Journey (and my) Story
Hey 👋!
Thanks for being here. This is the story of how Journey came to be born, and where it's headed next. I recommend you start reading from the bottom because I will regularly add updates to the top of this page as Journey progresses.
Thanks for joining us on this journey.
2022
We’ve wrapped up the journey with Journey. Can’t say too much right now, but in time I’ll be able to share with you what happened here :) Stay tuned!
2021
Our next major goal is to expand Journey interstate in 2021. It's going to be a big feat because we're still not quite sure how we're going to do this. There are two main avenues we can take (and as I write, I feel that a middle-ground of the two makes the most sense):
We want solve this challenge and be active in all Australian states by Nov 2021.
Once we've got a foothold interstate, we have a big lofty goal of going global - targeting US, UK, and China (who adopt the Australian curriculum in their international schools). Watch this space 😉
We know that education is changing, and LSG will not keep basing our business off a bandaid solution to the traditional classroom model. Our mission is to prepare our students for the future - to develop and foster critical thinking skills. According to Future of Jobs report (Jan 16), critical thinking will be one of the most in-demand skills in the global jobs market. With the rise of automation, these skills will future-proof the next gen’s place in the workforce, and set them up for success in an ever-changing technological world. The skills we want to teach - thinking and writing skills - will help students tackle problems more effectively, make more informed decisions, and be more creative and innovative in the era that awaits them.
At Journey, we believe the factory-model classroom won’t stand the test of time. As we await the inevitable education changes, Journey will serve as a bridge. Our resources will be based off the current English school curriculum so that our resources are hyper-relevant for students, but our teaching approach will be different. Rather than giving students information they can simply rote-learn (as you see in typical commercial study guides), we’ll create study materials that encourage students to actively formulate their own interpretations of a text, question their own biases, and learn how to improve their own articulation in writing and speaking - all skills they’ll need for the real world. Journey is a tool that will empower students to take control of their learning.
If you are an educator or someone who believes in our mission, please don’t hesitate to get in touch with me. I’d love to chat with you. This is an open call for:
business mentors who can keep us accountable and fast track us on this journey
educators (teachers and tutors) from all states (VIC, NSW, QLD, SA, TA, WA, NT)
ATAR students and graduates
who knows, if you’re an English educator from another country working with 16-18 year olds, I’d love to talk to you too.
Early-2020
I’m tired. I’m disappointed we still don’t have a product-market fit. But, I forge ahead. We're still in the ideation phase, so I run a design sprint with my team based off all the knowledge we've picked up through EDIE, and the iterations of EDIE. Alas! Our creative juices flow, and Journey is born.
Journey is a personalised online platform that provides high school students access to a vast library of easy-to-understand and curriculum-tailored content online.
We aim to fill the market gap by offering advice through a ‘choose your own adventure’ learning pathway, where students can engage with educational content in a learning format they prefer (videos, text, audio), when it is relevant for them, and at their own learning pace.
Through the introduction of Journey, we aim to overcome three key challenges faced by the current educational system:
The ‘one-to-many’ factory classroom model, where one teacher delivers education to many students. The challenge in this model is that high-performing students are left to further their independent learning while lower-performing students struggle because classroom content is not catered to their skill level and preferred learning styles. Harvard University advocates for education according to different learning styles, from auditory (read texts aloud), visual (videos) to kinaesthetic (practical learning). In line with this, we seek to solve this ‘one-to-many’ pain point through personalised content delivery (based on user input) so that students can choose their preferred learning format and study at their own pace.
The academic resource disparity between metropolitan (more school options, smaller teacher to student ratios, greater availability of private tutoring services) and regional areas. The challenge thus, is providing consistent and equal academic resources to all students irrespective of location. Journey aims to provide high-school students with a digital means to education, thus bridging the academic disparity currently seen in our education system.
Students see learning as a merely means to an end. It’s not their fault - getting a ‘pass’ or a 99 ATAR is all they’re concerned about because that’s the education system. They’re tied up in assessment after assessment. Many teachers are overwhelmed with too much content to teach and too little time to teach it (I can only imagine how difficult this was during COVID). It’s difficult to foster in students a love for learning. Thus, English as a subject has so much missed potential. It teaches you how to think critically, how to articulate yourself, how to be more creative and innovative - all necessary skills for the next generation in the workforce. Journey aims to reinvigorate English subjects by delivering our content in a way that discourages rote-learning, and optimises meaningful learning.
Meanwhile, Write Lab’s library of study guides grows from 6 to 20. Up until now, I feel like I’ve been building two businesses - LSG (Write Labs and private tutoring) and the startup (EDIE and its iterations). But, the stars finally align! We need a library of quality resources for Journey, and Write Labs conveniently offers that!
To get Journey up and running we use Write Labs as the MVP. We test our riskiest assumption that students are willing to pay for an on-demand, one-stop-digital-shop for high quality English resources. We launch a Journey membership at $99 per year ($8.25/mo) where students get access to all our text guides and videos + upcoming releases. We figure the personalisation features will be an added bonus.
We surpassed our success metric by signing on 30 memberships within the first 3 weeks! 👏 We did it!
We take a quick breather, thanked COVID for freeing up our weekends to do nothing but work, then prepared for what’s ahead.
I set up a public Trello board for Journey's Roadmap. Users can upvote for features they want, and it also gives our users an idea of what's next for the app. Transparency and therefore, an open-line of communication is one of our values.
We're launching personalisation features so students can begin to choose their own learning adventure from Jan 2021. Here's a sneak peek:
Meanwhile, we’re continuously optimising the private tutoring experience at LSG for both students and tutors which gets us 5-star reviews on Google and Facebook! Moving slow here was the right decision. I’m falling back in love with the business I’ve built.
2019
We scrap EDIE. Neither of us has AI experience, and because we're slightly ahead of the curve in terms of what an AI-powered bot can do regarding our vision, we decide it isn't for us. We continue to pivot, building upon our learnings from previous and new customer interviews.
Meanwhile, LSG launches its own web app to host our growing library of study guides (we're up to 6!). We move from physical products to digital products.
I can’t think of any names for the web app, so my friend, the search engine over at GoDaddy proposes one - 'Write Labs' (you can see naming things is not my strong suit 😂). Cool, Write Labs is a placeholder name for the time being. Good enough, I think.
2018
I cut down the number of tutors in my team from 50 down to 30. I realise that private tutoring is just a band-aid solution to a broken classroom model of teaching. Private tutoring isn’t the answer. I go back to the drawing board with these questions:
How do we enable all students access to the highest quality educators?
How can we enable education accessibility for all, regardless of price or location?
How might we impact an unlimited number of students?
How do we keep our team small so can we be nimble, build great company culture, and ensure every person feels like their work matters?
My partner, Josh the 'Jet' Li joins me as CTO, and we start coming up with novel solutions to the problems LSG was facing.
We come up with a solution called EDIE, an AI-powered bot which would help students answer any English question they asked.
We apply for 3 accelerators and get into the La Trobe Accelerator Program. We also receive $20k in funding since we took out the first spot in the cohort! Our idea was promising, now it just came down to execution.
In the meantime, LSG is bumbling along. I've started shifting my focus from private tutoring service to more affordable products, and publish my first 3 study guides.
Private tutoring is still growing, albeit at a (purposefully) much slower rate.
2017
I hire 30 new tutors within the space of a month. On the outside, everything looks great - business is growing! But behind the scenes, I start to encounter new issues that ultimately lead me to start Journey.
Problem #1
I realise that while I was hiring only the highest-quality tutors I could find, if I kept growing at this fast pace, I'd eventually run out of these high-quality tutors from the available talent pool. There are only so many % of students who achieve top marks > only a % of them willing to tutor > and even then, only a % that fit the requirements to become an LSG tutor.
If I wanted to continue to expand private tutoring services, I'd have to eventually sacrifice finding quality tutors to just get the LSG tutor headcount up so we could support more students. I didn't agree with this at all.
I see other tutoring companies grow just as fast, and I could see the quality in their service dropping substantially. I didn't want this to be my business.
Problem #2
Growing a 1-1 private tutoring business is expensive. If you want to serve high-quality service not only to your customers but also your team of tutors, there's an endless list of jobs to be done behind the scenes, from tutor training, developing/collating tutor and student resources, to customer service, payroll, etc.
I want to ensure I could offer this support by hiring a Student and Tutor Happiness Manager (Symone, my right-hand woman - she's great!), so our prices go up. In fact, we're now on the premium end of tutoring pricing, which also goes against my philosophy that education should be affordable. I'm now enabling those who can afford tutoring and most definitely contributing to the dividing education gap. Knowing this sucked.
I felt stuck. I knew that there are plenty of tutoring companies out there with lower rates, but I also knew that they were not offering the same level of service that you get at LSG. If I lowered our rates, I’d have to rely on economies of scale - and as you know from Problem #1, that would mean prioritising headcount over quality.
I resolve to find alternative ways to make high quality education accessible for all, and for that alternative to only require a small team that could still make a huge impact.
There are other problems, so if you wanted to learn more, feel free to watch this video 👇
I end up hating the business I'd created.
2016
Demand for one-to-one private tutoring grows. I can’t support all the new students requests for tutoring, so I hire my first 5 tutors.
Side news - we get incorporated (i.e. officially become a PTY LTD business!) 🥳. There's a mad rush to figure out an alternative business name because 'VCE' is copyrighted by the Victorian Curriculum and Assessment Authority, and I was using the name 'VCE Study Guides' 🤦🏻♀️ at the time. I couldn't think of any names worthy of the change, so I last-minute throw in my own name. 'VCE Study Guides' becomes 'Lisa's Study Guides', and I call it a day.
I thought the 'Lisa' in 'Lisa's Study Guides' would just be temporary - at least until I could figure out a better name. Low and behold, 4 years down the track, the name has stuck.
Circa 2015
I've shared my story online before, so I won't bore you if you're already familiar with the details 🙂
In a nutshell, I quit pharmacy to pursue Lisa's Study Guides full time as a private VCE English tutor.