Dynamic EFL

Recent podcasts--and the book "Traction"--have convinced me that I need to be less shy about getting feedback from the people my product is for. So, I asked a colleague if I could sit her down and show her what I was doing.

I prepped for the demo in two ways.

On Monday, I gave her the forms I use to keep track of vocabulary in my classes and explained how I used them and said "if you bring some vocab lists to the meeting on Wednesday, I'll show you what I do with it."

Also, I asked her for a copy of a worksheet she makes now, to scan in the header she's been using, then, I had to add offer codes to the site (something I've been meaning to do), and made an offer code for her that would automatically setup users who signed up with the offer code with the header as default.

So, on Wednesday I sat down with her and we went through the signup. We set up a class for her and made a first worksheet. She was impressed with the ease of use and the automatic formatting (three of the words she added to her class weren't in the system, yet, but that means it saved her time on the formatting and nine words...)

I think the prep I did was worth it. She says she'd like to use it, but I know that making something new a part of your routine is hard. I'll try to ask her about it gently next week, but her response was great.

I get that this isn't a major milestone, but I've struggled with motivation and the question of "is my idea a bad one?" Listening to the recent podcast on MicroSaas, I realized I don't check all the boxes (there isn't competition for what I'm offering, meaning I'll have to communicate its value).

So, I managed to use Meetup.com to find some people interested in founding companies and found four who could agree on a time to meet... and we met.

Not a big deal, but I was glad to be the only person there who had code written and a prototype working... and, to meet an honest-to-god software developer who expressed willingness to talk about my frustrations.

Even more, one of the people there has since signed up to the worksheet generator and started making worksheets to practice English with his girlfriend.

The first version was a brutal slog. I didn't know enough about coding to really plan, though I may not have started if I knew how many individual steps there would be.

Originally I used the tkinter windowing system to make an offline app that stored a lot of information in XML files and used the python reportlab library to make PDFs. I guess that was the first version, and I got me through quite a bit -- at first most of my time was invested in writing definitions and gapfill sentences -- and I was excited when they started to repeat. (When I saw that a definition I had written for one group was showing up in another group's worksheet.)

That was also the version in which I realized that I needed to differentiate between "table (the furniture)" and "table (in a document)" and similar words with identical spellings by different meanings.

And that was the version I was working with when I thought "I bet I could use my definitions to make a crossword puzzle." I was proud as anything when it worked.

I have ideas often. I even try to think of monetization strategies for the ideas. And, someday, I'd like to have a network or a team that could help me.

But, when I realized that I was investing a lot of time in making worksheets by hand--and feeling badass because nobody else had vocab review of this caliber--I realized that I had the kind of problem I could solve for myself, and then ideally sell to other teachers.

In the "early days" my goals were just to see if it could be done. By me, I mean. I knew the idea was well within the realm of what software could do, but I couldn't afford (and didn't have the skills) to hire someone to do it.

So, I set out to learn Python and made first an offline version that stored information in XML, and then django version. It probably isn't elegant code, but it does what it has to do, and I'm proud of it.

I developed this in secret (more or less). That was a mistake. Now that I'm interested in attracting users -- to much more than a MVP -- I realize that getting the word out is going so slowly that I should have been doing this before.

I know that was a mistake.

That said, I put together a strategy to reach teachers who might be open to changing their classroom vocab management. And, it's starting to pay off. I'm creating great worksheets to share for free -- as well as making a pretty good blog for teachers -- and they all point towards what I'm doing with the website.

The people who are clicking through are probably the people I want to reach. (They've downloaded a worksheet I've made from worksheet sharing sites, or clicked through from a blog post on teaching that I've written.)

The thing is, very few of them subscribe for a trial membership. And, I'm close to going crazy with ideas for changing the landing page.

But there are things I'd rather be working on than constantly reworking the landing page.