Modquiz

I did my first customer interview today with my sister. Since this is a study tool and my sister recently graduate college, I thought it would be a good fit. One thing about this project is I am in some ways writing a lightweight DSL for flashcard. This DSL Should be simple and easy enough to use that anyone can use it. The ultimate goal is that it's fast enough to use that a student could take notes in class and have all of their study materials complete by the time they leave class.

Since I'm trying to validate a "DSL for everyone" It was validating that my sister understood the purpose of the tool, why the tool was better than a similar tool she had used before, and she was able to navigate all of the UI features. She also gave me a hint on how to sell the product once I'm ready.

The software is still very buggy, so that and docs is where I'm going to spend alot of my attention. I'm hoping to continue validating the idea, so the goal is to do 10 customer interviews in February.

I've actually built this project before, as I mentioned in the last update, but when I did I spent most of my time coding and not nearly enough time finding customers. I don' really know much about starting a business, and I work best when I'm accountable to someone so I started seeing a business coach.

It's been a good exercise, as a way to starting planning my project, and they're like a manager I have to report progress to every week. I like that part of it, but one thing I'm struggling with is determining how much to lean into the "business side". My biggest mistake last time was not building up customers to help me product manage the service, and ultimately writing and re-writing a product for no one. This time I've noticed some of the business resources talking about building a brand, and my coach has been encouraging me to do market research and create a plan for launching my product/quitting my job.

I've been pushing back against this a bit, because the prototype is still not really useable. I went to another small business association meetup, and one thing that I think is different is that most of the businesses are already proven, there's a lot of consultants and marketing professionals and one recruiter. In a sense they're already certain someone will buy what they're selling and if a recruiter starts marketing and lands a customer they can start recruiting for that customer. I on the other hand can't service customers I were to get third-party until the MVP is more V.

I'm not building it in a vacuum, I have my first customer(my partner) and as of this weekend am thinking about trying to find a second, as I've built out enough features for my partner to studying with. The coach has been useful, but I'm curious how y'all have dealt with balancing these different parts of starting a business.

About 8 years ago I started a prototype for a flashcard app I called Modquiz. At the time, I lacked the experience to make the product a reality. Revisiting the space about 8 years later I noticed the space hasn't changed much. This is a project I've been particularly passionate about, so I've begun building a prototype again. The goal is to occupy the space between the easy to use, like Quizlet or StudyBlue and the exceptionally smart, but difficult to use tools like Anki. I'm building a flashcard app that will be productized and easy to use, while also providing tools and patterns to build immersive quizzes quickly and easily. Unlike flashcards which are entirely unstructured, the data used to build study materials with Modquiz will be organized in such a way to clearly and quickly navigate. I also hope to follow the principle of write once, use ∞. This means that you'll be able to read the information you put into Modquiz like notes, automatically build flashcards and quizzes out of them, create games and hopefully much more.