TeachHero

I set up social media profiles on 3 major social networks that seem to be primarily where my customers hangout and also where most of my competition has a presence.

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/teachheroinc
Twitter: https://twitter.com/teach_hero
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC4LBzKVO7QjnfP8RdIopVdQ

I don't have a clear strategy yet for how I'll use each social network, but I wanted to get a presence on there as soon as possible to start interacting with the communities

I knew I needed to get something up as quickly as possible (even while the product is still being built) so that (1) search engines can index and rank my site and (2) to start capturing leads.

I am a Laravel php developer, so I used my favorite static site generator: https://jigsaw.tighten.co/ to quickly scaffold out a landing page and hosted it for free on https://www.netlify.com/

I designed most of the graphics in https://www.figma.com/ and used my favorite CSS framework: https://tailwindcss.com/ to style the website.

To capture leads, I set up a free account on HubSpot and built a simple lead capture form (I'll improve this later).

teachhero.com

I wanted a professional logo and branding kit but didn't want to spend a lot of money for it. I figured that I can always improve branding later. Besides, a company brand is far more than it's logo, fonts and colors.

I tried Fiverr's Logo Maker at first: https://www.fiverr.com/logo-maker. But none of the suggested designs felt like my brand. I would need something custom made.

I'm a decent UI/UX designer and programmer but not a graphic artist ... especially not good at designing logos. So, I hired one.

I went with this designer on Fiverr: https://www.fiverr.com/softriver

I decided to form as an S-Corp instead and LLC because I have partners and want to issue shares of stock. It seemed like the better route to go long term for the type of business I was building.

I used https://www.legalzoom.com/ to submit all my paperwork to form the company. They made it really easy to get started and clearly explained all the necessary steps. I'd highly recommend using them.

Naming things is so hard! I really struggled to find a good name for my business. I spent nearly 5 months searching business names. Some tools I tried were direct domain searches on hover.com, brandbucket.com, and squadhelp.com. I also tried tools like Shopify's business name generator: https://www.shopify.com/tools/business-name-generator

I finally found a name that me and my partners really liked on Squad Help: teachhero.com

These were my guiding principles for finding a good name:

1. Easy to spell
2. Easy to say
3. Easy to remember
4. Communicates business intent without being too specific
5. Had a .com domain available

I was more than willing to pursue my business idea alone and go the solo founder route. I wanted to avoid taking investor money at all costs if possible. However, I saw the benefit of partnering with some who is highly connected in the education sector. I know I can build, but selling and marketing is where I need the most help.

I shared my business with one of my clients who ran a very successful homeschool organization and she loved the idea! Fortunately, she and her husband (who runs a multi-million dollar nationwide company) agreed to become partners.

I'd been working on a few freelance projects since late 2019. One for a multi-campus homeschool group and another for a private k-12 school. Both clients loved my work and continued to ask for more features and proposed new projects.

I was surprised how willing they were to pay for these projects (not cheap) and by the positive feedback from teacher and parents. Both projects had given me a lot of insight into the needs and many pain points schools face. I was able get excellent feedback from experienced teachers and school administrators from various backgrounds in education.

After almost 2 years of building web applications for these schools, I realized I had identify a tremendous need and a growing market. Not only that, I had been validating a product idea all along !

So I decided to take all the knowledge, product validation and feedback I'd accumulated over the past 2 years and commit to building a SAAS business.