Building the Internet for Children
A Spotlight on Mystery.org Founders Doug Peltz and Keith Schacht
“Why is the sky blue?”
It’s a simple question, one that a parent is likely to hear from their 6-year-old. But most adults struggle to answer, at least in a way that engages a child. Most explain in a way that sounds like a fairytale, using big words like “atmosphere” and “microscopic particles called molecules.”
This conventional answer does not work for a child’s mind. When an adult begins talking about molecules and spectrum of light, it shuts down the conversation. The child’s curiosity? Out the window.
That’s because the question is being answered backward. At Mystery.org, Founders Doug Peltz and Keith Schacht have turned the conventional approach of answering children’s questions on its head. They’re answering children’s questions forward, rather than backward.
“All too often, people answer children’s questions by telling the child what people have already figured out. When you do this, you’re starting with the end of the mystery. Instead, you need to engage a child by explaining how people figured out the truth. Start with their own direct experience, then walk them through how that experience leads to answer the question they’re wondering. This is how you help a child to truly understand and not just recite,” said Doug. “This is what we’re doing at Mystery.org.”
Doug, a former science teacher and curriculum developer for a group of private schools, and Keith, a former Facebook product manager, have joined forces to answer every question children ask. Their goal? To create the missing internet for children. In just three years, the company has grown from zero to $13M in recurring revenue, and expects to reach $100M in revenue in the coming years.
Every month, more than four million children in the U.S. use the explanations created by Mystery.org. Chances are, if you’re in a room with five elementary-age children, one of them is already a huge fan. Mystery.org’s products have become a go-to resource for elementary teachers and are used in more than 50% of U.S. elementary schools every month, but they’re just getting started. Doug and Keith believe children should be able to explore any question they wonder about, wherever they are—and they’re building the solution.
The seeds of Mystery.org
The magic of a good explanation
“How can we scale Doug’s approach to reach more children?”
This was the question Keith asked himself after he visited Doug’s classroom.
At the time, Doug was a science teacher and curriculum developer, while Keith worked at Facebook developing products. The two had met in college and have been close friends for over 20 years. Keith had visited Doug’s classroom and was compelled by how Doug could explain things to his students.
“When his students asked questions, Doug explained things in a way that captivated his students. No matter the topic—whether he was explaining what metal was, or describing an amphibian—he told the story of discovery. He recreated the process for how these ideas were figured out in the minds of the children. I could see how genuinely excited these children were to understand the world around them,” said Keith. “I recognized that Doug was doing something really unique.”
Rather than shutting down the conversation with a series of facts and vocabulary words to memorize, Doug encouraged the students to think about the question itself. He gave them space to discuss their own theories, and then helped them explore why their theories may or may not be true. In this way, he answered their questions forward rather than backward.
To explain “why is the sky blue,” Doug first encourages children to consider and discuss why they think the sky is blue. “Is the sky reflecting the blue ocean?” To explore these claims, he shows them clues, such as a photo of the sky in the middle of the country with green hills. He also shows them that other planets have different-colored skies. He encourages them to observe, and to reason from the evidence: “The sky on Earth is blue, on the Moon it’s black, and on Mars it’s orange-yellow. Why may that be?” He then integrates these observations and offers a simple yet accurate explanation. To see for yourself:
“Adults, especially educated adults, often try to explain too much. They skip the foundational understanding,” explained Doug. “There are layers of understanding. A young child must clearly understand the layer one explanation for why the sky is blue before proceeding to layer two. Most adults never learned this well themselves. As a result, they skip ahead to the layer 10 explanation and start referencing ‘molecules’ and ‘light spectrum.’ To teach children well, we need to know the most advanced understanding and then we need to appropriately simplify this so a 5- or 9-year-old can truly understand and get excited.”
A desire for better knowledge sharing
Although Doug and Keith had a long history of sharing ideas, it was this classroom visit that catapulted them to explore how they could make it possible for children everywhere to get better explanations for all of their questions. They were both expecting their first child, and were thinking deeply about what children want and need to thrive.
“Most adults don't realize how inaccessible knowledge is to children. For their first ten years of life, any time a child wonders something, all they can do is ask grownups,” explained Doug. “It’s easy to forget this. That’s because, as grownups, we’re so used to having instant access to the sum total of human knowledge. But the internet is unusable for children.”
“Most adults don’t realize how inaccessible knowledge is to children. For their first ten years of life, any time a child wonders something, all they can do is ask grownups.”
Doug and Keith both had a desire to fundamentally change the way children learn about the world. Doug, a teacher at heart, was focused on the content and questions that children needed answered, while Keith, a product designer and technologist, began to think about how to capture and share Doug’s approach.
“Since the beginning, Doug has had a vision for how to engage children, and I was intent on figuring out how to package this vision so that any child could use it,” said Keith. “There are a billion children in the world today. We’re building tools they can use independently, in addition to building tools that the grownups in their lives can use to support these children—teachers at school and parents at home.”
They set out to scale Doug’s approach.
With complementary skill sets, the two co-founded Mystery.org. Doug is the Chief Creative Officer, responsible for the vision that guides and directs what Mystery.org is creating for children. Keith is the CEO, overseeing all the business operations and product development, as well as managing the leadership team.
Building the internet for children
The vision for a better internet
The internet has provided adults with access to information like never before. Using a quick Google search, you can find an answer to any pressing question. But this same access to information does not exist for children.
“Children have access to YouTube, but not much else. For kids ten and under, YouTube can feel like the entire internet. While YouTube has a lot of information, it’s also very limited,” said Keith.
In addition to YouTube Kids, other tech companies, such as Spotify and Facebook Messenger, are introducing children’s experiences, but they’re often just an afterthought. It’s not enough to simply “kid-ify” a product. “I can see this with my own kids,” shared Keith. “They wind up wanting to use the adult version, not the kids version, because the kid versions simplify the wrong things. The reality is, none of these products are truly built for children.”
Doug and Keith take children seriously as customers, which is why they’re building a product that is designed for the child as the primary user from the ground up. The two believe that a better internet should exist for children—and they’ve set out to create it.
Building the Mystery product
Building an internet for children is a monumental task. Early on, Doug and Keith were tasked with solving two huge problems:
How could Doug’s approach to explaining things to children be scaled to reach a billion children?
How could the team break off a tractable piece of this project to prove the core thesis?
Doug and Keith spent their first year doing research. “We interviewed teachers, parents, and children to find out what questions children asked most often and how we could help,” said Keith. “We tested many early prototypes, but the first one that really struck a chord was when we helped 20 elementary teachers and 20 homeschooling parents answer the ten most commonly asked questions about the night sky.”
Both teachers and parents loved the product. They found that elementary teachers, in particular, were desperate for help answering children’s science questions. And it turned out that there were about 150 most-asked questions that they wanted help with. Doug and Keith, with a small team, created explanations for all of these questions, launching this collection as their first product: Mystery Science.
Focusing on this subset of questions proved that this unique way of explaining things made a difference. They quickly scaled to help millions of children and proved that a strong business could be built from their idea.
Backed by Y-Combinator and a dozen other investors, they built Mystery Science, a product for educators. It spread teacher-to-teacher, largely through word of mouth, and is now the most widely used science resource in schools. Children began to write in with questions for Doug. “We started receiving thousands of questions each week from children. As of early 2020, a million questions have been submitted,” explained Keith. This led to their second product, Mystery Doug, which answers each week’s most popular question.
They’re now expanding Mystery.org to launch their first product for children to use at home. “We’re creating explanations for all of the questions we’ve received,” said Keith. “We’re making it possible for children to explore, no matter where they are.”
Expanding the Mystery team
As Mystery.org grew, Doug and Keith worked deliberately to expand their team, searching for individuals who had deep expertise within their domains. Their team has pockets of expertise from the museum world, from childhood development and education, and from consumer technology.
“At Mystery, we have a culture of questioning assumptions, and not just doing things the way other companies do them,” said Keith. “The team is thoughtful about the why, rather than going through the motions of what they’ve done before.”
Each time the team makes a new hire, they’re looking for those who are passionate about sharing knowledge, have the drive to question the status quo, and ultimately, have the skills to help build Mystery.org into a billion-dollar business. “We think Mystery.org will be the most important learning tool ever created,” explained Keith.
With just over 45 employees, Mystery.org now has a dynamic team of individuals with a unique set of backgrounds from companies like Facebook, Palantir, LivingSocial, Exploratorium, The Field Museum, as well as multiple startup founders and former classroom teachers. These individuals have diverse backgrounds, but they all share a desire to create a fundamentally new internet for children. What began as a vision to create an internet for children has become a profitable business. With more than four million regular viewers and reach into 60% of U.S. elementary schools, Mystery.org has grown to $13 million in recurrent revenue, and expects to reach $100 million within the next five or so years.
The positive cash flow from the current products allows the team to invest in the future. For example, the team is building a community of explainers and developing a suite of tools to be able to scale from answering a few questions each month to quickly building a comprehensive resource that children can access with their teachers, parents, and independently. “We are not building a product around one personality,” said Doug. “Instead, we hope to empower others to explain concepts in a way that meets children where they are.”
Better answers for our children
When a child asks a question, what is it they're truly looking for? What is it that we, the grownups in their lives who love and care about their future, want them to know?
“We owe it to our children to spark their curiosity and provide good explanations,” said Doug. “For us, asserting a bunch of ideas and expecting children to simply believe us is simply appealing to our authority.”
“The first ten years of life are the years of peak curiosity, when children form habits of thinking that will live with them for the rest of their lives.”
“The first ten years of life are the years of peak curiosity, when children form habits of thinking that will live with them for the rest of their lives,” explained Keith. “This is when they form their view of the world. This is when we can ensure children develop the most important skill of all: the ability to figure things out for themselves.”
Explaining things forward, not backward, is hard. Try it with a child in your life, but don’t be frustrated if you become stuck: this is challenging work! Mystery.org is there to help—and you can sign up for their free Mystery Doug weekly videos now, and look forward to a time where children can, finally, harness the power of the internet to explore all the questions they wonder about.