Where Are They Now? Catching up with Lean Lab Fellowship Alumni

An integral part of The Lean Lab Theory of Change, is the cultivation of a strong community. Through a committed community of educators, parents, students and leaders we support founders and education innovations from the idea stage to launch and scale to transform the education landscape.

Through this interview series, we’ll catch up with founders and check in on how their ventures have evolved since their participation in The Lean Lab Incubator Fellowship Program in Kansas City.

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Co-Founder: Merlin Patterson

Venture: ClassTracks

Cohort: 3rd

Hometown: Baltimore, MD

Can you describe that moment in time that ignited the spark in you to create ClassTracks?

Actually, I joined ClassTracks a few months after it had gone through 4.0 School’s program and been founded. I met with Lida when I was looking for a new job and when she told me about the idea behind ClassTracks, language learning, I saw a future where it could be used for so much more. I saw how it could be used to learn math and science and history. So I had to join. I’m also a curious person so I wanted to do more than just build the tool, I also wanted to understand sales and marketing and all parts of the business. With that mindset, over time I grew from being just an engineer to a co-founder.

Your platform is really unique, because you have taken extreme effort to design with English Language Learners in mind. Can you talk a little about that?

Absolutely, that’s one of the things I am most proud of. Since the students who use our platform are still learning English, we have to ensure that instructions are communicated with as few words as possible. We have gone through a few (read: many) redesigns over the years and came up with one that relies on symbols and careful placement of the components we have built.

For readers who aren’t familiar with ClassTracks, bring them up to speed and describe the platform in 50 words or less.

ClassTracks is a vocabulary development platform designed for English Language Learners to enrich and master the language skills they need for academic and career success.

If you could convince any person from history (dead or alive) to join your advisory board, who would it be and why?

That’s a tough one. I don’t have an actual name (sorry!) but since I am engineer at heart, I would have to say someone who has experience in building automated infrastructure. A lot of our time has been spent manually testing things and it is only just now that I have been able to start the automation process.

For real though, who or what company/organization has been your greatest source of inspiration?

My partner Lida. She has given me the continued strength I have needed over the years to keep going and she is always challenging me to better myself. I could not have asked for a better partner in building a startup, and I could not have found an even greater friend.

What milestone were you most proud of at the time of the conclusion of The Lean Lab Incubator Fellowship program?

I was ecstatic when we made our first sale. It meant that teachers saw the value of ClassTracks and that all of our beta testing had been worth it.

It’s been a little over a year since you’ve completed the program. You’ve really accomplished a lot since then! Can you write a bit about that traction?

In the last year, we redesigned our UI to make it easier for teachers to create content and we are finishing up a redesign to make it easier for students to study on our platform. We also have expanded our possible customer base to include business with high populations of English Language Learners, so we can continue to help students beyond school.

Complete the Mad Lib: When ____________ happens, I’ll know I’ve/we’ve made it.

When we are in schools in every state, I’ll know we have made it.

In a couple months, The Lean Lab will release a ‘Request For Startups’ — where we’ll identify some of the biggest challenges facing the education sector and put out a clarion call to entrepreneurs to solve them. Do you have any predictions as to what issues might be on that list?

The basics of adult life: money management, home buying, professional behavior, etc. There are just countless things about being an adult that you never learn in school. If you are lucky, you may know someone who can teach you these things, but most people are just left to figure it out for themselves.

What big problem facing education do you think needs solving?

Mental health. There is a severe lack of education and resources around mental health in this country and the world. Mental health should be treated the same way as we do physical health. There needs to be a mental education class and every year we should have mental health checkups much like we have physicals.

What advice would you give a current student, or someone working full-time, who’s weighing working a traditional 9–5 versus starting a new venture?

Test your idea with your possible customers first. That might not make sense since you have not worked on it yet, but there is a myriad of ways to test your idea with people before it is built. If you skip this step, you may end up wasting years of work on a product that no one wants.

I suggest reading this article and The Lean Startup for more on why this is important and how to do this.

What can we as a community that supports education entrepreneurs do to continue to support you?

For ClassTracks, we’re always looking for English learning communities: schools with ELLs, workforce development programs, or companies with a number of immigrants.

For myself, I would love to meet more engineers in edtech. It would be great to discuss the engineering challenges that come with building edtech products.

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About Merlin

Merlin is a Senior Product Engineer/Wizard at ClassTracks, an EdTech startup where they architect and build the software that makes learning vocabulary easy and efficient. They enjoy using the magic of Meteor and React to bring their work and hobbies to life. In 2016, Merlin was nominated for Baltimore Innovation Week’s Technologist of the Year award.