Chief Quant, Director of Analytics at Math Academy. Posts about learning, upskilling, math education, Math Academy, and more generally, stages 2-3 of Bloom's talent development process in hierarchical skill domains.
New on JustinMath.com - Put Your Environment on Easy Mode; Best Teachers are Supportive Hard-Asses; Vastly Underrated Predictor of Success
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Hey! You're receiving this email because you requested to be notified about new posts at JustinMath.com. Here are 3 new posts: Put Your Environment on Easy Mode
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The Best Teachers are Supportive Hard-Asses
~250 words And a new podcast: Earning the Right to Scale - Math Academy Podcast #7, Part 2
What we covered:
– As Math Academy has grown over the past year, we're getting a better sense of general do's and don'ts when scaling a startup. We've learned hard lessons about overloading the database, the task processor, and our team, requiring numerous infrastructure and process updates.
– Schools have been using the system and we've built plenty of additional features to, among other things, accommodate unique billing schemes and make it easy for teachers to manage classes on the system.
– We've intentionally grown organically and were self-funded, which forced us to do things manually at the beginning. Years ago, we taught math classes in person and Jason onboarded our first online users on hundreds of hour-long individuals and calls. These were crucial experiences to learn who our customers are, what they want from the product, and common failure modes.
– In our experience, doing things manually at the beginning ensures that you 1) build a product that customers actually get value from, and 2) you don't clutter your product with unnecessary bells and whistles that don't add value. In other words, you have to do the manual work to earn the right to scale.
0:00 - Introduction
2:18 - Building infrastructure to handle increasing load
3:41 - Bringing on AWS expertise to robustify the backend
4:22 - An overloaded database enters a new realm of physics
5:50 - Prioritizing execution over perfection in start-ups
6:33 - Paying the bill for accumulated infrastructure debt
7:53 - Improving job prioritization of the task processor
9:52 - Benefits of scaling organically
11:42 - Wisdom is the result of failures
12:18 - There is no substitute for experience
13:17 - Focusing on solving problems, not advertising
14:48 - Upgrading with surgical precision
15:35 - The pain-point compass
17:04 - Managing finite time and resources
18:27 - Development of the gravity feature
20:42 - Gravity is a suggestion, not a hard override
22:25 - Limiting gravity to avoid cognitive overload
28:29 - Balancing customization and customer confusion
31:28 - The feature sandbox
33:58 - Increasing volume of customer support emails
35:22 - Additional infrastructure requirements for schools
36:18 - Learning about the customer through direct interaction
38:14 - Step 1: Manually added schools using spreadsheets
40:22 - Step 2: Developed tools to handle specialized school requests
41:23 - Step 3: Goal is 100% self-service sign-ups for schools
42:32 - Solve the problem manually first, then automate it
43:44 - Why focus on schools?
46:15 - Math Academy goes to college
49:37 - You can’t anticipate every edge case
52:14 - Letting user behavior build the product roadmap
58:54 - Becoming successful means working harder
1:00:24 - The customer support hurdle
1:03:27 - How Justin’s expanding roles drove growth (both personal & company)
1:09:03 - Teaching as market research for Math Academy
1:10:52 - The value of having been inside the trade
Best, |
Justin Skycak
Chief Quant, Director of Analytics at Math Academy. Posts about learning, upskilling, math education, Math Academy, and more generally, stages 2-3 of Bloom's talent development process in hierarchical skill domains.
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