optimus prime can't drink strawberry smoothies
Zip Zip Zip
Grew our uniques attending classes 30% last week. Nice. Reached 450 concurrent students in a single class. Dope. Our average class size was 200 concurrents throughout the week. Our W1 retention over the last two cohorts is hovering right around ~55%. W2 is still filling up.
Classes are just getting better and better. Better production. Better content. Better teachers. We treat every single class like a live TV show. Each class has a script which includes stuff like a hook, plot, characters, a climax, etc.
Highlights in the script indicate different elements: story elements (the narrative), physical interaction elements (ex. give me a thumbs up), digital interaction elements (ex. polls, chat, etc), etc.
Also - getting way better at picking classes to run.
At the end of the week, user’s votes on ideas I have for classes. Usually, there are 50-100 options. After that, I ask them to tell me 1) What they want to child to learn 2) What gets their kids excited (ex. some specific topic, a TV show, etc). I have this massive spreadsheet now with a bunch of shows kids are into and things parents want them to learn about.
For example, Pokemon is huge amongst 4-6 year olds (I had no idea) and parents want kids to understand shapes better (ages 4-7-ish) so we ran the class below and it was our most popular art class last week.
I also have a ton of analytics around classes. Most popular booking times, days, child’s age, state, subjects, timezone, etc. So, we can really optimize every aspect of the class using actual data.
The goal is for every class to be a smash hit.
That means we need to 1) Make the class extremely appealing to parents so they actually book it + show up 2) Make the actually class awesome for kids so they have a good time and want to come back.
Overall, Zip has been great fun. Hopefully we can start charging sometime in the next month :).
But, definitely overworking myself. For the last 2 weeks every single day has started at 7:30AM and ended at 9PM. I have dreams featuring my analytics dashboards, VSCode, and support emails. It’s been pretty brutal, but, I kinda don’t feel often it because users power me up.
But, I definitely need to balance a little bit, though. Startups really are a psychological game and you can’t have the game beat you :).
Oh and we ran a virtual field trip with a real zoo last week to hehe.
Stories
A friend the other day asked me who I look up to. And, no real person came to mind. There are the “greats” that I think are super interesting and I can learn lessons from, but, I don’t really look up to anyone. But, some fictional people came to mind. Some of you may cringe, but, Naruto has been huge for me these last 7 months.
I think its because Naruto really feels like a friend to me. I’ve seen him grow up, go through insane turmoil, and have insane wins. I just want to take that same energy and apply it to Zip. Why? Idk, part of me feels like I gotta surpass Naruto and be like, “Look dude! I did it!”. And he’d be super happy and we can keep working to surpass each other in our own fields. He’ll become leader of his ninja village. I’ll build a massive company.
I think everyone needs to get energy from somewhere. Some people get it from Elon Musk or Steve Jobs. Some get it from Naruto and Harry Potter. Ideally, you can get energy from both worlds (fiction and non-fiction) so you avoid falling completely into the world of fiction or completely into the world of non-fiction. The extremes of either are bad.
Somewhere in the middle? Perfect.