The Big Idea: How it Started (post #1)

I was in Seattle visiting my sister (Megan) and her husband (Greg) over the Fourth of July weekend a couple of years ago.  They had a little fire pit in their backyard. It was warm for Seattle, which meant that we were all wearing jeans and a jacket. We were grilling something up to eat and Greg and I were both drinking Glen Livet.  Not sure what Meg was drinking, but she doesn’t usually like scotch.

The way that I remember the conversation beginning was that I was talking about this article I had read in grad school about this guy who built a startup with a text messaging service for SAT/ACT students. I think he would just have automated text messages that had formulas to remember or vocabulary words. It was interactive in some type of binary fashion. Anyways, I liked the idea and said some day I would like to build something like that. Greg said what if I made it for professional licensing exams rather than just the SAT/ACT. That was really what got us started. Professional licensing exams. There must be hundreds of them. 

For a little context, all three of us have graduate degrees. All in different fields (social work, architecture, and business).  Each of us were fairly recently out of school. Each of us had different licensing exams in our near future. Each of us had full time jobs. Megan and Greg had a young son (Harvin) who was not letting them sleep as well. So the idea of some sort of either a text messaging service or an app that would send us questions or give us a little bit of information that we needed to know during the day intrigued us. It was a challenge to block out a several hours a week after work or on the weekend to study for these exams. 

As the night wore on, more exciting ideas sprung to life. It seemed like it would be best if you could pick the times of exactly when you wanted to be messaged with questions. We all agreed that we were not really talking about a normal study session that lasted a couple of hours. That would still exist but this was different. We were talking about a five or ten-minute study session where you just were learning or reviewing one specific concept. In my mind, it was while you were in line at Starbucks or taking the train to work or cooking dinner or picking up your kid from soccer practice or while you’re at the airport. Seemed like there were a lot of little slices of time that were basically wasted in which this idea could potentially work. It just seemed to us that if you did this, then you would not have to study as much and would have more time for friends and family as opposed to studying for an exam.

We came up with more as we continued to sip on the Livet. You know how the Netflix or Amazon apps can figure out what you should watch or buy next? And how they are fairly accurate in predicting this? Well, we thought that an algorithm could be built that could predict what piece of information you needed to see next. Every time you answered a question, we would get more data about what you know and don’t know. This could be much more efficient than having to read the whole chapter in a book. 

And then we started brainstorming about where do we waste the most time? No doubt it was in our cars, we agreed. What if there was a hands free version? You could be learning while driving around. I was guessing that I drove probably somewhere around an hour a day. This was good.

The final idea for the night was GPS. Sure, somebody could request the times that they wanted to be messaged with questions. But what if they could also say where they wanted to be messaged based on location. If I knew I wanted to use this service while waiting in line at Starbucks, couldn’t we just build the technology so that when I walked into my local Starbucks I would receive a notification asking if this was a good time for a few questions? Seemed feasible. I would just have a list of my favorite locations, and whenever I entered that location I would be messaged. 

This thing was sounding more like an app than a text message service. At the end of the night, our idea was an app for professional licensing exams that focused on bite sized learning (five or ten minutes) that could happen anytime or anywhere. As you used the app more we would learn about your knowledge gaps and be able to fill those in a more efficient way than a textbook can. So it would have a certain level of personalization. A textbook is the same for every person. And we also liked the idea of the hands free aspect as well as the GPS. 

I suppose it should be mentioned that we were not really trying to think up a business. It really felt like it just fell from the sky or something. Really we had just thought up something that was a solution to our own problem. As I flew back to Denver I was pretty excited about this idea.