Frenalytics | 2021 Q4 Progress Report
Happy 2022! As we kick off a promising new year, we’d like to take a moment to reflect on the past year at Frenalytics HQ and around the world.
From a macro view, we’ve entered yet another COVID wave —and while our case count in New York has sadly more than quadrupled since this time last year thanks to the Omicron variant, we’re hopeful that we’ll reach a post-pandemic world in the very near future. 🤞🏼
In a year where anything was normal, Team Frenalytics has been hard at work bringing our personalized learning software to new heights in new and exciting ways — far beyond the goals we set for ourselves a year ago. Let’s jump right into it! 🚀
First, the highlights:
- 📈 By the end of Q4, we doubled our revenue, thanks to the growing number of healthcare organizations and special ed classrooms on our platform and significant advances in our partnerships with IEP&Me and Molloy College.
- 😍 We launched several SpEd teacher giveaways on social media, were spotlighted by Boston College and featured in The Heights, and launched the Helping Hands Initiative to match low-income school districts with non-profit grant organizations that offer EdTech grants for software like FrenalyticsEDU!
- 🖥 We made huge progress with the IEP&Me team on building the first-of-its-kind Parent Portal that helps families nationwide take control of their child’s IEP!
- 💸 We’ve received $170k of our pre-seed funds from investors and are weeks away from closing our $250k round with other committed capital!
- 🚀 We set exciting goals for 2022 at our Holiday Team Lunch, including teacher-friendly pricing plans, international expansion, hiring more developers, and monthly Design Day workshops with our whole team!
IEP&Me Parent Portal Beta
In the second half of 2021, our product team lent a few hands to help make the IEP&Me Parent Portal a reality.
If you’re new to our Progress Reports, some quick background:
- The Frenalytics team announced a groundbreaking partnership this past summer with IEP&Me, an EdTech startup in California on a mission to democratize the IEP process for students with special needs.
- Together, our teams are launching IEP&Me and creating a first-of-its-kind integration that will enrich student IEPs with an unprecedented amount of student- and teacher-generated data from FrenalyticsEDU, our patented learning platform for special ed teachers and their students.
In Q4, our teams wrapped up development the beta version of the IEP&Me Parent Portal! With our upcoming launch, parents will be able to:
- Create a unique account for themself (and their child!) and upload their child’s IEP
- See a dynamic dashboard filled with the most important information from their student’s IEP — within seconds! — on the Student IEP Profile
- Upload past IEPs, evaluation forms, schoolwork, internal notes, and more to create their very-own digital IEP&Me Binder
In the next few months, parents will also be able to:
- Set a password for their child to login on their own, enabling them to stay informed of their rights and give them direct control of the accommodations, modifications, services, goals, and other notes their special ed team documented for them
- Invite additional family members and outside parties to view their child’s virtual IEP
- Organize the IEP&Me Binder with folders, labels for school year and type, and unique share links for non-IEP&Me users
- Forward emails to their IEP&Me Communication Log, where messages between families and school staff can be easily centralized and organized
If you’re interested in using the free IEP&Me Parent Portal, join their waitlist to be notified as soon as it’s launched! 🎉
Aligning with Common Core Standards & Vineland
In Q4, we made significant progress in outlining how our current content in FrenalyticsEDU aligns with Common Core Standards and correlates to domains evaluated in Pearson’s Vineland Adaptive Behavior Scales (VABS), a well-respected tool used by educators to support the diagnosis of intellectual disabilities and develop educational and treatment plans. This is a meaningful step towards our goal of allowing teachers to confidently use FrenalyticsEDU in their classroom with our age-appropriate, standards-aligned sections that are also fun, easy, and engaging for students to use! Plus, since our in-house team creates the sections and content in FrenalyticsEDU, teachers can immediately begin using our platform with their students — no setup needed or extra lesson plans required.
For teachers curious how FrenalyticsEDU can serve as a supplement to grade-level or adapted instruction, our new Help Center article references the standard(s) or domain(s) for our most popular sections.
💡 Coming soon: Lots more academic-and life skills-based sections in FrenalyticsEDU, as well as additional updates to our Help Center article on how sections align with Common Core and correlate to VABS!
Helping Hands Initiative
In November, we launched a new initiative to match Title I school districts with grant organizations that advance the use of educational technology (“EdTech”) like FrenalyticsEDU in special education classrooms. Dubbed the Helping Hands Initiative, we began with a focus in the New England region — Maine, Vermont, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Connecticut and Rhode Island — to connect qualifying schools with the Doug Flutie Jr. Foundation for Autism based in Framingham, MA.
To illustrate the initiative’s potential impact, our friends at the Flutie Foundation offer awardees up to $7,500 through their Allison Keller Education Technology Grant. Plus, as we add support for more non-profits similar to the Flutie Foundation, we’ll be able to help qualifying schools across the country by offering extended free trials of FrenalyticsEDU, grant writing assistance for the non-profit’s grant application, and much-needed funding for EdTech software like FrenalyticsEDU.
As I shared in our December announcement, we see this as a win-win-win scenario: schools that otherwise could not afford important EdTech tools can now better meet the needs of their students with special needs; FrenalyticsEDU can uniquely expand to Title I schools that have traditionally been resource-strapped; and grantmakers can now receive higher-quality applications and make an even greater impact to special ed programs with the support of their generous donors. To date, schools in Massachusetts and Rhode Island have enrolled in the Helping Hands Initiative for potential funding, and we’re working with them to submit applications ahead of the Flutie Foundation’s February 4 deadline. Wish them luck! 🙏🏼
2021 Goals Check
At the beginning of 2021, we published some goals for the year ahead, and at the end of each quarter, we shared some updates on each of these goals. Here’s the final outcome of our major goals:
Funding:
- 🙂 We’re about to close our $250k pre-seed round! Thanks to all who invested to date and to those who connected us to our amazing angel investors.
- 😁 We recorded our first revenue at the very end of Q2 and have more than 8x revenue since that point!
New Features:
- 😁 Through our partnership with IEP&Me, we’re about to launch a brand new product: the IEP&Me Parent Portal! We didn’t even know of IEP&Me this time last year, which makes this milestone and partnership all the more exciting.
- 😐 A few Frenalytics features slated for EOY 2021, like the cross-platform Frenalytics Mobile app, third-party media integrations and integrations with IoT devices, and our Settings module for powerful customization, have been delayed. But it’s not all bad news — they’re on our 2022 roadmap!
User Engagement and Feedback:
- 😁 We learned a ton this past year from educators to improve our FrenalyticsEDU offering. Based on user feedback, we released an upgraded Learning Session Dashboard, completely rebuilt our Learning Session experience, built an end-of-session summary screen, and introduced native text-to-speech in our Learning Sessions, just to name a few features.
- 😁 Our angel investors include teachers and patients with cognitive diagnoses, and they’ve already provided invaluable feedback to help Frenalytics grow both as a product and as a company.
2022 Goals
During our final Team Lunch of the year, we celebrated our 2021 accomplishments and put together a wide-ranging set of goals for our year ahead. Here are a few that I shared on Twitter:
- IEP&Me Partnership: Launch IEP&Me’s Parent Portal; build Teacher Portal; take what we’ve learned from IEP&Me and apply it to make Frenalytics even better
- Sales & Marketing: Create a FrenalyticsEDU plan priced for special ed teachers; pursue more university-level partnerships; fully automate our signup & onboarding processes
- Growth: Hire more developers; set Core Values for the company; expand Frenalytics internationally with localization support; continue to align academic content with Common Core Standards; add automated & accessibility testing
- Team Collaboration: host Lunch & Learns led by team experts; hold monthly Design Days for group R&D (research & development); better integrate our tools (like Notion, Miro, Figma, and Range) across the company; create additional mentorship opportunities for our interns & team members
Stay tuned throughout 2022 for updates on each of these goals and more! 📈
Thanks for reading! Cheers to a prosperous 2022 — stay warm, stay safe, and stay positive (but test negative 😉).
Questions? Comments? Just want to chat? 📨 matt@thinkgroupholdings.com
