Homeroom - Personalized short-form learning for moving up in tech

🌟 Are you a PM, PMM or Product Designer? Apply to be one of the first 100 users within your job cohort http://www.homeroomtime.com/oppo... ------ Hey PH 👋. It feels pretty special to launch this with you all. A number of projects and people I met through this community contributed to my taking Homeroom full-time towards the end of 2019. While we could have picked a better year to start a company, our team fought its way to the other side. Today feels like we've come full circle in a really cool way. That said, I'm excited to introduce you to Homeroom. It's a mobile app for premium short-form learning to help you move up in your job. I'll give some additional context because I'm among my product people and wow do we love context. 🦍 THE BIG HAIRY PROBLEM We're betting big on a key insight ... while data suggests that half of people who work at a desk have no time for extra learning at work, that's not entirely true. We learned that most people who put themselves in this camp could carve out 5-10 minutes pretty regularly. And we're talking about 50 million people in the US alone. They just don't have bandwidth for a typical high quality option like an online course. The big idea behind Homeroom is that if you can help people squeeze classroom quality learning into 2-5 minute chunks, then you'll have made meaningful professional development truly doable for a huge portion of the workforce. No prob, right? Big prob. You can't just chop up long-form courses and 10x the experience (we tried). Eventually we learned that a major opportunity existed in helping people start and stick with learning as a habit. In the words of James Clear, that meant it had to be obvious, attractive, easy and satisfying. We went back to the drawing board and started there. 👀 THE SOLUTION WAS RIGHT IN FRONT OF US After taking a close look at articles, we saw that they fit the short-form criteria, and it was obvious what you were supposed to do. This first version of Homeroom is what we got after iterating on attractiveness, easiness and satisfaction. And there was a lot of room for improvement there. Each week, we find you the single best article to read next for getting better at your job. You're grouped with people in your role at different companies who are reading the same thing. From there, various tools facilitate intimate peer-to-peer learning. 🚀 HOMEROOM 100 To make sure we roll this out the right way, we're opening things up one job vertical at a time. We're starting with: Product Managers Product Marketers Product Designers If that's you and you consider yourself a voracious learner, we'd love to see you apply to be one of our first 100 official users. You can do that at www.homeroomtime.com. If we're able to get you in the founding batch and you mention Product Hunt in the "Bio" of your application, we'll slash your membership price in half. Again, really excited to launch this with you all. Means a lot. And more than happy to answer questions here. Warmly, Erik

@erikspang, I love this. I feel especially in product management (after this year of being locked down, lonely, etc), it's even more important to get groups of like-minded people together to knowledge share. I also found long courses drawn-out and not actionable enough. Very excited to try out homeroom! <3

I used Homeroom during a beta test, and it's awesome. Much more focused than scrolling LInkedIn/Hacker News/Twitter, and the new features around peer-to-peer learning are very exciting. This is the tool I didn't know I needed until I had it.

I've used Homeroom for a little while now. As someone that recently transitioned into a PM role, it's been super valuable for me to seek out resources quickly to level-up.

Super excited about Homeroom!

@erikspang Really cool! Just signed up for the beta. I'm curious about how you curate content? What background do the curators have and the criteria to select sources. Super interesting.

Great idea 👍

Let's go, Homeroom!

I’ve been an early adopter of Homeroom during the Alpha preview and really appreciated the community aspects of learning. It’s like having a team of “accountability buddies” for hitting your learning goals. Excited to see what’s next!

I totally agree with the other sentiment here that Homeroom is one of those products that I never knew I needed - it just makes so much sense. I've been using the beta for a few weeks and already feel my industry trends FOMO diminishing and that "on top of my game" feeling spiking. Super excited to see this product flourish.