oxfalcon. 🔮 🏴 🦇🔊

Friends. Massive milestone today and I could use your help. Today, we’re officially launching Mentava on Product Hunt. (Please visit, comment, share, etc.) For the first time, you can sign up and teach preschoolers to read with Mentava as we imagined it when we started this project over two years ago. Basically, we’ve made it to the starting line. Learning to read is a magic moment for a child. It’s like a secret code that unlocks the world around them. But many kids miss out on years of this magic because of societal myths like “learning to read is hard”, or “learning too fast will damage kids brains”, or “kids can’t learn to read until they’re 7 or 8”. Learning to read isn’t rocket science. Kids need to memorize letter/sound pairings and then learn to blend them together. It’s not hard but it is time-consuming (and can be kind of boring). Fortunately, “motivation” is a solved problem in game design. (Just walk through the slot machines in any casino if you need to be convinced of this.) The open questions when we started this project were: (1) could we combine quality curriculum with game design best practices to create learn-to-read software that was both fun and effective? (2) are there actually enough people who want high-quality educational software to make a company viable? Or is the edutainment slop that dominates today’s market the only option? Given the feedback from our customers, the answer to question 1 is a resounding yes. Now we have to find out how many people actually want what we’ve built. If you believe in our mission of accelerating education, please please please help us out today by giving us a signal boost, as well as a comment on our Product Hunt page (link in next tweet). And let me know what you think of our new product demo video! It was harder than expected to capture what Mentava is all about, but I think we got there.