SEO

August 18, 2010

The Quizlet Story: Quizlet is how I occupy my free time and...

http://a.quizlet.net/i/quizlet-medium.jpg

 

The Quizlet Story

For lack of a professional writer working for Quizlet, here are some ramblings from me, Andrew Sutherland, creator of Quizlet, president of Quizlet LLC, web developer, and college student.

Hello.

Quizlet is how I occupy my free time and even some of my non-free time.

My mission for Quizlet is to make learning vocabulary not a chore. I know a lot of teachers assign vocabulary to students, but few students actually "absorb" words into their vocabularies after they take their test. Which kind of defeats the purpose, right? So Quizlet is my response - it aims to make learning fun, thus make learning effective. At the very least, it can help students do better on quizzes and tests even if they don't fully "absorb" their words.

Andrew Sutherland

I started Quizlet in October 2005, back when I was a mere 15-year-old (human years). I had just received a list of to memorize from my magnanimous French teacher. I was puttering along with my dad with some call-and-response type quizzing. "Man, I love doing this" was NOT what I was thinking. So I put my thinking cap on, and the first line of code for Quizlet was written that night. Of course, that code was all deleted when I thought about what Quizlet would be. You really should plan first.

Quizlet is a shoestring operation. For its first 420 days, it was the work of only myself. I did all the designing, programming, debugging, and perfecting. The project had no product managers, no marketers, and no venture capitalists. It was just me and my testers. Recently I've realized some things are out of my field of expertise (I'm not a lawyer, for example). So there are a few other people involved these days. In November 2009, Dave Margulius became CEO of Quizlet LLC after working with me on the site for 2 years, while I remain President and CTO. We now have an office in San Francisco where our small team works on Quizlet every day. Together we're working on making Quizlet a great business that remains true to its roots.

Quizlet is free and will remain free to all users. The current plan is to offer targeted advertising on the non-studying pages. I'm hoping to make some deals with some educational and test-prep companies and perhaps some universities. If you're interested in advertising to my userbase of highly-motivated high-school and college students, shoot me a note (see above right).

Now that Quizlet is out of its infancy (just check out the stats on the top right!), it has hundreds of thousands of users who use it every day. I'm humbled that so many people have found Quizlet useful, and that's what continues to motivate me every day. I'm now in college at MIT, which is a terrific place for entrepreneurs and technology innovation. Here's an example: Quizlet has worked with the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence lab to build exciting voice recognition capabilities into Quizlet.

Let's see, what haven't I covered? Ahh, the name Quizlet comes from Quizlette, the name of the "little" quizzes my French teacher gave in high school. She could have charged royalties, but that just wouldn't be right…

And because you really want to know, I made Quizlet using only the finest ingredients:

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