- Most Helpful Teammate
- International Ideas
- Big Company Interest
Last night I had my first international videoconference with David Tan from New Zealand. We were working on the Business Model Canvas, a one-page chart detailing nine aspects of the business plan. I had to go through the whole thing twice before I felt like the categories flowed together with any cohesiveness, and still wasn't fully satisfied with it. Luckily David had a whole book on how to use this structure and he's used it before, so he walked me through it. Also, just for the record, he's the only teammate who's been on the team from the beginning and has actually helped on any of the assignments, so if you're looking to hire a very bright and creative go-getter from New Zealand, I'd be happy to write a glowing recommendation.
Two ideas are also rolling around in my head a lot today. The first is to just focus on the Open Curriculum Project and get it working, and incrementally crank it up to full functionality before tackling the other two projects (or even really putting them out there). This has been the helpful advice from our team mentor, Santosh Rajan. (Also, I was super excited that he offered to mentor our team right away; it gave me a lot of encouragement!) Now, I know logically that just spinning up one project at a time is the way to go, but I have trouble doing that in real life for two reasons. First, having some experience in programming myself, I want to be able to give the programmers specs that have the end in mind so they don't program themselves into a corner and have to rewrite the whole thing later to incorporate the rest of the ideas. Second, my brain is just exploding with ideas and I really need to work on staying focused with what needs to be done first while filing away all the other ideas for later. Sadly, I cannot clone myself and work on a hundred things simultaneously! So for this weekend I'll work on re-doing the website mock-up to just focus on the OCP. I have the plans for every part of the website already drawn up; too bad I can't just push a magic button and have Publisher convert it into a decent website for me!
The other idea is this feature of having all the lessons available in any number of language translations. I had figured that each lesson writer would just add in a few translations willy-nilly as they needed them for their own students, with Spanish being the most popular second language here in the U.S. (Eventually, when we launch the Complete Curriculum Project, I'd like each lesson to be professionally translated into the top ten languages in the world, and then users can add other translations as desired.) But as I work on this project and see lots of interest from India, for example, I'm starting to think that the multi-lingual aspect just might be the "stand-out feature" that sets us apart from the pack and brings in a lot more customers from overseas. India in particular is going through such explosive growth, and has such a high demand for good English speakers, that being able to provide all the lessons in English plus Hindi and Bengali (for starters; there are MANY languages spoken in India!) would really let us expand into an international market quickly. However, after reviewing some of the other students' papers, I can see that there would be some challenges to overcome such as frequent electrical outages and a reluctance to use credit cards to order services over the internet. However, India is definitely on my mind right now; I've even been contacted already by a university department there about using our platform (though they wanted it to be rewritten as an add-on to the EdX platform) for science lessons.
Speaking of being contacted by interested people, I also just received a message this morning from someone at a huge international company that I very much admire; she's in charge of the "discovery" phase to find a way to expand their brand into education. So exciting! I am, of course, also a bit terrified. If we start small (i.e. me and a good web programmer) we could have a basic functional website up in a few weeks since the database is already ready. It could then grow organically, though probably with some pain and hiccoughs, but in a mangageable way that allows me to keep a lot of control over the project. On the other hand, if I decide to work with a venture capitalist or a large established company then I could, for all practical purposes, indeed clone myself and work on a hundred things all at once. Each stage of the project could roll out in a polished fashion with lots of attendant marketing and make a big splash. A whole team of people would be on hand to fix problems so quickly most users would never notice, and everyone would likely be paid in a timely manner. The downside is that I would ultimately own less of the company (though a smaller percentage of a big deal is probably still a good bet) and could find myself in a situation where the project goes in a direction I don't love. On the other, other hand...there's also the concern that a big company could just swoop in and take what I've dreamed of and worked on for twenty years and squash me in court (even though my patent lawyer is pretty fierce) and I could be left with nothing.
So. Plenty to mull over today.
P.S. And now, I just got an email from another person who has launched a successful start-up in the MOOC field and mentors NSF grantees using "lean startup" methodologies. That's really the direction I'm leaning so far, probably influenced by all the business books I've read lately. Back to mulling.
P.P.S. And today, 2/23, I was approached by someone from China (where stealing other people's ideas is an art form). I'm starting to think I need some serious business advice from someone who has been through something like this before and doesn't have any interest in developing this themselves.
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