Trail It

Easy Content Curation. Materializing The Human Curated Web.

Under 10 Employees
Multiple Founders
Founders Code
Community
Content
Marketing
Productivity
Social Media

Trail It helps you get 80% of the gist on topics you care about in 20% of the time.

Trail Creators organize content from other sites to form "Trails" via video/audio/and text overlays to provide their followers context

June 17, 2020 45 days later, waitlist over 300+, 6X Growth

The specific tactics we used to grow will be saved for a long form post. However, we've seen some great progress in the last 45 days.

The mediums we use are primarily social media and email. The process is laborious and not super scalable but it's consistent and very targeted to our ideal initial users (in our case instructors who have some specific domain expertise on a variety of topics).

We have a goal currently of gaining 50-75 new sign ups per week. It's intensive for sure.

We're going to be rolling out a giveaway soon. It's pretty awesome, here's what it looks like... Will report back in in about 45 days to share the results of the giveaway. We hope we can gain an extra 1,000 contacts through this strategy. If it works, we'll do it again and again.

Minion

May 1, 2020 A stronger focus on Email Waitlist

About 3 weeks ago we started reaching out to creators/instructors we think would be a great fit for our platform. We intuited that Udemy and Skillshare and the like would be a good starting place.

We've reached out to 100s at this stage. The response has not been that awful, it's just tedious because we're doing genuine outreach at this stage.

The good news is that although we have less than 50 people on our waitlist, cumulatively their reach is over 500,000 students!

We're focused on the supply-side first, and then expect our instructors to share their trails with their existing fan bases.

April 12, 2020 Rejected from multiple Accelerators

In Mach, we applied to 20+ programs knowing that Covid-19 may have a serious impact on startup funding (I think this will be a huge problem soon starting in June).

We've been rejected from 6 of them so far and are waiting for more responses from other programs.

Some feedback includes we're too early or its too ambitious.

I've been rejected by all VCs in my past despite having and sold 2 startups and generating over a $1m in income for myself over the years. Yes, no unicorns under my belt yet, but at least we know how to bootstrap.

Still moving forward. Not really phased by the rejections. We are still moving forward because.... internally we think this is rad and at this stage we can see the tech is starting to shape up and it people have indicated to us in our conversations they think its a pretty cool concept.

March 5, 2020 First Angel Investor

It turns out Professors and educators like what we're doing. It's likely because they viscerally appreciate that we're helping to pioneer the emerging field of Learning Experience Design (L.E.D. as I like to refer to it as)

LED is the notion that there actually are optimal approaches to learn different subject matter. Leveraging multiple media types and making sure to teach the right things in the right order can have profound effects on a humans ability to retain knowledge, especially if CONTEXT is accounted for.

Our first angel investor is Professor in Machine Learning and he loves the idea of being able to leverage other content on the web to explain topics relevant for his students, and he believes that creating trails with him providing context through overlay blurbs or video/audio clips can accelerate his student's ability to learn.

Also, content creation is much more difficult than curation. With our tool, he's still the guiding light providing meaning and context at the original source.

January 12, 2020 Deeper Competitive Analysis and Research

I'm glad we started without as much due diligence and just pursued the project without seeing exactly what's out there.

There are already projects that are browser-addons for annotating the web. It actually turns out that this idea is as old as the Mosaic browser, and that the same tech for product tours is fundamentally the same as Trail It.

Our key difference is our focus on building multi-media socially-engaging Trails for the expressed purpose of helping other learning complex things quickly.

Context matters. Humans learn better through storytelling. Despite the competitors in the space, we're still moving forward with our project because we think a human curated web is not only interesting, it's likely very good for the world to index the web in a way to maximize knowledge attainment.

November 2019 Decided to begin pursuing Trail It

I had the core idea for Trail it back in 2014. I finally had an opportunity, know-how, resources, teammates and partners, and will to begin late last year.

We started with sketches and then mockups and then about a month later we started to experiment and develop early prototypes.

About

Trail It helps you get 80% of the gist on topics you care about in 20% of the time.

Trail Creators organize content from other sites to form "Trails" via video/audio/and text overlays to provide their followers context