Future Builders
Like Spotify but for Learning
It seems like ages ago that we started to build our platform & it's been a pretty tough ride so far.
Back in October, we did a bunch of experiments to figure out which problem we should focus on. Our small team came up with a load of ideas, we short listed down to 10 and ran some landing page ads.
The results of the landing page experiments was clear so we went into a month long MVP build.
Just as we'd got to working prototype using a simple Ruby and Sinatra stack, our developer moved on. Nothing to do with the product, just needed a change. So I had to find some new devs.
MVP V2:
We're part of Founders Factory, a UK Startup Accelerator and they'd just launched on off-shore dev team in Romania, so we gave them a go. They re-bulit the MVP, pretty much to the same spec but in a new stack - Python/Django with JS on the front-end.
Many people would argue against doing this. They're right in many ways, the stack isn't important. But speed and getting good devs is, so I don't regret this at all.
We did a soft Alpha launch and got around 700 people signed up. The product wasn't great, but people were using it. Usage was ok, but we needed a better UX and some critical features built to get more usage.
We're just coming to the end of this work and what we've got is looking great. We've also built Native iOS and Android apps (Nativescript) and a Chrome extension.
We closed off the app for new people to do a launch, so now we're building up to that happening at the end of January.
Quick Pitch:
Future Builders enables discovery & sharing of high quality & personalised learning playlists to increase your productivity and professional growth.
We're looking for some early users to play with the platform and start building playlists - although we don't have a premium version yet, we do plan to. For this early group of curators, we're offering a full year of premium features for free (Starting at the point of introduction of paid plans, not now).
If you feel like you'd like a platform to share awesome resources that people can learn from, fill in the short form and I'll get back to you - https://forms.gle/cnW48b5xD6oMi95J9
Today we started a new experiment to test if people go through to payment rather than just sign up without cc details. After just a few minutes of the Reddit ads being live, we received the Stripe email that said "Payment of $6". It felt amazing! Just a few thousand more and we'll be where we want to be.
This idea has been evolving and being thought about for over 5 years. But finally, we've had the opportunity to see if it can work.
It definitely started as a problem I was facing - I was (and still am) learning at a fast rate than I have ever learnt, however, none of it is what you would normally consider 'education'.
Whilst I have Degrees and Masters, I learn way more from Blogs, Podcasts, YouTube Vids and other people than I do from courses. In fact, I really dislike courses (Ironic for a former teachers lol).
But I never really knew how good I was, what I should focus on next or how to connect my random 'nodes' of learning together.
Then the idea of Playlists occurred to me. If I can stitch together learning from all over the web into a playlist, maybe other people would benefit from it. Then what if I can see other people's playlists and then start to get recommendations based on where I am, where I'm going, my interested and who I follow.
So that's what we're building.
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