Archboard

The time has finally arrived. I have made the sign up live and have been sharing the link to some ed-tech groups. I am now seeking that illusive first customer!

It has been a wild several months, but the feeling of accomplishment is high to have gotten to this point.

I finally received my EIN. It has been two months since I first applied with Stripe Atlas. I was able to get all my tax details added to Stripe and I can now officially start accepting payments!

I'm still working on some of the applications, but have everything mostly deployed and I'm almost ready to officially launch.

Since Stripe and DO have a partnership, I was able to apply for DigitalOcean's Hatch program. It's a great program that provides a credit to use within a year (among other things).

For someone just starting out with no customers, this is a huge buffer for shouldering the cost before paying customers start flooding in (I hope)!

After months of fretting over the name of the company, I finally chose one!

I bought the domains I wanted, hired someone from Fiverr to design a logo that I like quite a bit, and applied to Stripe Atlas.

I've begun building the marketing site along with the account management app to manage subscriptions. Still probably have months to go and is moving a little slower than I'd like, but it's coming along.

The first app that I will market and sell is for parent-teacher conferences and integrates with a popular SIS called PowerSchool.

Our district did the first round of conferences and things went well generally. Received good feedback that was added easily enough.

There are tweaks that still need to be made to support cloud-based and self-hosted solutions, which is a common requirement for schools.

I work for a company that manages several international schools in China. As the company as grown, they needs they have have also grown. Namely, school administration tools such SIS, LMS, and other peripheral things to help with the day-to-day operation of a school.

When we started looking, everything seemed pretty outdated and had low functionality, or was so overpriced it wasn't possible.

At that point I saw an industry that needed, to borrow a buzzword, disrupting.

I am the single web developer for the entire company and have been building custom in-house apps for our schools for the last 4 years, working through the backlog of projects that the schools have needed. I worked out a deal to maintain the intellectual property rights of the apps I create, which is huge and is the starting point for the company.

I'm in a uniquely lucky position of having users immediately for the apps that I build and can receive feedback nearly instantly after launching.