Harnessing the power of flexible talent to launch an AI learning app
Overview
Project Read hired flexible talent to grow their user base by over 40K
Vivek Ramakrishnan and John Danner, both former teachers and founders of Charter School networks, launched Project Read following ChatGPT’s reveal in 2022.
Seeing its potential to impact traditional learning experiences, they asked, “What if we took the story that a child made as the basis of tutoring them?” The child could read out loud, and an application would recognize their speech and analyze what they were saying as they read the story. The idea was to essentially create a reading tutor with a child’s own content as the basis of that instruction.
The Challenge
While John and Vivek had built an MVP of the app and had received promising early feedback, they needed to build a subsequent version that could handle thousands of students within a couple of months. And this build was going to require far more technical capacity than either of them could offer. Hiring a full-time founding engineer or technical founder meant increasing their burn rate, impacting their next round of funding. They needed scrappiness to build something that could support scale.
Vivek and John were committed to finding a high-quality freelancer for Project Read. Previous platforms had been a source of frustration, with experiences like being offered discounts for premature positive reviews, tarnishing freelancers’ credibility. This pushed Project Read toward Contra, where they had heard about the superior quality of talent and the robust tools available for managing freelance relationships.
The Solution with Contra
Hiring independent experts enabled Project Read to deliver rapid results
Through Contra’s white glove service, Vivek and John had a partner in scaling up with pre-vetted talent. Contra worked directly with Vivek and John to find independent experts who specifically met their needs, and who were available on an ongoing basis to help the Project Read team scale. This approach and level of service was a far cry from the “needle in a haystack” search process on other platforms.
Vivek and John were introduced to Corey Ward, who was previously a Senior Web Developer at Figma and is now a highly-recommended flexible expert on Contra. Vivek and John later hired Alex Ketchakmadze, another Contra Top Independent and frontend engineer. Between these two experts, Project Read’s MVP went from an idea to an exciting reality.
“Corey’s been a marketing thought leader, he’s helped us fill design gaps, and brought everyone up to speed on Figma because he knows it inside and out; he’s effectively become our CTO.”
– Vivek Ramakrishnan, Co-founder at Project Read
While Corey led back-end, Alex prioritized daily experimentation and product iteration of their popular teacher-facing tools. With the help of expert flexible talent, Project Read was ready to be introduced to the market. At the time of this interview, Project Read’s user base had grown by over 40,000 teachers.
Outcomes
What the co-founders say they need to focus on next is developing the next generation of their AI Tutor and teacher-facing AI literacy instruction tools. With Contra, they can continue scaling by tapping flexible experts for new functions, leaving them with more time to raise funds, increase their customer base, and realize revenue.
