just played halo 2 on my samsung smart fridge the graphics suck
Hey, everyone! Haven’t written this newsletter in about two months. I guess we can start with this email I got from a user when her kids couldn’t get into our class about 2 weeks ago.
Attached to this email was a picture of her two kids sobbing in front of their computer. Okay, first of all that’s terrible. We had a bug and they couldn’t get into class. But second of all…wow. Kids are crying when they can’t get into Zip.
Wow.
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I was trying to turn this into a non-Zip newsletter but turns out if you’re a founder it’s quite difficult to write about anything other than your startup. I’ll return to writing this every week, but, don’t expect exact metrics, feature roadmaps, and user learnings anymore. Can’t give my competition all the cheat codes, y’know 😉?
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Zip has been through so much in the last month and a half. We’ve made a crazy amount of progress. First thing, we now have two awesome people full-time on the team. David was the CTO of an ad-exchange bootstrapped to over a mil in revenue and Alec worked as an engineer on the Xbox team at Microsoft. Both started in October. Both are dope. We’ve been working together at a beach house in San Diego working and cooking.
A ton of progress has been made. It’s been pretty cool. We all started together in October without a very clear path forward. We knew we wanted to do smaller classes with one teacher to five kids and that we had a lot of people who wanted it. We knew we wanted to have our video classroom system that we could customize and make perfect for kids and teachers. We didn’t know the exact business model that would work. We didn’t know the exact pitch to users. We didn’t know exactly how to hire a bunch of teachers, schedule them, and train them.
So, we just started!
In the last few weeks, we have hired 15+ teachers, ran 100+ small classes, and have seen 100s of students. We’ve built a video classroom system that teachers can stream to + share presentation materials with and students can actually join + stream (audio/video) to as well. Teachers love Zip because we give them basic tools Zoom doesn’t give them (ex. easily changing kid’s volume, giving kids digital rewards, and being able to have the students see them really big while sharing the presentation). Parents loves Zip because it gives their kids access to materials that their kid normally wouldn’t be able to learn about in school (pretty hard to find a quality place to teach 6 year-olds about human anatomy, for example). Kids love Zip because it’s not boring. Our teachers are trained overtime to understand what it means to teach for Zip: every class is an adventure and kids learn along the way, it’s never a lecture, it’s never boring.
Plus, we made our UI feel more immersive vs feel like a plain presentation. Kids float on top of the presentation as they go on digital adventures w/ the teacher. For example, kids don’t just learn about the digestive system. No kid cares about the digestive system. They work with the teacher to pretend to be actual doctors, diagnosing a patient, and helping treat them.
All this stuff has happened in the last 6 weeks and I just wanna give myself and team a pat on the back.
I think, founders (including me) are hard on themselves. Sometimes you gotta take a moment to be happy with the work because chances are next week it’s going to even harder and there will be 10 new problems if you’re company is on the right track.
Anyways, going to watch some Naruto now and plan for the rest of the week.
Pce.
