Ascendly

I just sold my first company, Ascendly. Ascendly was a labor of love for many years - it's been a great company with a great mission and I'm happy to see it pass along in to good hands. Every class had an engineering challenge - usually with LEGO bricks, and all of my favorite memories are of kids sharing their creations. So many cute kids, each beaming with pride. Even as we moved to online classes and camps (Ascendly.com/online), you can still see the unbridled enthusiasm in their eyes.

Ok - on to my next challenge...

We recently switched from in-person engineering classes for kids, to online classes. So instead of word-of-mouth marketing to PTAs, we need to be found by Google searches. Our main offerings are engineering classes for kids using LEGO bricks, but searching for "Online LEGO classes" listed Ascendly.com/online on the fourth page of results - ouch. After making our site mobile friendly, optimizing the images, and adding some initial landing pages, we finally inched up to the first page of results! The change even seem to have led to our first organic-search virtual camp signup.

We started offering a significant discount ($75) for referrals (for kids taking our live online LEGO engineering classes (https://www.ascendly.com/online). We thought kids will really like taking classes with their friends, and the discount is significant enough to provide a strong incentive. And from our perspective, we think it will make for a happier student group. Today, we got our first referral/friend sign up. So, this a great data point and makes us think about how we can do more friends-taking-a-class stuff.

Ascendly was founded to teach engineering classes to kids. Throughout our history, we've always talked to school and parent-teacher organizations. Our marketing was very one-on-one. Since we started offer live-online classes, we've needed to market very differently, moving to referrals, SEO, and newsletters.
Today, we received our first sign-up by a person that found us via Google.
This might not sound like a big deal, but we really cheered today!

We taught our first LEGO engineering class live-online today. We learned our little students often had their parents nearby. Also, we realized that since the kids stay at home, we don't need to allocated time for clean-up of the bricks.

We're just teaching via Zoom, which seems good enough, for now.

Ascendly has taught cool engineering classes to kids for several years. We've always had our eye on creating an online offering, but it never seemed like it would be worthwhile. We've been pretty happy teaching kids in Mid-Atlantic and greater-Boston area. But, we're now quarantined and world looks funny, so we're accelerating our plans for online classes.

After dabbling with LEGO education kits, Ascendly was founded to teach kids engineering.
We've made some great classes to give kids hands-on visceral learning experiences. Our Jr. Structural Engineering with LEGO class gets kids thinking like an engineer. And our Electrical Engineering class lets first grade student gain a better grasp of circuits than many grown-ups ever manage to achieve.