Introducing Clerro
The publishing platform for educators - away from news, opinion, personal stories and marketing speak.
Today, my best friend Utkarsh and I are excited to introduce you to Clerro — a publishing platform to write “guidebooks” that explain intellectually compelling topics from math, science, technology, art, history, philosophy, etc.
Clerro is a dedicated place for educators (with or without title), away from news, opinion, personal stories and marketing speak. So they can write guidebooks around important concepts, ideas and facts that actually make people more informed.
We deeply believe that good educational content deserves a place of it’s own and are on a mission to make the world smarter.
If you feel such a place should exist, I encourage you to join Clerro.
Why we built Clerro
I recently read a tweet by Naval Ravikant, the founder of AngelList —
Most reading (and learning) today, happens online. People have lesser time to read books and spend more time interacting with their phones than ever before.
At the center of meaningful learning is good content.
For well over a decade, people from different backgrounds, across the world, have been coming out to express their knowledge, tell their stories and entertain others via blogs. This movement was radicalized by the birth of blogging platforms like Wordpress and Blogger, making the internet more valuable than ever.
But even after this rapid democratization of voices, different blogs on the internet were like tiny islands — disconnected and waiting to be found by others looking for them.
The opportunity to centralize all these ideas and knowledge spread across the internet was ripe.
Just how Youtube became a centralised distribution channel for all videos on the internet, Medium and Quora became for written content (articles and QnA).
As much as this trend further liberated ideas and knowledge to flow all the more freely from one person’s brain to another, there’s an increasing noise that came along as an unfortunate collateral -
Most publishing platforms across the internet have culminated in a hot mess of content thats newsworthy, opinionated, intellectual, pseudo-intellectual, entertaining and even plain marketing speak (read inbound).
In other words, most educational and skill development content published across the big distribution platforms gets buried under the hot mess.
There are tonnes of channels publishing an ocean of variety of content on YouTube. But places like Udemy have got skill-development content creators and consumers flocking in.
We’re doing just that for other educational content, which could help people understand new topics (outside of their work domain) and even develop new interests.
Clerro is building a niche for written educational content just like Udemy did for skill development videos.
However, unlike Udemy, Clerro will be free for content consumers and because the content on Clerro is written (compared to videos on Udemy), there will always be a low publishing barrier for educators looking to share their knowledge.
What Clerro can and cannot do
By leaving out newsworthy, opinionated, personal and marketing content, Clerro could become a learner’s paradise. One that rewards educators who write meaningful content (possibly, even monetarily).
Clerro’s WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) editor lets you break down everything you know around a topic, into different chapters which are visually distinguishable and individually navigable.
Eventually, writing on Clerro will be more than just rich text editing — with more tools to express your knowledge like adding graphs, whiteboards, one click animations that simulate Gravity on different particles, etc.
By building a mix of strong internal, algorithmic and community driven moderation, we will make sure shallow and irrelevant content gets penalized. Done effectively, this will eventually make Clerro a safe haven for mass teaching and learning.
We visualise Clerro to become an active part of everyone’s life-long learning. People would actively be learning about stuff from outside their domains.
Bankers would know as much about science and history as programmers would about economics and culture. It would be a commonplace for everyone to not only learn about what they love but also develop new interests.
Collectively, a sharp intellect could bring a phenomenal change in how we and our future generations think about dealing with environmental, political and social issues.
Besides all of this potential, Clerro will never be the one to replace general publishing platforms like Medium where myriad people turn up to share their stories everyday. Nor is it intended to. This can further be corroborated by the fact that we chose Medium as home to Clerro’s blog.
On the contrary, we see a future where Clerro’s educational content exists in harmony with people’s personal stories and ideas on Medium.
Join us
Join Clerro today and contribute in creating a more informed, wiser and empathetic world.
Here’s a few more ways you can contribute and participate in making Clerro even more awesome —
- We have a Trello Board open for everyone to submit ideas, bugs and other feedback. You can see which ones move from suggestions to “Backlog” list, on to our “Doing” list and forward to our “Live” list.
- If you would like to talk to me personally for suggestion and ideas, you can shoot an email to animesh@clerro.com or tweet at me animeshkmar.
We’re just getting started. We could use any and all help from those passionate educators out there.
Thank you!
PS — If this really resonates with you, I encourage you to go ahead and tell others who might be interested in using Clerro.
