New Sphere
Virtual Classes for Children
Preschool is all about socialization and learning practical life skills. Covid-19 has put those important activities on hold, and parents are left to figure this all out on their own. They need help figuring this out.
As a founder who codes, I tend to want to bury my head in code and ignore problems that I should be focusing on. I can control code. I cannot always control the rest of the business as I like.
Anyway, I in mid-December realized how much I had on my plate and how little I was getting done. I did a lot of reflection trying to figure out what I could do to lower my burden and make the company move faster. Since I was writing the first version of our scheduling software I decided that was the immediate thing I wanted to rid myself of. I had a ton of fun spinning up a new project but there is no way I can juggle everything else.
I reached out to a software engineer that I previously hired to see what she was up to. I pitched a job offer to her pretty quickly and she ended up joining the company about 2 weeks later. During that time, another one of our former teammates became unemployed when their project ended. So now I ended up hiring two amazing engineers to help us build our product out.
The mental burden and weight on my shoulders were gone in an instant. Sure, now I have a significant payroll expense but I can handle that by growing the business when I focus on the right things. Allowing myself to write the software was not the right thing for me to do.
Wow, what a whirlwind the last 4 months have been. We very rapidly scaled from one of my co-founders teaching classes to over 10 teachers in 3 months. Our revenue scaled from $0 to $19K at the same time. Our pipeline continues to grow at a pace we cannot seem to overtake. Yes, I know, all great problems to have!
We have 400+ people in our trial queue right now and cannot hire enough high-quality teachers fast enough. In our experience, our trial to paid conversion rate is hovering around 54% each month for the past 3 months.
We are revamping our job postings and will have those up in a couple of days. Switching everything to JazzHR will help us keep the pipeline under control, but it takes someone to manage that. Now we've hired someone who will focus 90% of their time on recruiting so we can continue to build new class cohorts.
We also launched an internal referral bonus ($1,000) for our team that will hopefully encourage them to help us expand the team. We are also kicking around the idea of using our existing Facebook/Instagram Ads expertise to recruit teachers. That one seems a bit scary since it does not directly result in paying customers.
Does anyone else have any ideas on how to help us hire teachers? Do you know a preschool or elementary school teacher who wants to work from home?
We've been conducting 10-15 minute long meet and greet sessions via Zoom for all of our new families. This did not scale as we ramped our ads up. We are booked solid every 15 minutes until November 5th. Ooops!
Doing things that don't scale is a great method until you are overwhelmed by an influx. We did not pay close enough attention and let the bookings get away from us in a few short days. Now we have to tweak how we onboard new customers.
I think we will move to an intake form where the parent fills out info for them and their child. We will then let them schedule the trial classes directly from our available hourly classes. That should allow us to focus on maintaining the class quality and continue to hire more amazing teachers to add more class times.
Does anyone else have any ideas?
Two parents from our test cohorts sent us testimonials for our upcoming website launch. What an incredible feeling to have satisfied users tell us how much they love the service offering!
Here are the testimonials:
Clara was immersed in the program in ways I didn’t think was possible digitally. She found the teacher thoroughly engaged and managed to keep her attention throughout the class. The classes were live and interactive, something that cannot be achieved through other online programs.
- Christian L. from Edmonton
Circle time is the equivalent of preschool in terms of the quality of its delivery and content. Joshua looks forward to every class!
- Daisy W. from Toronto
We've put together 2 cohorts of six kids to run a test service offering with. Our goal here is to answer the following three questions:
- Do kids stay focused and engaged for the entire session?
- Can parents leave their kids alone during the session?
- Do the kids want to participate long term?
We'll conduct daily sessions with these test groups to gain some insight into these questions.
We've continued to explore this pivot. We came up with a name for our service! We're going to call it Its Circle Time. This name is simple and rememberable, albeit not very trademarkable. Since we are building a virtual analog to Circle Time, it works really well.
For the past year, I have been building a preschool, called East Sac Academy, in East Sacramento, CA. That project has been a rollercoaster of ups and downs as we navigate building out a physical space in a heavily regulated market. We have obtained a building, been working with architects & various consultants to bring our dream to reality. Our timeline got shifted a bit because of the new realities of COVID-19. My team consists of myself, my co-founder Colin, and our school director Melody.
After pumping the brakes a bit on East Sac Academy we were all discussing things we could work on until we can continue construction. One idea that emerged eventually became Its Circle Time. We decided to see if we could provide an educational experience over Zoom targeting 3 to 6-year-old kids. The big question we were facing was whether or not kids that young would stay present and engaged for 45-minute sessions on video chat. Would it devolve into a crazy mess of kids all running around, or would it capture their attention and kept them coming back?
The only way to answer that is to spin up a few tests and collect data.
All preschools in the state of California have been closed indefinitely due to Coronavirus. My family of 3 is all working from home, including our 3.5-year-old daughter. She was in a Montessori preschool from 9:30 am to 4 pm 4-5 days per week. Her preschool closed by sending the parents a group text informing everyone, they also lacked any plans for distance learning.
The dog is wondering why everyone is home all the time.