Sumo Maths was an educational tool for primary school aged kids to learn maths in an interactive engaging manner. I built it with my friend Hayne, who had some experience building robots. He built a plate sized wheeled robot, and I built the software interface. Answering a maths question correctly allowed the student to drive the robot for some seconds, and attempt to push the opposing robot off the table - hence the sumo. We tested it successfully in a primary school and got positive feedback.
What we built:
- About 5 iterations of robots, changing the size, shape, robustness (it had to handle repeated falls off tables, and whatever else primary school age students were bound to do with it).
- A web app that connected to the robot over a bluetooth connection. We chose a web app because it needed to work on a variety of computers with as little set up as possible.
- It included maths questions to answer
- Multiple user accounts, including teachers, students and admin.
- Simple and intuitive enough so school students could begin in very few steps.
- We also established the basics of a business, a bank account and online payments system and incorporated a company in Australia with the most low cost method we could find.
- A website Sumo Maths.
It was built before AI coding tools became good and most of it was hand built with text editors and drag and drop software using bubble.io, which is rather powerful for drag and drop tooling
(I had previously built most of a business operating system using bubble.io and was confident in my abilities to build with it).
Traction:
Shipped working prototypes 2 weeks ahead of schedule. We gave ourselves 10 weeks and shipped in 8 weeks.
We were spending 1-2 days a week on it each (every Friday and some Saturdays).
2x classes of 30 kids and 2x teachers tried out our prototype and gave feedback.
The whole experiment from start to winding down probably took about 8 weeks, including deploying working prototypes in a real classroom with real students using it and loving it.
We chose to wind down the startup because Hayne wanted to focus on something with perceived higher impact.
While I would have been happy to continue, I chose not to continue on my own.
We wound down the business and are good friends to this day.
I look back fondly on the memories of Fridays at the WeWork building and testing our robot.
They were exciting and joyous.
Things I learned:
I learned that I am extremely motivated by being around other very ambitious people.
I learned how much I cherish being around others with similar ambition and drive.
I also learned that picking a cofounder matters a lot!
A cofounder who is not aligned to you will be a difficult outcome long term and I am grateful we wound it down before that.
I also realise that I will have many many opportunities in the future that I will create for myself, by virtue of being ambitious and hard working, and intentional with my actions.
I would go back and do it again given the chance, because how else would I learn these valuable lessons?
