See you on April Fool's Day. No joke.

Hey family! It’s time for an update + Mark your calendar for April 1.

Let’s start with recent goodness:

• Our first cohort for high-schoolers
  I was honored to teach our crash course to a cohort of Houston high-schoolers last month. So much optimism about their electric futures. Much more on our work with The Plug soon.

• Mardi Gras e-bike win
  Two of you rented out bikes and loved them. One bike never came back because you bought it! Reaffirms my belief in experiments; more below.

• Cool Tools Podcast

  Kevin Kelly’s the author of 1,000 true fans, a respected futurist and a personal hero. He’s been inviting some of his listeners to his Cool Tools podcast. What a blast to hang out and share my tool picks. Watch/listen here.

  

• 10 cohorts in the books
  Thank you, everyone. All of your feedback means it’s time to drive this thing into the pits for a tune up.

3 edits I’m excited to make after reflecting on what you’ve shared:

1. Unbundled, affordable course format

2. More experiments

3. More community-wide stuff

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1. Unbundled, affordable course format

Multi-session, live cohorts are great for retention but tough logistically. So I’m unbundling the course into a self-paced solo-learning experience + a steady menu of live events for group learning and one-on-one advice. I’m hoping this simplifies logistics, increases access, and strengthens community.

• Self-paced solo crash-course
  I’m jamming what you’ve said works best into a fun, 30-minute flipped-classroom experience new folks can navigate at their own pace.

• Steady menu of live events
  Weekly office hours and monthly community events will give people going through the course a chance to connect with each other and the rest of the community.

We’ll keep an eye on this; if it feels too isolating, we’ll try something else. But I’m really excited about how this feels and early reactions.

I also want to make the course as affordable as I can. I think folks show up and invest if they pay something, but this simpler, self-paced format means we can ship it at $20.

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2. More experiments

I’ve witnessed the power of a well-designed experiment, and I think it’s time we get more serious about play. With such good feedback from our Mardi Gras experiment, it’s time to own experimenting as part of what we do here. Two things on this front:

• Discord group for experiment design and planning
  I’m opening up a discord group for anyone curious about helping me with experiment design. If you have an idea, if you want to workshop crappy ideas that haven’t fully formed, please join the new My Next Electric discord here.

• Drop our next experiment on April Fools Day
  Because why not. See #3.

BTW, if you don’t know our origin story, My Next Electric actually began as 1 of 5 simultaneous experiments in 2021. A few days before this was going live, Hurricane Ida smashed into Louisiana. A couple of months after that, the prototype below was was reborn as My Next Electric. Shout out to Jonathan, Carl and Parker for signing up when it was still this rough:

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3. More community-wide stuff

Many of you’ve met your awesome cohort-mates, but it’s time to invest in getting the whole band together more often, so we’re doing one live event each month.

Let’s start with Saturday mornings Central time. Many of you had your course graduation celebrations in this time slot, and it’s always been a fun, high-energy session. I’m learning how to make this fun for virtual attendees too, so look for some upgrades to the virtual experience. I haven’t worked out the virtual doughnuts yet; input welcome.

I say we kick this off on the funnest Saturday of 2023 - April 1st.

Inspired by our own Mardi Gras experiment and this, I’ve come up with the outlines of our next My Next Electric Experiment, and you’ll have to sign up to hear more on April Fool’s Day! Spots in the experiment will be limited, so don’t miss the drop!

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New website’s got all the details.

You can see all of the updates over at mynextelectric.com.

Thank you.

If you’ve been here since the beginning, or if you just showed up, thank you. This is a community first. A learning space second. Thanks for making it so. Matt