Hey guys!

This one is going to be short. This week has been super busy getting ready to launch our program on the 1st of March. We’re definitely feeling the heat, onboarding 1800 people with a team of five. Here are a few of our experiences and learnings in creating a learning community.After a lot of consideration, we decided to launch our learning community on Discord. Slack is expensive for a small startup, and Discord is an easy and free platform to use. We also created a course wiki on the Notion which we launched at the same time. In customer support, the same questions are asked over and over, and this can be overwhelming. This is why companies will try to funnel you through self-help or a website first. A community wiki can be really helpful for answering questions and running through community guidelines.

We’ve found that it’s important to make sure everything is as automated as it can be. We’re investing a lot of time into building Discord bots that can do actions at scale, for thousands of users. This has saved us literally hundreds of hours of staff time.And for the bits that can’t be automated, we hired a part-time community manager to help us launch and manage EntryLevel v.1

Email Shield

During my morning walk, I was thinking about how many people have been emailing me recently. I get notifications from Mine telling me how many companies own my data which I just find difficult to do anything about. I’ve had companies email me despite opting out and my spam folder is filling out. With this website called Have I Been Pwned, I found out that my email has been leaked in a recent data breach.

I’ve recently been using things like ten-minute mail to sign up for stuff or get access to things without giving them my data, but this is a little frustrating because sometimes I need a permanent user and log in. I like how my Lastpass (a password manager) lets me generate passwords when I'm signing up for something and auto-saves the password to that domain.

What if we could do that with emails? What I’m envisioning is the ability to generate an email proxy which is a randomised email address that acts as a semi-permanent proxy to my actual email. This way, I could email block access if I don’t want a company to email me anymore, and instead, they would just be sending stuff to a randomised email. I’d also like the ability to email or reply back using this proxy so that I’m always behind this email shield. A quick google search shows that Apple has a similar functionality where you can hide your email. However, there is still a great opportunity to create a password/email system that auto-generates with a clean user experience (a chrome plugin). This is definitely a technical project but I’m sure you wouldn’t need a huge budget to make this happen with some developers.

This one is something I’m really interested in and something I want to see happen so again if you want to pursue this - I’d be keen to support where I can (perhaps even financially).

Until Next Time,

Ajay