Junto

Hi Product Hunters! 👋 Eric here, one of the co-founders of Junto. I’m super excited today to introduce you all to what we’ve been building! Junto helps you level up at key work skills so you can do your best work. We find the best ideas for how to do better work from books, blogs, podcasts, research, and experts and turn them into a concise course format that feels interactive, accessible, and fun. Throughout my career, I’ve found myself needing to level up a pretty broad range of skills to do great work. Regardless of whether I’ve been an engineer, engineering manager, PM, or founder, it’s always been the same: there’s a lot to learn! As many of you know, some of the most important skills in knowledge work today aren’t the “deep skills” of whatever our discipline is, they’re the other supporting skills. I often refer to this as ”the work about the work”. This includes skills like how to communicate, collaborate, manage time & people, storytell, give feedback, experiment, negotiate, think creatively & critically, manage projects, prioritize, conduct research, motivate teams, and the list goes on! Anytime I’ve learned these types of skills, it’s benefited my career immensely. Even more so when my teammates learn them along with me and we all level up together. ⚡ But the problem I’ve continually encountered is fitting learning these skills into my busy week and building momentum towards applying them at work. Many of the existing options felt like they needed too much of my attention for what they offered or weren’t built for learning. I found myself wishing there was a single place I could go to learn about these topics and be guided towards applying them to my work. All of this inspired us to create Junto! We’d love for you to try it and let us know what you think. Our favorite thing is hearing stories of people who learned something new from a Junto course and applied it at work. I’d be super excited to hear yours. Junto is free while we're in beta and dialing in the overall experience. Eventually, we're going to charge a subscription for ongoing access to content. Thanks again for the support and please don’t hesitate to leave a comment or question, or reach out to us directly!

Hey everyone! I’m Ben, one of the co-founders of Junto. Very excited to be showing the world what we’ve been working on. Since Eric has discussed the vision of the company, I want to touch on the thinking that went into the product itself. The challenge for this product is: how can we deliver great ideas in a super engaging way, but not require an intense amount of effort and yet still provide value? To figure that out we went through many iterations, from audio courses to video courses, and even a chat UI experience. What all of that taught us was that the key to making a great learning experience that struck the right balance between engaging and actual learning is interactivity. We found that even if you made a great set of audio-based lessons or a great video course, inevitably you end up in the position of trying to explain a complex idea without any feedback from the user. Have they understood a concept? Do they need to go back? Do they want more examples? That 2-way experience is crucial to learning but is impossible with a static content experience. So what does interactivity look like for Junto? Think Instagram stories + choose your own adventure + steroids. Instead of a linear set of static videos, Junto lessons are composed of a graph of screens. Depending on your actions or answer to a question, we can take you down a completely different path. It brings life to the lesson and makes it really feel like it’s reacting to you. But we retain the creative freedom an Instagram story gives its creator by giving the same control to our course designers: custom backgrounds, different layouts, images, animation, and plenty more to come. A Junto lesson should feel a world away from a newsletter or a blog and really take advantage of the supercomputer in your pocket. We’re constantly working on the format and are only just scratching the surface of the kind of unique creative experiences we think Junto can provide. Just a few things on our roadmap: - Interactions far beyond question and answers. Think things like interactive diagrams to explore statistical relationships. - Other types of questions beyond multiple choice like sorting, grouping, etc. - Much more expressive animations. - Full-screen video. - Immersive audio. Really happy to be finally launching this to the world today! I’d love to hear your thoughts on what we’ve built.

Been digging Junto's lessons. They're perfect for someone who doesn't have a lot of time and trouble focusing. As a freelancer who strongly dislikes negotiating, I've found the "Neuroscience Behind Negotiations" especially helpful.

The UX here is so so good. It honestly feels like Notion in app form. Definitely something to this!! 👏

I've known @theericanderson for quite a while and we worked together on a few projects. One of the best hacker/designer/entrepreneurs I've worked with. I've heard a ton about this elusive upskill platform he's been working on, excited to take it for a spin! 🙌

This tool is really engaged me to move forward the course by splitting huge amount of data to small pieces with regular checkups. And mobile platform suits it perfect! Great work!

Nice work, Eric and team!!! Congratulations on putting this out into the world. Excited to learn with it!