Do You Think You Could Write Something Better?

I'm Jeff, the creator of Scholaric. That question was put to me, in 2008. I was talking with my wife and our friend. We had started our homeschool adventure with a spreadsheet, then quickly moved to a desktop application, which we hated. Now the three of us were discussing what to use. What we had wasn't good enough. Basic tasks like entering and printing lessons took too long, and you couldn't visualize the data. My wife asked me "Do you think you could write something better?" She was serious.

I Want a Grid

My wife and our friend provided the starting vision for the product. "I want a grid, like a teacher planning book, but be able to print out a checklist for each student." I wanted to be able to enter a lesson in about two seconds, which meant as few required fields as possible, instead of the 13 fields I currently had to enter.

Nobody is Ever Going to Find This

I registered a domain name in 2010 and launched a quiet beta, missing lots of features and having numerous bugs. My wife was worried what people would think, but I told her, "Don't worry, nobody is ever going to find this". My only marketing effort was a Twitter account, where I rarely mentioned my product, just provided resources for homeschoolers. Our friend started telling people on Facebook, and they were trying it out.

She's Using It This Year

Then our friend casually told me in an email, she was using my product, my BETA product, exclusively for the coming year. I told my wife, "She's using it this year." I was shocked, shocked! Was it good enough? Could I keep it online?

Launch

I launched Scholaric April 15th (tax day), 2011 at the St. Louis Catholic Homeschool Conference. Since then, Scholaric has grown to hundreds of users and millions of planned lessons. I think I did write something better. Join now and see.