Wasssssup ✌️
Happy Sunday! Hope you have been having a great week and an incredible start to your June! The world is starting to open up again and it feels good. During the pandemic, I didn’t think I was being affected that much. Now being able to get back to normal life, I realized there was definitely something missing. I hope you have been having the same realization as well has starting off your summer RIGHT.
This week was a jammed packed one. Tons of great stuff all around. Today I’m drinking water, but in the process of brewing my second batch of homemade Kombucha 😋. Keep reading to find out more!
Hype ZipSchool Moments
If you read last weeks newsletter, I answered some cool questions about how the month of May went. This helped me frame what felt was most important for me this coming month. This was really important because this past week we launched a new product at ZipSchool called ZipSchool Courses! Based off all our learnings from small, live classes and large on-demand classes, we were able to boil it down to an experiment.
It took us around 3 days to build everything and launch it. Thats a new record in ZipSchool history! Interested in checking out more? Head over to this link to see our first course thats live for you to signup for now. BONUS TASK - Check out the video towards the bottom of the page (ya I’m famous now).
To get back on track here, I feel like one of the hardest questions I’ve had around this process was - did we give our prior experiment enough time? Did we truly let this thing run its course? The answer to this for me has been “follow the data” (I know a shocker).
I have learned a lot about this idea of “PFM (Product Market Fit)”. Is the problem we are trying to solve a paralyzing issue or it is more of a migraine level issue? I keep picturing it as an onion - every new iteration we build at ZipSchool is like peeling back a layer to lead us to this paralyzing issue we are solving for. As I have mentioned before, we are very big on talking to our parents and looking at our analytics. This plus our own ideas for the product make this a winning combo.
So, where do we go from here? We wait! We see how our new courses perform and revisit our data to see where it has led us. During this time we will iterate on what we currently have. Imagine if we worked 3 months on this without getting any feedback from anyone? I love the fact that we can launch a solid v1 that gets the point across and then collect information and build from there. I think this is the coolest thing about our team. We don’t want to work on something for months at a time without any feedback. All this to say - don’t wait until you are a year deep into a project to finally show it to someone. Launch early, get feedback, evolve, and repeat.
Personal Development
This past week was pretty amazing! I felt like I was finally experiencing NYC. I feel like I have a good start to a solid foundation here. This is the goal to help me get too feeling like NYC is my home. So, I’m going to keep doing that! So for this section today, I just wanted to share some cool things that happened this week:
☀️ NYC Sunsets are pretty sick
Farza, David, and I went over to a cool new park called Little Island that just opened! Perused the sunsets and such.
☕️ Made my first batch of Kombucha
I think I have told you in prior newsletters, I am a massive Kombucha fan! I think it’s a top tier drink and on top of that it actually helps your belly ✌️! So I started to brew my own and I had my first flavors ready to taste this week. I would give it a solid 7/10! There is definitely some work to be done on it, but it was so easy and I am in the process of brewing my second batch now. The goal is to bring this to a food market and give it away to people. First flavors we have are: Peach, Strawberry Peach, Ginger Peach, and Strawberry Ginger
💰 Bartered my Kombucha for pizza
YA this totally happened! My friends Jared and Sammi came to watch a movie with me a few weeks back and on our way our out we stumbled upon this pizza box with “Unregular Pizza” written on it. Jared and Sammi knew all about these people.
TL;DR - you can bring things to trade them for a slice of pizza!
Pretty cool concept and ironically enough they had messaged them earlier that month to trade some of their world famous, homemade limoncello. A block later we saw that they just opened their first store front and the owners were there closing up! We knocked on the door and had a great conversation with them to the point where they wanted us to come back for their first ever barter in store. It was so sick and was an awesome time with friends! Go to their instagram and you’ll be able to see more cool stuff from them!
🌊 First beach day in NYC
Ended up going out to one of the beaches here in NYC yesterday with David! I was highly skeptical of it because nothing beats a Florida beach, right? Well, I was pleasantly surprised. Pretty solid beach experience and was easy to get to!
So ya, pretty awesome week! Expecting this week to be just as good or even better. Really my personal growth goal this week is to just keep this up. I’m excited to be in this sort of experience with ZipSchool and in NYC. A lot of cool stuff going on.
Music Of The Week
Playlist number 17 coming hot! This playlist definitely had a lot more slow paced music and really just different vibes. It’s cool to see how music changes during the seasons. I definitely use music to stimulate certain vibes/feelings of that day. Pretty powerful stuff! As always, tell me your favorite jam on here 🤘
Well friend, that is the end of the road for me today! Thanks for taking the time to check out my thoughts for the week. I am always down to chat about whatever is on your mind so just throw a quick reply and let me know whats up! Have an amazing week.
Salute y Saludes.
Alec