A season of district leaders building real software inside your walls — and the four sizes it could start at.
An SIS that absorbs the security and privacy complexity districts can't carry themselves, module by module, until the system of record is yours.
A walled space where a district builds its own app against its own data and deploys it safely — no procurement cycle, no year-long security review.
The SIS is the harder engineering. The garden is the bigger idea.
Every district in America has a list of workflows no vendor will ever build, because the market for each one is a single district. That list is where the frustration lives, and it's the one thing a national product can never fix. A walled garden solves all of them at once by not solving any of them. It hands over the shovel.
Thirty years of being buyers taught them that software is something you purchase, evaluate, and complain about. Nobody has shown them the other posture. Access isn't permission, and permission isn't skill.
A vendor demonstrating how easy it is to build on their own platform is a sales pitch, however true it is. The same demonstration from a practitioner who has sat in their chair is proof. That gap has nothing to do with your product. It's about who's holding the marker.
Other industries raise money on promises to reach other planets. This one argues about seat licenses. If the districts already leaning forward stay isolated, the ceiling stays where it is — and that ceiling is the reason you started a company.
I spent years as a district practitioner and now run AI strategy across twenty-eight districts. I know what a technology director does with a vendor demo. I also know what happens in a room at two in the afternoon when half of it is stuck on an auth error and morale is the actual deliverable.
That's the job I'm proposing to do. Not to sell your platform — to teach inside it, in front of people who will recognize me as one of them.
You need a gardener, not another billboard.
A small roster of district leaders who already want this. Not an audience — a cohort with names, a schedule, and something to build.
They build real tools against real workflows, inside your walls, then show the work to an invited room of peers. Proof travels. Pitches don't.
Alumni return as co-leads. You end up with practitioners who can run the room without me, and a playbook you own outright.
Each one names what you're buying an answer to, and each comes with the result that says stop. A package asks you to believe. A bet tells you when to quit.
Five districts, two to three builders each, everyone arriving with a workflow their district actually suffers through. Day one they ship it. Day two we harden it and deploy inside your garden before anyone leaves.
Fewer than three of five have something working and deployed by end of day two.
The scrimmage plus the three weeks that decide whether anything survives it. Two build clinics, office hours, and a Demo Night on the last Thursday — open to an invited audience who came to watch peers, not a pitch.
Fewer than half the apps are still in use at day thirty.
Kickoff retreat, biweekly build clinics, a mid-season teardown where districts critique each other's work, and a Demo Day with a visionary keynote in front of an invited room. Every district ships at least two things.
This is the tier that produces the playbook — curriculum, facilitator guide, recruiting funnel — yours to keep whether or not you ever hire me again.
Fewer than two districts opt into partnership on their own initiative by Demo Day.
Overlapping cohorts, with alumni co-leading the second. Plus a student division — kids designing the instructional tools they actually want, judged on what teachers would really use, winners deployed in classrooms.
A story about superintendents building software stays inside edtech. A story about fourteen-year-olds shipping tools their teachers adopt does not.
Fewer than three alumni will co-lead a second season without being paid to.
That's $22K to $33K per design partner. One fully loaded rep working the phones costs more than the entire season, converts on a longer clock, and leaves nothing behind when they quit.
A cohort run by someone with an undisclosed vendor relationship is worthless to you inside a year. One that's papered correctly is worth something for a decade.
Six weeks from a yes puts a scrimmage in early October, before districts disappear into the fall. Seven weeks puts it after, and the room gets materially harder to fill.
Cleanest path: run the scrimmage standalone, then decide three weeks later whether to roll into Season One with the fee credited. You risk $18K to learn whether the format works. I risk having to be good in front of a room, which is the part I want.
Three minutes, mostly multiple choice, including a blunt one about the numbers above. Answer those and I'll come back inside a week with the session design, the roster, and a real cost estimate.