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Homeroom — Personalized short-form learning for moving up in tech
Each week, we find you the single best article to read next for getting better at your job. In our mobile app, you're grouped with people in your role at different companies who are reading the same thing. Features facilitate intimate peer-to-peer learning.
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Aman Manik
@erikspang, I love this. I feel especially in product management (after this year of being locked down, lonely, etc), it's even more important to get groups of like-minded people together to knowledge share. I also found long courses drawn-out and not actionable enough.
Very excited to try out homeroom! <3
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@amanik thanks mate! Experimenting around the best way to approach peer-to-peer learning was finicky. We eventually built up enough confidence to bet big on the efficacy of small groups, extensible lightweight social interactions, and an extremely doable shared experience (reading an article together). Excited to pour the kerosene on this thing!
I’ve been an early adopter of Homeroom during the Alpha preview and really appreciated the community aspects of learning. It’s like having a team of “accountability buddies” for hitting your learning goals. Excited to see what’s next!
🌟 Are you a PM, PMM or Product Designer? Apply to be one of the first 100 users within your job cohort http://www.homeroomtime.com/oppo...
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Hey PH 👋. It feels pretty special to launch this with you all. A number of projects and people I met through this community contributed to my taking Homeroom full-time towards the end of 2019. While we could have picked a better year to start a company, our team fought its way to the other side. Today feels like we've come full circle in a really cool way.
That said, I'm excited to introduce you to Homeroom. It's a mobile app for premium short-form learning to help you move up in your job. I'll give some additional context because I'm among my product people and wow do we love context.
🦍 THE BIG HAIRY PROBLEM
We're betting big on a key insight ... while data suggests that half of people who work at a desk have no time for extra learning at work, that's not entirely true. We learned that most people who put themselves in this camp could carve out 5-10 minutes pretty regularly. And we're talking about 50 million people in the US alone. They just don't have bandwidth for a typical high quality option like an online course.
The big idea behind Homeroom is that if you can help people squeeze classroom quality learning into 2-5 minute chunks, then you'll have made meaningful professional development truly doable for a huge portion of the workforce. No prob, right?
Big prob. You can't just chop up long-form courses and 10x the experience (we tried). Eventually we learned that a major opportunity existed in helping people start and stick with learning as a habit. In the words of James Clear, that meant it had to be obvious, attractive, easy and satisfying. We went back to the drawing board and started there.
👀 THE SOLUTION WAS RIGHT IN FRONT OF US
After taking a close look at articles, we saw that they fit the short-form criteria, and it was obvious what you were supposed to do. This first version of Homeroom is what we got after iterating on attractiveness, easiness and satisfaction. And there was a lot of room for improvement there.
Each week, we find you the single best article to read next for getting better at your job. You're grouped with people in your role at different companies who are reading the same thing. From there, various tools facilitate intimate peer-to-peer learning.
🚀 HOMEROOM 100
To make sure we roll this out the right way, we're opening things up one job vertical at a time. We're starting with:
Product Managers
Product Marketers
Product Designers
If that's you and you consider yourself a voracious learner, we'd love to see you apply to be one of our first 100 official users. You can do that at www.homeroomtime.com. If we're able to get you in the founding batch and you mention Product Hunt in the "Bio" of your application, we'll slash your membership price in half.
Again, really excited to launch this with you all. Means a lot. And more than happy to answer questions here.
Warmly,
Erik
I totally agree with the other sentiment here that Homeroom is one of those products that I never knew I needed - it just makes so much sense. I've been using the beta for a few weeks and already feel my industry trends FOMO diminishing and that "on top of my game" feeling spiking. Super excited to see this product flourish.
I've used Homeroom for a little while now. As someone that recently transitioned into a PM role, it's been super valuable for me to seek out resources quickly to level-up.
Oh this is so awesome. I think there is so much value in creating tools to support individuals in understanding/applying the lessons from written material. These tools should help user's extract as much as possible from the content, but then get out of the way, so the focus is _always_ on the meat and potatoes of the article/video/whatever. Homeroom seems to be trying to do exactly that! Big fan, backed hard. Good luck.
@sweetheart absolutely, preach 🙌. We're big fans of the idea that it's better to read the best stuff on a topic several times than to read every little thing. Just like you said, a focus on really extracting value is implied here ... and way way underdone.
@erikspang Really cool! Just signed up for the beta. I'm curious about how you curate content? What background do the curators have and the criteria to select sources. Super interesting.
@alonsofb glad you applied! And really great question.
On one hand, we have a top down approach. We've analyzed a few dozen of the more popular content repositories that have cropped up over the past few years ... scope ranges from "all things tech" like First Search (https://search.firstround.com/), to very job specific lists organized by thought leaders. There is a lot of helpful overlap here when it comes to creating a kernel of content. But most importantly, this is helping our ML get better at learning what a good article looks like.
It will combine this "knowledge" with our bottom up approach to curation, playing the role of scoring any given article.
Half of this equation is understanding what language/typology makes sense to users. We're wrapping up a ton of research with PMs, designers and PMMs to identify skills and activities that represent these jobs ... eventually to be owned by each role-specific community at large.
We'll be running a ton of different experiments around how standard and deputized users can nominate content into these "job to be done" based categories. Eventually we want our ML to own more and more of the article evaluation so we can really scale what we feed it.
I used Homeroom during a beta test, and it's awesome. Much more focused than scrolling LInkedIn/Hacker News/Twitter, and the new features around peer-to-peer learning are very exciting. This is the tool I didn't know I needed until I had it.
@shannon_odell ladies and gentlemen. The greatest Science Advisor there ever was.