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Dom Teiml

Dec 2019

In this presentation I'm selling 4 things:

  • the team
  • the problems
  • the solution
  • the roadmap

Team 👫

Full-time

Dom

  • I dropped out of MMathAndCompSci at Oxford
  • I ran a math camp company (https://oxsc.eu)
  • Later I did a personal coding bootcamp
    • it was hard to find good resources
    • that's where I got the idea of an aggregator of education resources
  • I then worked for 1.5 years at the blockchain unicorn Gnosis (https://gnosis.io)
  • I travelled extensively in India, my hobbies are meditation, year-round cycling and sauna.
dom Wikipedia 2019

Potentially full-time

Name Superpower
Alex Full-stack engineer
Dmitry Front-end engineer
Ming Ming UX for education
Sultan Full-stack engineer

Problems 😕

Problem #1

  • A lot of people are using the internet for learning
  • There doesn't exist a place to view what your friends, colleagues and people you admire are learning
    • Goodreads is the closest, but that is only for books

Problem #2

  • Finding good resources on the internet is difficult. We still lack an efficient aggregator for education content.

Solution 😌

  • The goal is to create a social network & search engine for learning resources
  • We'll bootstrap this by building a social network for engineers.

Products

  • a web app - PWA technology will allow us to make it native for desktop & Android with just a little addition to the codebase.
    • PWA doesn't have full support on iOS
  • a Chrome extension - will run on any Chromium browser and Firefox.
    • users of Safari may add a bookmark to their bookmarks bar with the same functionality.

Features

There are four main tenets:

  1. Users can follow others, or follow just different tags of others, e.g. Javascript. Or just the tags themselves...
  2. Users can tag interesting material with tags such as Javascript, React, PWA.
  3. Users will get reputation for these contributions
  4. This data will feed into a graph-based search engine for learning resources.

That was a lot so let's unpack

  • We take learning resources very broadly, it includes blog articles, online courses, academic papers, podcasts...
  • Just as the current MVP, we'll be using a graph database (Neo4J) and graph query language (GraphQL).
    • That allows us to do efficient graph lookups - e.g. show me all resources that use React, Nextjs and Typescript
  • We will try to close popular open-source teams such as Babel, Webpack and React to use this
    • Customer interviews have shown that ppl will use this if OSS celebrities are there.
Google Solvio
Full-text search ✓ (for public content) ✗
Only show learning-resources ✗ ✓
Order resources wrt. resource's
prerequisites & user's learning profile		 ✗ ✓
Customize path with length, format,
language and other metadata		 ✗ ✓
Tracks with different mental difficulty ✗ ✓
Explore topic graph ✗ ✓
Extra content (community-generated) ✗ ✓
Get credentials ✗ ✓
Be able to save learning paths ✗ ✓
Get notifications to follow learning path ✗ ✓

Vision 🚀

  • After expanding from SE to other engineering domains, we'll expand to all topics
  • We can then leverage this search engine to include offline courses (short-term courses), attaining credentials for self-learning and a better hiring platform for businesses.
  • Our ultimate goal is to create an education system that would be recognized by governments for purposes of taxes, immigration etc.

Monetization

  • Due to the ambitions of this project, our main focus is on the execution
  • If this plan succeeds, a small capture margin of the value created will be huge absolute wise
  • Examples where value can be captured:
    • Small yearly/lifetime fee for personalized searches
    • Commission from sale of offline courses
    • Income-share agreements
    • Commission from hiring

Seed round

  • We're raising $150k.
  • We plan to be remote-first with all employees based in Europe/Western Russia
  • With that we can have 3.5 FTE (full-time equivalent employees), e.g. myself, Sultan, Dmitry and Ming Ming.
  • I will focus on sales & growth and Ming Ming on UX (a superb UX is very important for this project)

Roadmap

  • Month 1: Onboard team, pick technologies, begin working.
  • Month 2: MVP which has reputation and search
  • Month 3: Add social features, begin to use it internally
    • This can be done with little engineering effort. No uploading of custom data, no news feed - users get access to content through daily emails or automatic posting to Slack through webhooks. We're not making a Facebook competitor, it's all about the learning.
  • Month 4: Close 10 teams
  • Month 5: Close 100 teams.
  • Month 6+: Expand to other engineering domains (and eventually to all topics). Solvio becomes the go-to app for any curious soul!

Technologies

Apart from what was already mentioned, we plan to use:

  • Nextjs for lightning-fast apps pre-rendered by our server
  • Material UI for super fast UI development
  • Heroku for an easy deployment and hosting solution
  • React Native to re-use our web code on mobile

Assets:

  • We own solvio.org         &        amos.app

Discussion

What else can I say for me to
be able to tell you more?