outschool whose business model I’m not a fan of. So, on Thursday we ran two sessions w/ no video + no audio and turns out…everyone was just as happy with it. Literally in the survey parent ratings stayed the same and willingness to pay went down 7%. We could have had 1000 people in the Zoom call. It wouldn’t have mattered. Chat just worked perfectly.
I can have 1000 kids in the class, where each pays $2 for a 30 minute session ($2000 total) vs having a session w/ 30 kids where each kid pays $10 ($300 total).
We learned a lot from the no video/no audio experience.
Currently, building a mobile app where kids can hop on when the live session starts, chat, answer polls the teacher puts up, raise their hand, and have emoji reaction Instagram Live style.
It’ll probably be done like this Wednesday-ish and then take a few days for Apple to approve it. Hopefully it’s fully live in 2 weeks max.
In the meantime, we’re going to keep running our sessions on Zoom. I’ll be running a session myself on Sunday or Monday for 3rd-5th graders on programming :).
Song of the Week
This was is absolutely crazy. My boy scarlxrd on of the craziest beats I’ve heard in a while. The genre is trap metal rap.