Archive for the ‘MyHomeSchoolPlan’ Category

Adding a new school year in MyHomeSchoolPlan.com

Monday, August 3rd, 2009

When we built myhomeschoolplan.com and launched the service back in January ‘09, we only had the functionality of having a single school year. Were we shortsighted, or lacking in confidence, thinking we would only make it through May? No and no :)

We didn’t need it at the time and there were more customer-facing features to add. Plus, it was a great feature to get feedback from users as they used our service to create their first school year. Now that they have done that, they can tell us how to create school year number two, three, etc. And creating a ‘next’ school year is different than creating your first school year. In many cases, customer want to move their courses from one year to the next. Some times they want to move the course but have a different child take the course this year.

The point is that had we built this at the outset, we would have built it differently than building it now, and it would have been worse. This fits with our attempts to follow 37 Signals Getting Real philosophy, specifically the “It’s a problem when it’s a problem.”


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MyHomeSchoolPlan.com – an update

Monday, June 29th, 2009

Several months ago we launched myhomeschoolplan.com. It was a very soft launch; we twittered the launch and posted on a couple of homeschool forums.

It has been interesting watching how the site grows since then. We now have over 330 hundred customers using the service. There have been weeks where the number barely moved, then would jump 25 customers in a day. Typically we could trace this to word-of-mouth. Someone would ask a question in a homeschool forum about what options are out there for homeschool scheduling and tracking, and another person would post a positive response to our service, and our numbers would jump. This would also occur via twitter.
My advice from that is to make sure you monitor twitter and forums in your niche to see what is being said. One compliment we got was our quick response time, and that was often because we were listening to those channels.
The tools I use to monitor:
  • Eventbox: this is a mac-only desktop tool for social networks (twitter, facebook, etc.) What I like most is I can set up searches right in the app. So I used this for twitter.
  • Google alerts and Techrigy: I used both of these services for monitoring what was being said about the product on the web. Techrigy is a terrific service; my needs were small so I used the free version. I use google alerts as well. Between these two I feel I am getting what I need on the web.


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Speaking at Ignite Event

Wednesday, April 8th, 2009

Minneapolis joins the ranks of other cities hosting Ignite events. What is Ignite? From the site:

Basically, a person prepares a brief presentation on any topic. They get exactly 20 slides to tell their story, and each slide displays onscreen for exactly 15 seconds. So that’s 5 minutes per presenter.

As someone who can speak extemporaneously, but can also meander, I think this will be a fun challenge. The 20 slides will be fun and easy. The 15 seconds will be a challenge.

I plan on weaving my my experience in user experience with the launch of myhomeschoolplan.com into one presentation, focusing on how user experience can lead to innovative new ideas.

I’ll post back when the event is over and link to the slides after the event.

The event is April 22nd at Solera in downtown Minneapolis, MN.


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Launch of MyHomeSchoolPlan.com

Wednesday, January 7th, 2009

We’ve posted about it here and here.  MyHomeSchoolPlan has launched.  Many thanks to Dave Reid who has worked tirelessly on this application.  To Mike Lieven who has contributed to the building of this application as well.   And a special thanks of my wife Jenn who has had to be our chief tester and customer along the way.

We’ll be writing much more about the product on the blog.MyHomeSchoolPlan.com site, but on this site we’ll talk about how this came to be built.

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