After interviewing EdTech founders for a year, an interesting trend emerged:

Many founders have great stories about starting their companies.

This week, I put together the Origin Stories from 3 Superheroes of EdTech. These founders are Michelle Brown of CommonLit, Brett Kopf of Remind, and Brad Schiller of Prompt.

Here is an overview of their stories:

1. Leveraging money from wedding gifts 👰 - Michelle Brown got the idea for CommonLit while doing Teaching for America in rural Mississippi. She wondered what it would look like if a high-quality research-based curriculum was available to all teachers for free. To top it off, she built v1.0 from her couch while in grad school using money from her wedding
2. Every teacher can text 👨‍🏫 - Brett Kopf and his brother interviewed 100s of teachers before ever writing a single line of code for their school communication app, Remind. Then, while other entrepreneurs were building products with many features, the Kopf brothers decided to use one, omnipresent channel: text-messaging. This was one factor that helped them achieve scale quickly.
3. Does My Essay Suck? 😡 Brad Schiller wanted to find the patterns behind student writing needs and how to fix them. So he created an essay called www.DoesMyEssaySuck?.com and let students get feedback at no cost. He also offered to do it in 6 hours or less. He learned a lot on little sleep. Now Prompt grows 3x per year.

Want to hear the full episode? You can listen on iTunes here. Or listen on Spotify here.

Thanks for reading,

Gerard Dawson

PS - I'm rethinking my email newsletter. Why do you read these emails? Can you take 15-30 seconds to reply with 4-6 words?