HACKER Q&A
📣 BerkLee19

What Are You Working On?


So a little background before I get into the main question behind this post.

I'm Neo, currently building a newsletter called Unheard Roots where I share the stories & strategies behind the early days of game changing startups.

If you're building a startup that has found PMF and want to put your story out there, I'd love to do a feature on you.

I've got an audience of 800+ entrepreneurs, startups employees, and VCs / Investors across the board that would be seeing your story.

We would talk about how you got into startups / business, how you decided to build your current venture, and the stories & strategies from the early days (growth, building the product, fundraising, etc).

Just comment under this post and tell me about yourself & your startup.I promise I will reply to each and every serious comment.

(Alternatively you can reach out to me on Twitter at @theneooftech)


  👤 garbagecoder Accepted Answer ✓
I'm not sure I'm in a startup the way people think of it. A buddy from the army and I that did a tour in cyber really worked well together, so we're writing an app for the education space. I've started, owned, sold, managed, and left several businesses in the past, but really none of them are your classic tech startup.

We're "self-funding" to the extent we need funding at this stage.

Without giving away the plot, we're working on replacements for certain apps teachers use the are installed on desktops both so their IT departments don't have to manage installs and so we can hopefully learn something useful from the data on the back end.

One huge challenge in assessment is getting questions that are properly normed. In AP tests for example, they throw in one "junk" question to see if it's good enough. We think we might be able to do make that something individual teachers can do and take advantage of for formative assessments, but with unlimited questions. No cheating unless you literally get the other kid to do your unique problems.

It's not going to change the world and it's not going to be a giant enterprise, but we think we can contribute something and bring more and more and more open source into the education space to lower the bill on our school districts. They can pay for actual hard costs like support, data storage, and actual human time instead of just for licenses. This has already started in curriculum but we want to bring it to assessment and do it right.

Both of us are veterans of our own enterprises. (I started my first "tech company" installing Novell Netware networks in the early 90s and my partner developed and ran a website and related services for a major entertainment industry media outlet.) We wanted to find something that would be as easy as taking advantage of all our relevant skills and experiences.


👤 BrandiATMuhkuh
I'm working on creating a fully Automated Math tutor (amy.app). It tries to find your knowledge gaps and then "fills" them.

It's been in the making for about ~5 years now. Turns out, it's not so simple. In particular tech vs. content. Selling tech like this, quickly puts you into a situation where people (teachers/parents/students) want to be able to learn all-math. Not just subparts (algebra, arithmetic, fractions, etc.).

Currently we work on an SAT product since the market and scope are somewhat well defined.

Landing page: https://www.amy.app Content page: https://curriculum.amy.app