Backstory

My name is Matthew, I’m a Computer Science major attending my local community college. Last May I co-founded an education startup called ClassStatus, it texts you anytime your class gets cancelled.

This post is going to talk about how ClassStatus came to be and how I realized to stop ignoring inconveniences and actually find solutions.

Our Beginning

ClassStatus was born on May 15, 2013 at 2:09pm, this was the timestamp attached to the message I sent to my co-founder Nick on Facebook. We were already working on something called Workload, this was supposed to fix all the headaches Blackboard was giving us but we were way over our heads trying to build something so massive.

The day earlier my brother and I were on our way to our Intro to Sociology class, this is a 10-15 minute commute and when we finally arrived we saw a yellow slip on the door indicating the class was cancelled. This was inconvenient especially since we both had emails in our inbox from our professor indicating the class would be cancelled, we just never bothered to check. I would later find out the following that 80% of the class did not receive that e-mail before leaving either. This is where I found the inconvenience to be an opportunity.

The following day I would message Nick on Facebook explaining to him the issue and how we could start clean with this project taking the lessons we learned from our first startup and giving ourselves a fighting chance. He agreed and we began work on ClassStatus.

Fast Forward

Fast forward almost a year later and we’re currently in the middle of a closed beta with two successful uses of our product. My major fear with moving from Workload to ClassStatus wasn’t whether or not we would succeed or if we could actually get professors to use it but was whether or not the idea of ClassStatus was too simple.

I was afraid my idea wasn’t grand enough to catch the attention of anyone, that it was too boring. This left me in a period of doubt for months. Now that students are actually using our product I’ve been able to make it past that hurdle, fear was the biggest obstacle mentally for me to overcome.

While in high school I was fascinated with sites like Facebook, so many options and features. You had so much to customize and offer to users and there was my issue. When we actually had ClassStatus up and running I realized how simple it really was, it served one purpose and nothing more. This left me feeling trapped, I had a constant fear during pitches of hearing the question “is that it?” because I wasn’t sure how to respond.

Recently

I looked past this though, a few weeks ago I went on Facebook and searched for the original message I sent Nick when talking about the idea of ClassStatus and saw:

Whenever a teacher cancels class they send out a notification, it notifies students via e-mail and push notification so they always get it.

This was what I set out to do with ClassStatus and I did it. I came to the conclusion that there was nothing wrong with simple. My problem was mainly fear based and a lack of confidence but this was only due to the fact I was comparing myself to success stories. At the end of the day you can’t try to compare yourself to anyone or anything, you can only ask: am I happy with what we’ve accomplished so far?

I asked this the other day and decided: yes I’m doing what I set out to do and it’s working, I can’t complain with that. By not overlooking an inconvenience and actually taking the time to solve the issue I now have ClassStatus to show for it.

As I’m writing this I realized I was somewhat all over the place but that’s ADHD for you. Moral of the story is don’t overlook a problem just because of its size, tackle each project with an open mind. Something like that.