me n Krillin just grabbed starbucks

Putting a 20-minute timer on to write the ole newsletter this week.

• Zip has 4X’d in the last two weeks. So, that’s pretty wild. Just working hard to execute now. Create curriculum. Hire teachers. Scheudle classes. Add the necessary features to the product. All that jazz :).

• We’ve gotten super good at running low-effort, high-value experiments. For example. We wanted to test if parents would rather buy “packages” from Zip instead of a subscription (which we were struggling with). We came up with some classes, put it on a Notion doc, hosted it here, and shared it w/ parents. And bam, we got tons of positive feedback from parents on the model and a bunch of revenue from the experiment. Gives us a base to keep making the thing better!

• Working really hard to be healthier. If you know me, you’ll know I can easily work 100+ hours a week many months at a time, and wouldn’t really be phased. But overworking often leads to a lack of clarity in thought — at least for me! I’ll start making dumb, emotional decisions vs thought-out, data-based decisions. Can’t afford for that to happen. Got a team now! Got people depending on me. The Zip team, our teachers, our users…and the millions of future Zip students!!

• Basically starting with one habit to be healthier: in bed by 9 PM. No phone, no books, just lay in bed until sleep comes. Took 4 hours the first time to fall asleep at 9 lol. Now, taking around 15-20 minutes :).

• Learning that running a company is hard not because of the quantity of work, but because of the amount of mental bandwidth the endeavor takes up. Pretty much up to me to make sure I don’t use up all my personal bandwidth on high-effort, low-value tasks (ex. finding the write typeface for our landing page, spending 2+ days building features we have no clue users even want, spending 10+ hours on Facebook Ad copy vs just shipping a shitty v1 of the copy to start getting some data, etc).