P.s. I’m writing this after a while I started this project so I couldn’t take all the pictures. Hope you understand.
Why did I start this?
This started in my science class (I believe it was chemistry class). AP Chemistry class is known as one of the hardest classes to take in our school. What most of the students say, getting out of the AP Chem class, is “Omg!!! This class is so damn hard!” “Oh! I’m going to community college” “I’m lwk dropping out”. I believe science should be, first, easy. Science is a study of explaining intuitive using number; it is not twisting intuitive fact and making it harder. Once students see science as a study that applies in the intuitive real world, science will be accessible and you won’t need AP Chem teacher to learn advanced chemistry, even making it accessible for underserved students.
Building the website
The first thing to do was to make a website. Back then, when I start this, I knew nothing about coding. So, I figured out WordPress was the platform I should design on. I started by watching Wordpress tutorial on Youtube. This is one of them that I recommend if you wanna learn one too:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=09gj5gM4V98&t=178s
After speeding through this tutorial, I built this website from scratch.
(WP admin page below)
Back then was before realizing that action teaches more than researching and thinking excessively. So I spent the next week or two researching competitors, Instagram marketing strategies and more. To check out the exact brainstorming I did, you can check it out here and here.
Growing the platform
Next, I optimized SEO. I installed NitroPack, an app that speeds up the website speed. I tracked top Science keyword in “Google Trends” and tried to use as many of those keywords in my website. I set up google search console to track visitors and number of searches. I did the same thing for all the pages in the website. I did the same thing for all the images on putting alt text and meta text. After all these were finished, I moved on to recruiting writers.
Building the team
This was probably the hardest part of everything, since I didn’t have any networks. Here were my strategy. In each schools, I gather school leaders who will establish their school chapters in their own school so that they will recruit writers in their own school.
The problem now was recruiting those leaders. One thing was to post the fact that I am recruiting people to write blogs in many communities. I posted in reddit, discord server (which I later realized that spamming was prohibited), and even mom’s community who can refer to their child who is good at writing. By the end of the day, I could recruit about 88 writers who will help write it and form a leadership structure.
(all the writers in the wordpress)
Now, after structuring leadership position and organization, now my step was to clearly articulate my vision to my writers and educate them. I had a meeting with all the chapter leaders so that they know what to do, gave them wordpress authority and id, and make sure that our mission is to make science easy and accessible, not to make it extra complicated. I decided to make guideline writers should follow so that they both manage SEO and focus on making science easy.
Scaling the Organization
After setting up this structure, aiming and articulating clearly to chapter leaders every month that we should write article every 1-2 months, our platform quickly grew. Now, there is over 130 posts in our website.
I set up Instagram page. I post our post on reddit. I sent to my friends. I post on discord. I asked my friends to share to their friend to share to their friend. I got the feedback. Iterated. Opened subscription model (which was free).
Now, everything was consistency. Result was profounding. I got 1.5k+ subscribers in our mailing list. Got 1M impression (maybe more since tracking data before 2025 March was erased).
Reflection:
This honestly was crazy. I learned something more than just how to scale an organization. I learned that everything can be make easy. The reason why science feels hard is because we don’t understand fully. When we understand things fully, we should also be able to articulate it easily (this is awesome quote from Richard Fineman). Maybe, it seemed like we were making science merely easy and even childish, but writing the article was process of deeply understanding the beauty of science. And distributing that article as an entrepreneur is an act of spreading that beauty to the world.
What a beautiful world lol.