just popped a white claw w/ kevin from the office
Zip
Good week.
Went through a product pivot this week. We shut down our small class program, where students would have a class with a ratio of 1 teacher-to-5 students.
Why did we pivot? Growth wasn’t going anywhere w/ the small class program. Our growth curve for the last 4 months was moving suuuuuper slow despite us trying really really hard to grow and improving the product a lot.
Was pretty rough. Had to let go of tons of teachers and contractors who loved Zip. Also had to break the news to a bunch of our paying users who grew to like the program.
But, everything is working out :).
We’re deciding to move toward more of a large class model. Where 1 teacher can teach 1000s at the same time. This may sound like what we were working on in Summer 2019. And, it sorta is. But with a few tweaks.
We’re focusing wayyyyyyy more on curriculum quality and curriculum development. Before, it was just me at the company and I had literally 0 clue what I was doing in that department. Users would take 1 class on Zip and then leave and I didn’t get why. After a grueling last 4 months with the small class program, we understand curriculum and what parents are looking for in curriclum much better now. They want something more long term they can trust.
We’re broadening our reach from just ages 4-6 to ages 4-11 by widening our class offering. Before, this felt super hard. But, the small class program showed us that we could quickly make classes for a variety of age ranges, fast. Today we’re able to spin up new classes in ~2-3 days.
A focus on teacher quality. In the past, this felt impossible. But, with the small class program, I was able to hire nearly 40 amazing contract teachers which was a major grind. Finding a few awesome teachers now feels a lot more doable and we’re more confident in the qualities we’re looking for in a teacher.
This week, me and Emily put together 10 new classes + assembled a small team of teachers we love. David and Alec coded up the MVP in 4 days. We went from 0 users -> 1000 unique students who joined a class in the last 3.5 days. Pretty crazy. Went from a pivot to 1000 WAUs and some really good momentum in a just week.
At previous companies, we’d still be building a month later with 0 users lol.
I like this team a lot. No one is happy when growth isn’t there. We evolve fast. We talk to users literally every single day on the phone.
Survey results from last 4 days on the MVP below.
One other crazy stat, lol.
We gave kids the option to interact in class by tapping on 1 of three emojis: thumbs up, heart, and wave. These emojis were tapped 50,000 times in the last 3.5 days. LOL.
Kids like tapping emojis, noted.
Also, kids can answer live quiz questions in class the teacher cues up. 29,000 answers were selected in the last 3.5 days lmao.
The most answered question was “where does chocolate come from?” lol.
I think we can get to 1500 WAUs next week and grow 50%!! Will keep y’all posted.
New site
Deployed my new website with Zeet.
Zeet is a really easy way to deploy code. All I did was create a next.js project, write some HTML, push to Github, connect to Zeet, and bam I get CI/CD for free and my project is deployed just like that every time I push.
10/10 service, free to start! Zeet is made by some of my buddies and it’s wayyyy better than Heroku, GCP Run, etc. Try it today :).
Naruto
Think about Ancient Greece. They had their own set of gods, legends, and myths. These stories passed down from generation to generation gave hope and meaning to the people of Ancient Greece. Kids would grow up hearing stories of Zeus, Athena, Poseidon, and others. These ancient tales had a very real effect on a person’s character teaching them about right/wrong, friends/enemies, hope/despair.
You can read these myths today and still feel quite moved by them at a deep level. Even if you know that they are all just, well, myths.
For me, Naruto is sorta like this.
I just finished the entirety of the show today.
This story has literally become part of my identity. I can not stress enough how serious I am when I say that I am happier and more optimistic than ever before because of this character and the way his story developed.
And that may sound ridiculous because the character is a fictional, 2D animated ninja. But, in ~500 B.C Ancient Greece, the people had the stories of the mythological gods to really power them and give them some sort of guidance.
In 2021, we still need something like that. Like, a myth or story we can relate our real-world problems and emotions to help make meaning of them. And right now Naruto is certainly that for me.
I’ve probably taken the character/story much too seriously at this point and you may be cringing, but, I’m just being honest :). I don’t have any real-world heroes or role models (sadly, my ego is too large for me to say I look up to someone).
So, I gotta find some meaning somewhere. I think I’ll find it fully by crafting my own legend though…
Back to Zip :)!!