Co-Founder/CTO @ Sandbox Platform, Inc.
Starting in June 2017, I co-founded my own EdTech company with a good friend of mine named Ryan Eppley. The company started to build a software solution very organically, when we were recruited to be advisors for a summer incubator program for students at William Tennent High School in Warminster, PA (https://www.centennialx.com/). There is a big push in education to focus on “Project-based learning”, and that is exactly what this program accomplishes. However, we realized they needed project management software to help aid the program. When we looked at project management software, we found current solutions such as Basecamp, Asana, and Slack were not necessarily tailored towards education.
In 3 weeks, I built a working project management app using Python, MongoDB, HTML5/CSS3, and AJAX (JavaScript). We had 35 beta testers through the incubator, and this rapidly accelerated both the project management app as well as my growth as a full-stack engineer. As a company, we were incorporated under the name “MyVenture Labs, Inc.” on July 28, 2017. However, the differentiation of education alone was not enough to help us bootstrap our company in such a competitive market like project management software. About 3 1/2 months in, we realized we had to pivot our idea to better suit the needs of a growing education market.
We switched our focus towards building inventory management for hardware labs and makerspaces. While our focus still remains on helping grow innovative hubs in education such as hardware labs and makerspaces through engaging, project-based learning, but our core focus is on solving the problems these places having in managing their inventory & safety credentials to use items such as 3D Printers, Raspberry Pi’s, and other electronics. This truly narrowed the scope of our application’s use, and we recently built an API (Application Programming Interface) that is going to help us scale after we release the next version of our beta in January. In addition, we re-branded as Sandbox, the comprehensive management system for Makerspaces and Hardware Labs.
*I have attached our Certificate of Incorporation in the state of Delaware for proof of the company*