February flew by in a blur. I hardly had time to breathe, let alone stop and smell the roses. When I have stopped, I’ve generally found myself confused about what’s happening, missing the human elements in life (friendship, interaction, physical contact), which quickly leads down the rabbit hole of questioning what I’m doing. I know that I made the analysis before whether to do this, and agreed I should. Now I follow through. So I pull it all back together, take some big mindful breaths, and put myself back to work.
Following through demands seamless discipline. I have my structure, and within it perform to varying degrees of efficacy from day to day. The more I push on, I find that the structure is really most effective and mitigating the poor performing days rather than optimizing the good days. When I’m in the zone, I’ll get things done, regardless. But when I’m not there, when I’m down, fogged, etc, it’s the routine and discipline that ensure the train keeps moving. In my experience, there are more days outside of the zone than in it. Ultimately the outcomes of this whole enterprise will largely be determined by how well I do when not firing on all cylinders.
February Activity
Curriculum Design
Curriculum design is a never ending task. I have Cambridge Lower Secondary and AP Computer Science A to work on. Although both are, in effect, done, they’re not. There is always more to do, improvements to make. Quality curriculum includes:
- Lecture slides
- Assignments with their corresponding answer keys, rubrics, and output templates
- Lab material (e.g. structured code for streamlined instruction)
- In class supplementary material
- Teacher guides and teacher resource indices
- The list goes on
Part of me thinks I should put the brakes on the development until I can confirm a sale. The development is so time intensive, should I continue grinding if I don’t even have a customer on the line? My gut says to continue because I want the material to be out-of-this-world good. As I get better at making curriculum, and new features evolve, I loop back around and iterate on material. This has become a labor of love…or maybe an obsession.
At this point I’m convinced of the critical importance of quality curriculum. With the right material, an average teacher can deliver a well structured lesson and can leverage supplementary material such that the overall experience is solid. Curriculum takes lots of time and it takes experience with the platform of choice. Despite what the media might have you believe, this isn’t something you can hand off to AI. No doubt, AI has greatly improved my output, but I’m still the driver.
Develop Promotional Material
I’ve put together promotional packages, ready to hand to leads when the time comes. These packages include lesson samples, assessment artifacts, teacher guides, labs with code, etc. Basically, these give a snapshot of what the broader curriculum is like. Along with these packages are slides I’ve built for presenting to leads, and the pitch itself. I practice this ad infinitum so I could present in my sleep. And I need to keep practicing it, lest I get an interested lead 3 months from now and I’ve forgotten my pitch.
Cold Email Outreach
I don’t know any other way to get my message out in time to sell than by sending out emails. I need to stress, we’re sending out emails to people that don’t want to receive emails from us. We’re those obnoxious people sending promotional material that you didn’t ask for. We’re the email version of telemarketers.
This is totally new to me. I’ve watched educational videos, and read educational material on how to run effective campaigns. Of course, there are countless YouTubers who swear they’ve got the secret to knocking it out of the park, but I’m still daunted by the stats: average cold email reply rates of around 3.5%. Most of those are something that translates to ‘No!’. Average conversion rates are between 0.2% and 0.3%. Many cold emailers compose lists of tens, if not hundreds of thousands of contacts and then let the emails fly. My target market is much smaller, but I suspect they’re no more receptive to getting cold emails. Nevertheless, I must play the numbers game and get out my message out to as many viable schools as possible.
My assistant has spent months harvesting school details. We now take the information she’s gathered and validate emails via Snov.io. It outputs emails that are green (confirmed) and yellow (maybe). This is important, because yellows will bounce 50% of the time, which can lead to a blacklisted inbox. So we don’t touch the yellows yet. After we’ve confirmed the email addresses, we pass them into an email automation platform (Saleshandy.com).
We’ve currently got five email addresses across two domains (coderpromail.io and coderpro.co). I don’t use any email addresses from coderpro.io in the cold email outreach, because I don’t want to damage my domain reputation by having emails bounced, labelled as spam, etc. So I have the five email addresses ‘warmed’ in another platform (trulyinbox.com), which is somehow affiliated with Saleshandy. Once those inboxes are ready, we add them to campaigns in Saleshandy and are ready to rock and roll.
We’ve currently set up around 1000 confirmed email addresses across the following regions:
- Northeast Asia (China, Japan, Hong Kong, and South Korea)
- Southeast Asia
- Europe (we grabbed the markets with the larger school network – Spain stood out – but still have many countries yet to harvest)
- Latin America
- The Gulf/Middle East
We began our campaign in the middle of February, only to realize that at the same time Chinese New Year and Ramadan were just getting started. So, we paused and waited a week. It wasn’t long after that the violence in the Gulf region erupted, so now that area is back on pause.
So far the replay rates have been in line with the averages. I know that we’re playing the numbers game and the waiting game, but that doesn’t make me any more comfortable. Sitting, waiting, unsure if the emails are reaching the right people, if there even are any right people, weighs on my mind. I’m not sure if it would have been better to do this earlier, nor am I sure how much effort should have been put into curriculum development prior to having viable leads. Only time will tell.
So, as of now we’ve received some warm, informative responses. We’ve received more ‘no’ replies. But nothing that stands out as really encouraging. I don’t like this model of sales. As I sit and wait, I think about how this could be improved the next time around, if there is a next time around. Moving forward this month, we’ll continue to harvest more email addresses, and I’ll practice mindful patience.
Wish me luck!