SkillTrek
Self-Paced Life Skills Curriculum for (mostly) Homeschooling
We purchased SkillTrek from a large homeschool family like ours. The original Wordpress platform was setup in such a way that it was easiest to license our material on a per-family basis. However, I stupidly never stopped to think about how "a great deal for an entire family" sent an unwelcoming message to families who just had a single student in need of our materials.
Only in the last few weeks have emails started asking about single-student pricing.
Yesterday I added a "per student" price option, and I'm excited to see how well its received. Sometimes that's "obvious" takes a really long time to come to light.
I acquired SkillTrek a little over a year ago, and for most of that time have been focused on operations and marketing. My ambition has always been to put most of my energy towards the educational content itself.
Finally after gearing up (lights, camera, teleprompter, soundproofing), I shot the footage for the first new educational content for the program to be released in a very long time. I'm looking for a formula that our community of homeschool families will find to be engaging and supportive of their family's life skills goals.
The concept of your "future self" isn't something I invented, but I tried to adapt it for a younger audience. The feedback so far says A) the music is too loud and B) too long (which is probably a polite way to say they think it's boring). BUT as with so many activities among this hacker community, the first release is just the starting point. I'll keep iterating and find something that works. There's no doubt that there are LOTS of homeschool families interested in life skills, mindset and character development.
If you have 13 minutes to spare, check it out at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bh8tR1X-9WM&ab_channel=SkillTrek. Better yet, if you have a kid, ask them to watch it with you and give me some candid feedback.
In an effort to make our offer more clear, I've released a preview of a new landing page to our social media channels. While the previous page went the route of "long copy" I am interested to see if a simpler description of the offering will convert.
Because I bought a functioning business with existing customers, most of this revenue is from recurring subscriptions. Since taking ownership of the company, I've added instrumentation to our websites to understand behavior. Even though we have a number of pages which get a decent amount of traffic (relative to the niche in which we operate), that traffic does not yet show signs of conversion. In other words, the reason they would click through to one of our content pages does not typically make them good candidates to purchase a subscription. In the coming month, I intend to iterate on the main landing page to see if I can get a better flow through the funnel.
As the new owner of this business, I wanted to learn more about my customer's experiences with our main product, which is a life skills curriculum for (mostly) homeschool families.
Thankfully, when I acquired the business, they were pretty well setup in Ontraport to select contacts from among current or recent customers. I sent out an email to about 300 such contacts with a link to a 8-question Google Forms survey. I offered an incentive of a small kid-friendly prize a randomly drawn respondents.
I ended up with 48 responses, which seemed pretty good.
What I learned about my business:
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No surprise, customers love the idea of teaching their children life skills. That is the essence of the product. However, there are a significant number of people whose good intentions don't translate to a habit of utilizing our materials. There's probably a relevant comparison to the gym membership phenomenon, where developing the healthy habit is easier said than done.
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The curriculum content is currently packaged in a way where topics are essentially dripped sequentially over time. However, at this time people don't find it easy to browse the entire library of topics. This was a highly requested change.
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Even people who were less than pleased with overall usability still valued the content.
Conducting any kind of survey involves decisions about how much to ask, how to word the questions and how to structure the responses. Even though I'm sure I could have improved in some of these aspects, my major goal was accomplished: I got some great feedback to better understand the perceived strengths and weaknesses of the program.
Back in late December, 2021, I came across a listing on FE International that caught my eye. Right off the bat, it checked a few boxes:
The business offered homeschooling educational resources. I had been homeschooled as a kid, and my wife are in-progress with our five children. It seemed good to have some overlap between that important part of our life and a potential side hustle.
Development of life skills is an aspect of education I find very compelling. Years ago, I had partnered with a blogger to develop a life skills community for adults. A lot of those ideas (some realized, some not) could potentially flow into this new effort.
Additionally, the total number of customers and the revenue was at a scale that seemed plausible to grow as a side hustle. I could learn the specifics of the business without a huge amount of customer support.
Lastly, after many discussions with the creators, I reached the conclusion that I could probably add value. To put it more bluntly, not everything about the website and the product was perfect. And there were a number of areas where effort and expertise could be applied. I wanted to make sure I wasn't hanging too many hopes on a single factor of the business.
Long story short, we closed on the deal at the beginning of February, and I'm excited to carry this business forward. The previous owners have been fantastic throughout this whole process. I've had a few side projects over the years, but this is the first time to build upon someone else's work. It's really nice to have fresh eyes and fresh energy that won't have to fight the battle for basic viability. The founders were successful proving the demand could be serviced by their solution. Now it's up to me to build from there.
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