- Mystery Science is an interactive curriculum designed to help elementary teachers teach science.
- The founders, Keith Schacht and Doug Peltz, met in college and shared a passion for explaining science.
- Mystery Science started as a product for parents but eventually expanded to schools.
- The founders initially faced challenges and had to pivot multiple times before finding success.
- They realized that their initial product, a Pinterest-like platform for science teachers, was not gaining traction.
- The founders eventually found their target audience in elementary teachers and have achieved significant adoption in schools.

- The founders initially targeted science specialists but found that elementary school teachers were more interested in their product
- Elementary teachers were excited about the finished lessons and wanted help in teaching science
- They conducted a pilot program with 10 elementary teachers and 10 homeschoolers, which was successful
- They realized they had product-market fit and traction when they received 15,000 signups in a day after advertising on Facebook
- They were not aware of the competition from larger curriculum companies but focused on creating a resource that teachers and students loved
- The secret sauce to their success was creating a product that teachers and students loved, leading to word-of-mouth promotion and increased sales.

- The company created a product that teachers loved and provided value for both teachers and students.
- They struggled to sell to schools and had to hire and fire a VP of sales.
- They almost ran out of money but were able to raise $2 million from new investors.
- They joined Y Combinator when they were already profitable and saw it as an opportunity to raise another round and scale their team.
- Being part of Y Combinator exceeded their expectations and helped them refine their strategy and raise money.
- One of the founders left a comfortable teaching job to become a full-time founder because he wanted to reach a larger audience and have a greater impact on science education.

- Mystery Science is an interactive curriculum for elementary teachers to teach science.
- Founders faced challenges and had to pivot before finding success.
- Initially targeted science specialists, but found more interest from elementary teachers.
- Conducted a successful pilot program with 10 teachers and 10 homeschoolers.
- Achieved significant adoption in schools with 15,000 signups in a day.
- Success came from creating a product that teachers and students loved.
- Struggled to sell to schools but raised $2 million from investors.
- Joined Y Combinator to scale their team and refine their strategy.
- One founder left a teaching job to have a greater impact on science education.

At YC Edtech Night, early-stage edtech founders from around the world gathered to meet and learn from each other. The sessions included fireside chats with edtech alums from YC and Imagine K12. 

Keith Schacht and Doug Peltz are the founders of Mystery Science (YC S17), a company that produces K-5 science curriculum designed to instill a love of learning about the natural world. At Edtech Night, Geoff Ralston interviewed Keith and Doug about their journey from idea, to product-market fit, to being used in 10% of US elementary schools.

This is the last fireside chat tonight and I am very happy to introduce Keith Schacht and Doug Peltz from Mystery Science.

Could you guys just start us off by introducing yourselves, please?

Okay, I'm Doug from Mystery Science, and I taught elementary and middle school science for 7 years before this guy convinced me to quit my job and join a startup in San Francisco.

Doug and I have been friends a long time, 16, 17 years.

And Doug went right into the classroom outside of school.

I started a couple, 3 startups, and sort of certain small, medium level of success, and then joined Facebook, and left Facebook to start Mystery Science and convince Doug to come along with me.

So just to kick things off, what is Mystery Science?

So mystery science from the teacher's perspective.

Most elementary teachers in this country, and by kindergarten through fifth grade, about 95% of elementary schools in the country have 0 elementary teachers on staff.

So the elementary teacher is expected to teach science and it's the subject they struggle with the most.

So mystery science is an interactive curriculum that they use now instead of their textbook to help them teach science.

We often describe it that it feels to them like a virtual science expert named Doug who co-teaches the class with them remotely.

So it's a sort of pre-recorded choreographed experience.

We have, on a weekly basis, we have active teachers now in more than 10% of schools.

It might be a lot more than that now, I forget.

Tell us the, you gave a little hint at it, but tell us the founding story of mystery science.

It sounds like someone had to be convinced, sounds like there was an inspiration.

Can you sort of walk us through how it happened, how you got together, and how you actually kicked off this crazy venture?

Well, Keith, as he mentioned, we met in college, and he was always my tech engineering friend.

So he would explain to me, like I'd say, how does email work?

Like what happens when I, I would use what happens when you click like on Facebook, but we're old enough that there wasn't Facebook yet, so I'd be lying.

Yeah, and Doug was my nature friend, so he would be like, I'm taking you out of the computer lab and we're going on a hike, and you're gonna walk through the woods and I gotta show you cool stuff.

So we always had this fun back and forth.

And I knew, Once I got to college, I had always loved science from the time I was a kid.

And the only career path is you become a scientist.

I never had it, it's so funny, so many of my friends who work in education cite an influential teacher.

I never had like a great science teacher.

I figured that when I got to college, science explanation would be so much better because now the scientists themselves would be teaching you.

And it turns out they're even worse at explaining things.

So I got really interested in the problem of explaining science.

And I figured out while I was in college that I wanted to become a teacher and write my own curriculum.

Keith went on a little bit of a different path, but it was around the time that he had kids that he started taking an interest in my career.

And we always had this shared interest of explaining science and technology to other people.

And so I, right out of school, I did the same thing.

I did it at an advanced level, helping R&D engineers learn about new materials and manufacturing processes and electronic components and things like that.

And so Doug and I would have this fun exchange every year.

We'd get together often over Thanksgiving and teach each other things.

My wife and I were visiting, Doug and his wife, over Thanksgiving.

And as soon as you have kids, you start thinking about, where am I going to send them?

And how am I going to be responsible for this other human being's life for the next, whatever, 12, 16, 18 years?

And seeing Doug teach in the classroom I thought, okay, my kid is gonna learn science from Doug, like check.

I don't want to move down to Orange County but that's somehow a piece of the equation.

And that's a series of conversations started then of like, okay, we should, we have this shared passion, we should really work on this and I'll skip a few steps in the story, but the passion, the sort of shared passion we had was that there's this fascinating body of knowledge in the world about, body of knowledge about how the world works.

It's what makes our modern lives possible.

But it's very often 1 of the most boring classes that you take.

It is labeling the layers of the Earth, the crust, the mantle.

There's the, what color do you color those?

And that's what science class has become.

It's this exercise in vocabulary memorization.

It was like, there is this huge disconnect here between how fascinating this content is and how terrible it's being presented.

Now, it was not obvious that we were going to be in schools and create a curriculum and all that stuff.

But that was enough that Doug somehow convinced his wife to leave his job and move up here somehow.

So when you started, you didn't even know who your customer was, you didn't know you were going to sell to schools, you didn't know what you were going to sell, you just said we're going to find a better way to teach science.

And I mean, we knew our customer was children.

So, you know, now I think of us not as an education company, but as a learning company.

Like we almost fought kicking and screaming into schools.

You know, we knew we wanted to reach children, and parents, we assumed, were our gatekeeper to children.

You can't get a six-year-old to sign up for your website and start using something.

So we're thinking about children 5 to 10 years old, and we prototyped a whole series of products initially for parents.

And then some friends of ours were homeschooling.

And 1 of them happened to be for elementary teachers.

But it was with much reservation that we started thinking about schools.

Ben Horowitz wrote this book called the hard thing about hard things.

And it sounds like, if you just step back a second, we're going to reinvent science curriculum for kids.

And we're going to make a business out of that.

That sounds, did you know how stupid and hard that was going to be?

We managed to convince some people to give us money early on, in spite of it being stupid and hard.

Yes, I mean I think we had, partly I had done this a few times before, so I expected, I said to Doug, I'm like, well the last 3 times I started something it took me 6 to 8 months to go from from vague sentence on a napkin to like you know meaningful business it took us more like 18 months

we thought but I was I told Doug it'll take 6 months don't worry.

After 6 months you were you what did you say to yourself when you were still 12 months away from

I mean, that was, I can, so then in the first year, we probably went through, depending on how you count it, we probably went through 5 or 6 different products.

1 of them we spent, I don't know, almost 6 months on.

Basically, that was like Pinterest for science teachers.

It was really dumb like to give it a little bit more credit it was

It was the resource Doug wished he had when he

Oh, yeah, I built something for myself Which is a way to start.

How did you find out that it was the wrong idea?

Well, so here's the thing to earlier to what Tim was saying about teachers are nice to a fault Because we'd get them on the phone and they wouldn't they weren't just nice.

They'd be like this is so interesting It is like And especially when I would explain it, and I'm explaining my vision for it.

Imagine a lesson that's all these visuals.

So where the rubber hits the road is when you start watching the usage.

I mean, they'd say it's so interesting, and then it was just like that.

So we reached a point where I remember Keith said, like it was heartbreaking to me, he's like we're going to pivot.

And I was like no, no, no, no, we just gotta give it a few more weeks.

Remember this moment because you will know what traction feels like.

Wait, you're saying that to them or he said that to you?

I mean, because there was this, it was not an argument, but there was a disagreement where He was like, I think people like this.

Look, we talked to the, think of those 10 teachers in the last 2 weeks we talked to.

And I was, you know, I remember saying to Doug, this isn't what traction feels like.

Like, you will know when we have traction, And this is not traction.

By the way, this is 1 of the most non-intuitive things about we talked about knowing when you have product market fit.

Sometimes it's not so obvious, especially if you build an awesome product that it turns out customers didn't want to use.

What happened that was interesting was we thought, because I was a science teacher, I was a science specialist, so we thought we were going after science specialists and I'd explain this to them.

And then it was a little disappointing that they wouldn't use it, like they didn't do science in the same way.

They don't teach science the way I was teaching it.

We're doing something unique with how we're explaining science.

What happened was we would accidentally get an elementary school teacher in the funnel.

And I remember the first couple times it happened because I was a little annoyed.

Because I'd look at Keith like, uh-oh, this is a third grade teacher, this isn't the person we want to talk to

right and we posted on the middle school science teacher list

right somehow we got the third grade but we'd explain oh so here's all these pictures and the third grade teacher would say so what do you do with these pictures and I'd say well let me just walk you through how I would use them And then it was like after 3 times that that happened where a teacher said, I wish I could have just recorded everything you just did and play that back for my kids.

I think we solved someone's problem right now.

So it wasn't exactly sort of a sophisticated product segmentation analysis that got you to figure out what product market fit was, your users walked you into it.

Yeah, I mean it was systematic about, all right, so this is what we know, and this is what we don't know, and okay, well if that's not true, then what else could we, and so it was clear that, you know, to connect the dots a little bit, Doug had this unique way of teaching science.

The key ingredient being that he actually explains the evidence for how we know the conclusions.

Like, funny, you know, I don't know why, you know, like you know there's a molten core in the middle of the earth, right?

Even though no teacher ever told us how humans have figured out there's a molten core thousands of miles beneath our feet, you know, that's the disconnect in science class.

So Doug teaches science class very differently.

Pictures play a key role, because when you're presenting evidence, you often show the evidence for what you what it is you're teaching and so this was a resource that was a collection of picture but middle school science teachers don't teach science that way so they were fascinated by it with it but they didn't know what to do with it.

And so the more Doug showed them, the more they started to look like finished lessons.

And then elementary teachers got excited about finished lessons.

Because they don't have an opinion on how science should be taught.

And they were actually, on the contrary, they were, it's the subject they're the most scared of teaching.

So they're like, if you could just step in and help me, that would be great.

So walk us through it in a little more detail.

What happened when you finally figured out, oh, this is our product, and when you had that moment when Keith looked back to you and said, see,

Yeah, I mean it was, and we've saved all these screenshots because we now walk all new employees through the origin story.

And so there was a, you know, a screenshot with all these thumbnails that looks like Pinterest and then they're ordered and then there's captions beneath them and then there's an intro paragraph and it's like, starts to look more and more like a lesson and then it is a finished lesson And so there was a point where we said okay elementary teachers seem much more excited about this let's find 10 elementary teachers and 10 homeschoolers, so what we actually were considering both and get them all to agree to teach the same 8 lessons in a row.

And it was like December 1st and we're like, yeah, so we'll get all 8 lessons done by the end of the year and then they'll all start right after the holidays.

And then we, so we had 20 people on this pilot and this was, you know, pivot number 7 or so on our list And we're pretty sure it was going to work, just

like we were pretty sure the last 6 were going to work.

So once a week, starting January 1 of 2013, I think it was, once a week for the next 8 weeks, we released the lesson and scrambled to get it done in time.

And it was just a much, they were incredibly enthusiastic about using it and the feedback that we got.

And they were sharing with us anecdotes from the kids.

A lot of times, you really know you have product market fit and traction because it just kind of goes and happens and all of a sudden you find people using your product that you had never heard of and and you know your servers start to break etc.

How did that happen and when did you know?

I mean I remember 1 moment this was back when now in hindsight if you want to put something if you find a Facebook page I used to look for it's funny you talk about the hard thing about hard things.

I love looking for silver bullets, though.

I used to look for a silver bullet so that we could get the word out about mystery science to people.

And I love using Facebook, so I would always look for like, there's got to be some Facebook page that all the teachers are on.

And I wound up finding this 1 that had over a million likes, and it was this era when if you posted it, if you had a Facebook page and you had people like your page, then they saw your post.

In hindsight, it was like Facebook was giving you a free year, like looking back on it.

Now it's like, yeah, sure, you can give that to everyone if you pay Facebook a lot of money right but we managed to convince this guy to put a like a little ad up about mystery science and how many signups did we get in a day

it was we got about 15,000 signups 10,000 so that over a week or so

your question that was like I remember being like oh Keith is that is this what you mean like traction

so So didn't you guys know that there were these huge gorillas, the McGraw Hills, I don't know, Random House, Pearson, who sell science curriculum to these schools didn't you know you had no chance against them.

This this was a case of you know if you want to do something impossible, give it to someone who doesn't know that it's not impossible.

So we didn't, even at this time, I was actually pretty ignorant of the whole curriculum company space.

We thought we were building a resource for teachers.

And the distinction between supplemental resources and curricular resources was totally foreign to us.

And 1 company in the space that served as a model for us was called BrainPop, which is this website that teachers pay money for that has a bunch of subscriptions.

And we researched all the competitors in the space, and they claim to have 20% of schools in America paying them, and they charge about $1,500 per school.

And what we were making was not too dissimilar from that.

And so that was 1 data point that we know it's possible for at least 1 company to pull this off.

And in retrospect, they're not a curricular resource.

And so we assumed we were going to be a supplemental fairly early on.

And so that we didn't really think about those companies.

The 1 thing we both had is we know a lot of people in the space.

A friend of ours who ran a school agreed to pay us money on the side so that we could say we had a paying customer.

Did you decide from the very beginning that this was a for-pay service?

I mean, the 1 thing I can relate that might be of interest is, I definitely remember our first user, like our first teacher, we enshrine her.

I've joked with her and she's not too weirded out by this, that we should have a cardboard cutout of her in the office.

Because I tell anyone that joins our company, you have to meet Kiyomi is her name and learn to think like Kiyomi.

We have different customers now, different mental models of like what our user is, but she is just the prototypical target user for us.

And so I remember her, and then on the sales side, well, it was a couple of years into before we started sales.

And I remember saying to ourselves, if we work really hard, this was in January, we were going to start sales.

And if we worked really hard, we could sell 300 schools by June and we sold 1,500.

What we knew fairly early on that we were gonna charge some kind of subscription fee for this, as we started thinking about the teacher resource, but didn't know how we were gonna sell to schools.

I really didn't wanna build a sales team.

We were just focused on growing for usage.

So it was a freemium model, and we treated this like a consumer business, you know, a consumer web business.

Like teachers are our customers, let's get them to spread us word of mouth, and we'll figure out the whole making money thing at some point.

So as you guys just heard, Doug just threw out a number, like 1,500, they've sold to a lot of schools.

Everyone knows how hard it is to sell to schools, but somehow you guys have managed it.

Can you give a little bit of the secret sauce if you're going to try to be successful selling into districts and schools what you need?

I know You should take the piece of the automation because the thing I would say like 1 piece of the sauce is when you were asking about Pearson earlier, right is like Yeah, those those big behemoths they make stuff and they sell stuff But do teachers like it?

In the science curriculum space, let's just say there's, if any of you out there know anything about science education, there are large boxes that have like an inch of dust on top of them in many schools.

And 10 years ago they were sold to schools as a curriculum and teachers don't use them.

So the secret sauce for us was, well, make something teachers love, make something that the kids love.

And if you do that, you solve so many problems because the teachers are willing to spread this virally via word of mouth.

And then even willing to be, not your sales people, but they're willing to, when it comes time to submit a purchase order to the principal, they're more than happy to do that.

Yeah, although that was not obvious early on.

So we knew that we had something that teachers loved and that we were fundamentally creating a lot of value for teachers and for students.

And we had done a pretty good job of growing.

I think we'd passed 100,000 sign-ups or so.

But it was non-obvious how to sell to schools.

We hired, We asked a lot of people advice and it was you hire a VP of sales and you build a sales team.

And so we hired a VP of sales and 3 months later we fired a VP of sales.

Was that the biggest thing that went wrong as you were trying to grow?

I mean the hardest part of the business was, gosh, was it before or after that that we almost ran out of money?

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Keith Schacht and Doug Peltz on What Traction Feels Like - at YC Edtech Night