Funding would go toward our salaries. We’ve been self-funded thus far, and are running out of short-term savings, so the continuation of the project hinges on us getting funding.
As for what we would do with more time:
We’re still in an exploratory phase where we’re experimenting, so our plans are subject to change, but here is what we have in mind.
Personalized advising and networking of advisees
In the process of doing personalized advising, we would learn more about the questions that people have in practice and do research to answer them, which would feed into content creation.
We’re in the process of introducing our advisees to one another when they have common interests, and are exploring the possibility of creating a discussion group for them. What we learn from their discussion (e.g. resources that they recommend to one another) would feed into our content creation, too.
Content creation.
As above, the particular topics that we end up covering will depend on part on the sorts of questions that arise in the course of our personalized advising. However, some subjects that we’d like to cover are:
Careers. We have a detailed page on academia as a career option. We want to create similarly detailed pages for other career options (we plan to add law and consulting). We want to give information on academia as a career option by field of research for common fields of research. We would also like to cover entrepreneurship as a career option in much greater depth than we do now, covering both entrepreneurship in the tech sector and entrepreneurship in other contexts.
Majors. There are two things to cover here: (a) how valuable it is to major in a given subject and (b) the best learning resources for a given major. On point (a), there’s research to be done on which majors qualify one for which types of jobs / graduate programs. On point (b), in most cases we don’t have deep subject matter knowledge, but we can interview subject matter experts to get their thoughts, and scour discussion forums for relevant information.
Benefits of learning different subjects. We’ve made pages for 11 subjects, and would like to flesh these out and cover dozens more subjects. As far as we know, there’s no website that does this, so there’s room for becoming a canonical reference.
Mapping connections between different subjects. We want to be able to present our advisees with information of the type “If you like learning X, you might also like learning Y.”
College admissions and obtaining financial aid. These things have large zero-sum component, but we want to cover them so as to offer students a complete package of advice. We’ll satisfice rather than optimize here.
How to learn on your own. Because we advise that gifted students rely on self-learning and not school, it’s important that we offer good advice on maintaining motivation and assessing progress while learning on one’s own.
Socio-emotional issues. This is not our comparative advantage, but we can at least compile existing information, as I did in my post on methods for treating depression.
Side projects. We want to research the different kinds of side projects that young people have pursued, with a view toward getting a feel for the range of possibilities of extracurricular activities for our advisees.
Outreach.
Disseminating our content is high priority for us. As I mention in the main post, we’re still searching for good ways to do this. One possibility that we’re pursuing is getting our content published on other websites such as About.com (hypothetically). So we would spend time looking for such opportunities, in addition to other types of opportunities as they arose.
(1) At least 3 months part time and no more than 6 months part time. Some of this time is spent looking for short-term funding sources, which would otherwise be spent on core operations and securing funding sustainably.
(2) Funding of $20k would enable us to work an additional 3 months full-time, and invest resources in incorporating as a nonprofit.
(3) In my original post and in a comment to Luke I wrote about why we think that funding ourselves primarily through advising fees isn’t promising. We do intend to charge if we have more potential advisees than we have time for advising.
(5) We’re still in an experimental phase, so to some extent we’re continuously iterating. Our advising feeds into our public content. We sent out an advisee satisfaction survey, and we learned that (i) the benefits to a few advisees were major (ii) the benefits to the median advisee were small (iii) few of our advisees would have been willing to pay (even those who reported major benefits) (iv) people like our web content a lot, and we’ve updated accordingly. We’re keeping track of our advisees over time and following up on whether they found our long-term recommendations useful. We’ve been experimenting with different fora to use to disseminate content. Do these things answer your question, or are you wondering about something else?
It seems like it would be really great for you to get some sort of EA seed funding so you can continue to develop this idea. I don’t have $20K myself, though, unfortunately. Maybe I could help out some? Maybe you could put together a Kickstarter / Indiegogo campaign?
How would you know if a self-reported “major benefit” is actually a major benefit to the EA bottom line?
Do you have any plans to track advisees more deeply?
What would you do with additional funding?
Funding would go toward our salaries. We’ve been self-funded thus far, and are running out of short-term savings, so the continuation of the project hinges on us getting funding.
As for what we would do with more time:
We’re still in an exploratory phase where we’re experimenting, so our plans are subject to change, but here is what we have in mind.
Personalized advising and networking of advisees
In the process of doing personalized advising, we would learn more about the questions that people have in practice and do research to answer them, which would feed into content creation.
We’re in the process of introducing our advisees to one another when they have common interests, and are exploring the possibility of creating a discussion group for them. What we learn from their discussion (e.g. resources that they recommend to one another) would feed into our content creation, too.
Content creation.
As above, the particular topics that we end up covering will depend on part on the sorts of questions that arise in the course of our personalized advising. However, some subjects that we’d like to cover are:
Careers. We have a detailed page on academia as a career option. We want to create similarly detailed pages for other career options (we plan to add law and consulting). We want to give information on academia as a career option by field of research for common fields of research. We would also like to cover entrepreneurship as a career option in much greater depth than we do now, covering both entrepreneurship in the tech sector and entrepreneurship in other contexts.
Majors. There are two things to cover here: (a) how valuable it is to major in a given subject and (b) the best learning resources for a given major. On point (a), there’s research to be done on which majors qualify one for which types of jobs / graduate programs. On point (b), in most cases we don’t have deep subject matter knowledge, but we can interview subject matter experts to get their thoughts, and scour discussion forums for relevant information.
Benefits of learning different subjects. We’ve made pages for 11 subjects, and would like to flesh these out and cover dozens more subjects. As far as we know, there’s no website that does this, so there’s room for becoming a canonical reference.
Mapping connections between different subjects. We want to be able to present our advisees with information of the type “If you like learning X, you might also like learning Y.”
College admissions and obtaining financial aid. These things have large zero-sum component, but we want to cover them so as to offer students a complete package of advice. We’ll satisfice rather than optimize here.
How to learn on your own. Because we advise that gifted students rely on self-learning and not school, it’s important that we offer good advice on maintaining motivation and assessing progress while learning on one’s own.
Socio-emotional issues. This is not our comparative advantage, but we can at least compile existing information, as I did in my post on methods for treating depression.
Side projects. We want to research the different kinds of side projects that young people have pursued, with a view toward getting a feel for the range of possibilities of extracurricular activities for our advisees.
Outreach.
Disseminating our content is high priority for us. As I mention in the main post, we’re still searching for good ways to do this. One possibility that we’re pursuing is getting our content published on other websites such as About.com (hypothetically). So we would spend time looking for such opportunities, in addition to other types of opportunities as they arose.
Thanks for putting this together.
A couple more questions come to mind to flesh out your funding case:
1.) How much longer can you run on self-funding?
2.) How much are you looking to fundraise? How much salary do you intend to draw from Cognito Mentoring?
3.) Do you have any near-term or long-term plans to ask those being mentored to pay for the service?
4.) Do you have any case studies available for people you’ve mentored?
5.) What plans, if any, do you have to learn / iterate / improve based on continuing with your model?
If you want to answer these questions but don’t want to do so publicly, feel free to answer by email.
Hi Peter:
(1) At least 3 months part time and no more than 6 months part time. Some of this time is spent looking for short-term funding sources, which would otherwise be spent on core operations and securing funding sustainably.
(2) Funding of $20k would enable us to work an additional 3 months full-time, and invest resources in incorporating as a nonprofit.
(3) In my original post and in a comment to Luke I wrote about why we think that funding ourselves primarily through advising fees isn’t promising. We do intend to charge if we have more potential advisees than we have time for advising.
(4) You can read some reviews here.
(5) We’re still in an experimental phase, so to some extent we’re continuously iterating. Our advising feeds into our public content. We sent out an advisee satisfaction survey, and we learned that (i) the benefits to a few advisees were major (ii) the benefits to the median advisee were small (iii) few of our advisees would have been willing to pay (even those who reported major benefits) (iv) people like our web content a lot, and we’ve updated accordingly. We’re keeping track of our advisees over time and following up on whether they found our long-term recommendations useful. We’ve been experimenting with different fora to use to disseminate content. Do these things answer your question, or are you wondering about something else?
It seems like it would be really great for you to get some sort of EA seed funding so you can continue to develop this idea. I don’t have $20K myself, though, unfortunately. Maybe I could help out some? Maybe you could put together a Kickstarter / Indiegogo campaign?
How would you know if a self-reported “major benefit” is actually a major benefit to the EA bottom line?
Do you have any plans to track advisees more deeply?