“It all begins with an idea”.

Hello reader,

Today, my team launched our first product called Lightner-ai, intended for evaluators (primarily school psychologists) in the education field. Phew. We are tired. We tried our absolute best, and our hope is that our collective skills and experiences were enough to satisfy our users’ needs. Judging from the initial responses… we’re not sure? At this point, aside from thousands of lines of code scattered across the cloud (some AWS data centers, to be specific) — all we have are hopes and dreams that the last year or so has not been spent pursuing a phantom issue.

My name is Dani Sofjan, and I am the CEO of Ai-ai, a tiny, 5-person company. I was a tech product manager working at Amazon, and for the last ten or so years, I was amongst the large % of people in the world who’d identify themselves as a worker bee. I’ve led teams in multi-million dollar projects for multi-billion/trillion dollar enterprises; I’ve also consulted executives of many-thousand people organizations on subjects of business development. I went to school for petroleum engineering, and to this day, if you need to know which casing to pick as you’re drilling for oil, I can tell you the grade of casing, diameter, and mud-mixture you need as you hit the payzone for unconventionals or deepwater so that you can make $$ with hydrocarbon production. But none of that compares to how nervous I am for the next 3 days in New Orleans, as we pitch our product to school psychs and SPED directors from all over the country at NASP.

The idea for Lightner-ai was borne over some tasty fried chicken in Seattle, from a place called Sichuanese Cuisine on Jackson St. I was catching up with Austin, a school psych who then was working in the Seattle school district, and he went on quite an unhinged, manic tirade about how being a school psych was not really turning out to be what he thought it’d be. He went into the field thinking he’d spend most of time working with and helping students, but instead, he was spending 20-25 hours a week writing evals in the hopes that parents don’t flip a table at him when he shares final eligibility. It was a scenario I’m familiar with, having worked in tech and seeing how modules around automation were typically built — Americans want the point of story, not the whole story. So, build tools that get to the point of the story quicker. His chief complaint was simple — why was eval writing work so prehistoric and so dated, when it seems like every other industry uses cutting edge tech to automate the “basic” stuff. No offense, but as a technologist, hearing that folks were still largely responsible for their own templates as they write reports was simultaneously, fascinating, comedic, and terrifying. Why is he spending hours every eval downloading score reports from different providers, clicking through them to pull data tables, writing statements that he has written hundreds of times already, over, and over, and over again. Why are districts seemingly never resourced correctly to handle a very obviously increasing caseload, in an education environment that seems to be getting more and more complex. Etc.

It seemed to me that the school psych industry was left in the dust by tech providers. The “best” tool at the time was a tool that lets users download an Excel and Word document to put data into, and the users weren’t even allowed to save the files. Algorithms and programmatic tools have been writing public facing articles and media messages for a while now, in high-stress, highly precise industries such as Fintech, Healthcare, Defense, Cybersecurity,…. (I can name at least 20 other industries). Where is school psychology in all this?

If modern technology is a train and industries were passengers, school psych wasn’t even at the train station. It was stuck at a school, or after hours at home, behind a laptop in a dimly lit room, triple checking that the scores from a BASC-3 report wasn’t fat fingered, or something like that. As a layman who is not a school psychologist, that is what I understood from the fried chicken conversation. So, that’s when we decided to pursue a seemingly simple idea — build a product that saves people time, in a field that desperately needs both more people and time.

The idea seemed like it would also be simple to pitch to investors, build a team, launch a product, and achieve success. So I did that — I pitched the idea of building a tool that can save school psychs a few hours a week to several venture capital (VC) groups. Each time, I was given feedback I still don’t agree with. In short, it’s something like this: “we agree you are onto a real problem, but it probably doesn’t make enough money to be worth the risk.” It was after my 3rd or so pitch that I got the same feedback that I understood, finally, why school psychs did not have enterprise grade technology. Because enterprises, and those who support modern enterprises, don’t think this industry is worth their time, which they have equated to money, because the opportunity doesn’t offer a path to being worth tens of billions. One partner was very blunt with me and said “if you can’t make more than $100M a year, you don’t really have a place in startups in the current economic environment”. $100M, at LEAST?? I just want to build a ****ing tool that saves people time so they can help kids; oh, how depressing capitalism can be.

Being a start-up is not what it was compared to the last twenty years, give or take. For the first time in a long while, the product or services that companies offer actually need to be profitable in order to survive. If you find that to be a strange statement, simply look up how many companies are funded since 2014 that do not make it past Seed A funding, or fizzle out even with a few hundred million under their belt. How many Theranos-esque, FTX-esque, Nikola-esque companies were fraudulent and built on hype, promises, and carefully crafted PR stories, rather than actually delivering value. Even useful companies, like Uber and Lyft, took… how many years to be profitable? Silicon Valley has a nasty addiction to trying to create unicorns so that they can enjoy giving the bag to the next round of investors, rather than building businesses on sound fundamentals. Perhaps the most shocking to those who are less versed in the VC-tech space (I had to learn this “on the job”) — a company that is pre-revenue is worth more than that same company being post-revenue.

Why? Because if you’re pre-revenue, you can make up whatever theoretical value you want and try to sell that promise to some other rich people to buy into. If you’re post-revenue, you actually have evidence of whether you are what you say you are. To no one’s surprise, when the primary incentive of lying is to be rewarded with insane cash payouts on future evaluations, you’re going to get a lot of bull****. Also depressing — the modern addiction to money over actually solving problems that society desperately needs.

For a while, our company stands to make no money. In fact, the more users we have, the more money we pay to Amazon, Google, and other software vendors to scale our infrastructure (DJ Khaled was onto something with the meme “suffering from success”). If a few thousand people end up using Lightner on a regular basis, we’d pay (tens) of thousands of dollars in costs per month just to keep the infrastructure from total collapse. Such is the price of earning people’s trust. We will go broke trying to make this thing work, or figuratively die trying (AKA Chapter 11, and close the company). If we find some traction and success, we will scale this into first B2B, district focused company in the report writing space, and continue to build the most powerful report writing tool in the world. As one of my old managers would have said: what’s better than the most powerful tool? An even more powerful one.

We think we have built a product that, if applied correctly, can save many hours per week. It is no exaggeration that we think Lightner can even give those who are neck deep in eval writing back 1 day a week of their lives back, simply by automating things that are relatively simple. If our current version of the product doesn’t achieve nearly those returns, that’s OK — we’ll bust our butts patching it up and improving features users actually need and customization schools actually want. We have found something that is worth building and spending countless hours and all-nighters on — a product for people who are trying to help kids that need help. What the journey will look like to get us there, is less certain. If we fail, we will fail gloriously and share what we learn so that the next brave set of souls that try this may succeed.

This is my first blog post — before this, I have only written long, formal documents on behalf of enterprises worth far more than every EdTech company put together combined, for things that I held zero passion in. I hope that you, the reader, will find solace in knowing that our attempts to serve you is not a silicon valley cash grab, but is rather, the desperate attempt by 5 like-minded people who are on a mission to prove that solving real problems is still something worth doing, not just chase trends because billionaires happen to be funding them. I’m serious when I say on our Release Notes page that we are watching our bug report inbox like hawks, I personally read through them all and triage issues, just as I would be doing if I was still working a regular job.

Below is the boilerplate template to a blog that Squarespace, the website host, had when I first started writing this. I decided to leave it here, as the message gave me great comfort in a time of great anxiety.

“It all begins with an idea. Maybe you want to launch a business. Maybe you want to turn a hobby into something more. Or maybe you have a creative project to share with the world. Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.

Don’t worry about sounding professional. Sound like you. There are over 1.5 billion websites out there, but your story is what’s going to separate this one from the rest. If you read the words back and don’t hear your own voice in your head, that’s a good sign you still have more work to do.

Be clear, be confident and don’t overthink it. The beauty of your story is that it’s going to continue to evolve and your site can evolve with it. Your goal should be to make it feel right for right now. Later will take care of itself. It always does.”

Anyways, I, Austin, Daniel, Sai, and Beau will try our best. If by this time next year we cease to exist, we’re at least going to be happy knowing we tried. Cheers to the uncertainty, and thank you for being a part of this journey.

-Dani