The Story of Shuletime
It all began at the end of my high school studies. I and my closest friends, apart from studying, we would spend some time talking other issues relating to students life in different schools and in the entire education system on how it could be better. The talks would base on exams, syllabus, teachers, schools, past years students, performances and more. I found most of these conversations more useful to me personally in my studies, and to be honest it is through these conversations where I found the best methods which helped me pass the final exams. Someone could list the best exams or tuition centers among many available at the time. Exams/tuition centers are places where you could find private individuals and great teachers or former students teaching different subjects as alternative to school teachers to overcome the problem of lack of teachers to some of the schools or some teachers being not very good at teaching certain subjects. I asked myself if this useful information was documented somewhere and made available to every student, could help a lot of them like it did to me. I couldn't do much about the ideas at the time, because most of my time and efforts had to be spent on studies. That's how high school ended. But the first ideas that came to my mind was to start blogging about all this. Start something like a blog where I would be writing about everything that I believed would be helpful to students and other information related to education.
Post high school, when I got home (my school was a boarding school) I had strong ambitions in two things. First one was to start a business, anything that would come to my mind I was ready to do it. So I thought why not give it shot from this side (Africa or Tanzania). The second thing I was ambitious about was to put into action the education ideas I had since high school time. Combining these two things I was so eager to do, would conclude to one thing, start working in a startup idea. That is when I started to work on my education idea with a long term goal of making a legitimate business some days.
The first thing I started to work on was to come with a name. I tried several names to see if could fit the idea. One of the names I considered was "Mwanafunzi", this one couldn't take much time before I droped it. The name was a translation of the word "Student". It was not sound good to me because I thought it was not unique, a little bit long and lacked many things that I believe a good business name should be which I am about to talk about. The name that I eventually picked to use on this idea was Shuletime. How did I come with this one?, I combined words "Shule" which means school, but could also informally has a meaning of "learning", and "Time", so together the name meant time being spent to learn or getting/sharing knowledge. One major reason I stayed with this name choice was that it was "easy to catch". A living proof is that, as of today I have never mentioned twice to anyone when referring to this project. It is so easy to pronounce and listen to. For a very long time I have never thought of changing the name, I hope it stays that way forever.
After getting the name I wanted to use, I quickly went to search it online to see if its domain name was available, it was. I also searched the name on social networking websites, only Facebook and Twitter at the time and they were both not being used by any one. I did not waste time I registered the name on both Shuletime and Facebook.
Late Feb of 2012 when I had just finished my studies, I already had a name for the idea I wanted to work on. So it was the right time to start doing what should be done to bring the project into existence. The first step was to make a decision on what platform can be used to implement the idea. And not just which platform to be used but it had to be the platform I was already familiar with myself because I had to do everything on my own since I couldn't afford to pay someone to work on the technical part. Another reason that made me be the only person to work on early days of this idea was that, I wanted to learn a wide range of most of these technologies and be the first technical guy before anyone else joined me, this would help me understand core part of what I'd be leading (if it could end up with me leading the project). First platform that came to mind was a blog. I decided I should start to publish articles about everything that would be related to education. The blog idea came quick because I had already been blogging for three years. I was already familiar with Blogger and WordPress blogging platforms. So I chose WordPress, why Wordpress?, I liked Wordpress, I believed it provided a little more features than blogger including more themes and statistics say WordPress as a CMS powers more websitse on the Internet than any other platform out there. So I signed up a new blog on WordPress with a sub-domain shuletime.wordpress.com, I selected a blue theme called Andrea in large party inspired by the Softpedia website colors (at the time I used to spent a lot of time reading Softpedia news (tech, software, security etc)). Since WordPress was not that new to me, I instantly started designing and customizing the blog to suite what was on my mind trying to see if it might bring the real usable website I wanted. The blog had a number of pages and to be honest it was a lot of pages. These pages were all on the navigation bar. Apart from the "about" and "contact" pages which are common pages on most websites/blogs to be on the navigation bar, the rest of these pages included "categories" for the blog posts I was about to be writing about and other pages had contents such as lists of best performing students/schools of different academic years.
When I was working on the early designs and customizing the blog, I called my friend Tyler, a classmate from high school, to tell him for the first time that I was working on a certain idea (But I didn't disclose to him what was it, promising to tell him on 1st of July of 2012, a month later). This was my closes friend at that time who since high school had interests in business and entrepreneurship. I remember the first time I talked to him about entrepreneurship was this day I wanted to tell him a story of Jacob, a Portuguese teenager and an entrepreneur who happened to inspire me so much. At the age of 19 he had done a lot of things for an entrepreneur and he was traveling across Europe giving speech, owned his company and had several appearances on international TVs including France24 where I first saw him. Jacob had projects one of them was based on education. Why did I want to talk to my friend Tyler about Jacob?, I remember earlier in our last year of high school (form 6), Tyler got into the class where most of the class members were busy studying for their every evening preparations. Tyler asked to borrow our attention just for few minutes, he wanted to address something. It wasn't common for any student to do this, especially that time. On everyone's surprise Tyler started addressing his message with so much confidence. In the beginning no one took it that serious, but his voice, his body language and his seriousness got everyone attention. There was something different you could notice about him. Actually his entire short speech was aimed at trying to convince the class to work together and cooperate as a team. That evening when talking He explained better methods the class could adapt to achieve the cooperation he just suggested. His ability to talk to that small audience, the influence he had that evening, that was character of a charismatic leader I didn't think he knew where that could get him. To be honest I wish it was me who did that. He inspired me. I told my self, if I could find time, I will tell him about the potential he had, and I did. Initially I didn't expect him to be interested into entrepreneurship and business, that lead me to use Jacob's story (the Portuguese teenager) to try to convince him. Good news was, he already had interests. Later years when he got serious into entrepreneurship, I have heard him saying his interests in business roots back to his childhood.
Before 1st of July , the day I was supposed to tell the first person ( a friend) what I am up to, while searching the Internet I got another thought that a blog was not a great platform for what I wanted to create. Blog is means of communication where mostly one part (a blogger) provides information where the part (readers) the receive what has been written. Although there can be a room to let the readers comment, this does not change the fact that a publisher acts as the main provider of most contents. There many disadvantages on this mode of communication, one being the content being, the publisher can easily be biased to one side. For instance, in education when a publisher wants to address a problem of poor performance in exams, if he/she is a student much blame on the content are more likely to be directed to teachers together with with other causes. So on searching the Internet I found another platform that would offer equal participation of all users on providing contents on the website. The platform was called Spruz. There were more service that offered similar platform but this one had the best ones comparing the costs and also it had a free plan to begin with. Other similar services were SocialGo, Ning and others. I started using Spruz, tried to move some of the contents I had already published on the first blog (wordpress) that showed could fit on this new platform. Spruz service offered a little more than what I wanted. It included services like blogging system, events, member groups, site member activity, forums and many more. Up to the day I was supposed to reveal the project to a friend, the website powered by Spruz was now ready, it was using a sub-domain www.shuletime.spruz.com.
1st of july, the day I promised my friend that I would tell him about the idea I have working on, we agreed to talk on the phone at night when both of us would be free and ready for that crucial conversation (at least I believed that). To be honest I was very impatient just waiting for the day, I believed my friend, Tyler would understand my fascination over this project and finally we would work together as a team to get the project off the ground. When we started talking on the phone that night, I explained slowly and carefully about the Shuletime idea, trying to convince him to understand the project and join to work on it. I knew at the time we were both waiting to join universities four months later, so at this time we had nothing serious going on that would prevent us to work on this project. He understood my idea and the project and the visions I had about it. One expression I remember him saying was "Musa, I will be supporting you on every step of this project if I am ever needed, but I can't promise to be a full time associate". That was it, I understood his decisions, what I believed was, Tyler could change a little bit the decision about his involvement on the project and become a full time team member only if I could prove to him the project will work. After the conversation I left while convincing myself that, if I can get this project somewhere and show that it can work, I might persuade Tyler to come work with me. Frankly speaking I needed Tyler on this project. From the first day of thinking and planning I always included Tyler in my plans. Like I said before, since high school when I saw him persuading his classmates, I knew his characters were something I believed could make a great team together in business. Tyler was the second person to register on the website after myself. He helped to invite most of our classmates to sign up on the website, this was just one of the things I needed him for, he knew people and had his own way of influence. So it wasn't that hard to for him to invite as many people. That 1st of July 2012 was like an official launch of the website, running under a sub domain name, shuletime.spruz.com.
The time between the launching of the site and the time when I was supposed to start my university studies I continued working on the website. This time I had several types of task than before launching, including continue building the website, marketing it, publishing content and other minor tasks. The work went on, I enjoyed every minute of working on my idea freely, without earning anything. I remember skipping meals because I was busy working. My mother started to get a little bit worried over this new behaviour, although she didn't know what I was doing when I am busy starring on a laptop all day. I did not run any advertisements or any kind of monitization on the website because the traffic was still very small for that, this didn't bother me much, I wasn't after money after all. As long as it did not cost me much money than just few Shillings for data plan that I was able to afford, I wasn't thinking about monetization of the website anytime soon. The main thing that was scratching my mind was the domain name. I wanted to purchase the shuletime.com domain. Using the sub-domain name shuletime.spruz.com I found it very uncomfortable especially when inviting users, because it was very wrong and difficulty to catch. Things that delayed me to buy the domain included a payment method. For the bank I was using, to purchase online you had to go and activate your bank ATM card to for purchasing online. I got this information about card activation from a blog called techintz.com thanks to them.
I remember the day I went to the bank for activating the card, the bank officer attending me was so excited about my presence there for that specific service. It was in the town (regional) branch, I don't think they used to get much people requiring to activate their cards for online purchasing, I just hope I wasn't the first one. He was interested to know what do I buy online, I told him, mostly software and for that particular moment I wanted to buy a domain name. After finishing to serve me, he showed much appreciation for that, I believe he said to himself that I must be a kind of Geek or something. He told me the account would be active after 24 hours. I went back home and I never tried to purchase a domain for months until when I got the university on later that year.
I constantly searched for the domain name shuletime.com to see if it's still available on godaddy.com. I knew Godaddy from an article I ready few months on under30ceo.com website and they recommended purchasing domains on Godaddy they provided a promo code too. After joining University on November, a month later on 26th December I bought the shuletime.com domain from Godaddy. I was so happy this day, especially after successfully achieve to map the domain name from Godaddy to Spruz servers, of course this was after upgrading to a paid plan on Spruz which allowed to use own domains.
I remember this very first semester how things went. One can imagine how to be seriously working on administrating a website at the same time focusing on an engineering course classes. The semester turned to be quite tough for me, but I persevered and in the end I passed all modules for that semester. I used the holidays working trying to spread the word about the website mostly on social media. I remember one time I posted about my website to a larger forum trying to get feedback, it went well with lots of constructive views. I also once posted on a popular Facebook Computer science and IT group to try to get some feedback too.
Spruz, the platform that Shuletime was running on had some disadvantages that bothered me a lot to a point that I was thinking Shuletime was not ready yet. Despite running the website on the upgraded plan, still this plan had limitations like I couldn't embed any scripts on any page. Inability to run scripts meant I could not run advertisements (Google ads) if I wanted. Another disadvantage was that, the website wasn't mobile friendly (it had non-responsive themes), mobile phone users when visiting the website were being shown a large page with height and width similar to that of a computer screen. These problems and other pushed me to start looking for another platform to fix these problems.
Ucoz, a free web hosting with a built-in content management system based on Russia was the next platform where Shuletime was hosted. Advantages of the platform included, using a domain name on a free plan, it had so many features offered on a free plan compared to similar features that would be offered on the previous platform. FTP access was also being provided on Ucoz and not on spruz, with FTP there was access to upload some files (Not all) including images and files to be used for the file download feature. This platform had a problem with its built-in captcha system, simply a program used to prevent spam on websites. Also the themes and especially mobile theme was not very customizable to make them different and attractive.
One moment when I was playing with a control panel of certain web hosting service, when I was looking around I was attracted by this free and open source forum script which was availabe on Softaculous. I tried to install it and test the features it had. The script was Phpbb. Good thing about the script was that it's free so it wouldn't be costing me anything to get started, it was open source which means I could have access to most of its source code and play with it, changing anything however I want. And more was that if I had access to its code, I could learn the code it was programmed with. If I was to use Phpbb that meant I had to host it on any web hosting service and I would be having complete access to my files some thing I never had on the previous platforms Shuletime was running on. So I immediately started migrating from the current platform to a Phpbb forum. The project would now be forums based website, but with the Mods(Modifications) the Phpbb board had, one could add more features to a website and it could be more than just forums. I later come to realize that Forums were much a better way to implement the Shuletime idea that blogs. In forums every user had a chance participate in discussions on forums to give her/his opinion by starting a new topic or posting a reply to an existing one.
The website kept running, I constantly paid for the domain yearly. I was gaining users slowly, and the website wasn't producing any money an I was cool with that. There was times where I tried to find partners to join working with on the site, but it didn't work most of the time I tried, because I changed plans before I even told them.
Talking about inviting people to work with, one time I was an active member of this computer enthusiasts Facebook group. The group's conversations were mostly computer tech based including information security and many more topics, I enjoyed the people and the culture of that small community. I thought it would be great if I could find one person to work with on the Shuletime website. I was convince the group admin would fit that position. I knew him through that group, following his posts and the knowledge he had sounded perfect. His name was Itachi. One day I sent him a message, telling him about the website and I want him to work with me, what role would he play and why I wanted him. Good thing about people working with on the tech side of things is, they love what they do and the fact that I told him that he would be doing what he likes, he agreed to join. Finally I had someone to I had someone to help me not only on the technical side but also moderating the site. At this same time, my classmate Jordan showed interests to join me as moderator of the website. So it was now a three people dream team.
There was a time when the school was so tight that I stop being involved with website. This same time it was about the time I was supposed to pay for updating the domain name shuletime.com. The update time passed and the domain had to be sold. Since the domain had what it takes to be a premium one, some premium domain seller purchased without me knowing. When I got time and checked on my godaddy account, the domain was gone. It was a bad news but I had to do something. I searched for shuletime.org and it was available for purchase. I bought it and now the website started being available at shuletime.org instead of shuletime.com. Earlier this year, 2017 I had thought to start using the country level domain name since the website was more focused on the country. I bought the domain and of now the website is running on a domain shuletime.co.tz
Finally I want to talk about what do I think of Shuletime now compared to the first days of its life. To be fare with five years of life Shuletime should have been bigger and made its way on achieving what I had though it would solve in the community. I wasntot to talk about some of the things that I believe were serious obstacles that has slowed it down. I began working on the project the same year I was going to start my Uni studies. It's not easy to do both successfully. Some people has dropped one, but I didn't. I never wanted to loose either that degree or this project. Taking both at the same time came with the cost of slowing down this project, it's still not so bad, right?. I know university/college could have bee a great opportunity to run a startup of this kind but it never happened that way to me because of the second obstacle. Lacking confidence especially in the early days of the project has slowed it even more. I had this style of using social media to invite users apart from the closes people. I did this because I wasn't confident enough about my own idea.So very few people around me new about the site. Post university life has given me time and opportunity to focus on the website. Currently I am working with Itachi and looking forward to add more moderating as the number of users grows. I have tried to skip so many events to keep this post as short as possible. All the names of people used are fictional to protect their privacy. I hope this story might help someone, if not help atleast entertain you. And this was my Shuletime story.