About Flashcard Friends

What do we do?

Flashcard Friends is a website focused on education. It enables people to create, learn and test themselves using the proven method of flashcards…except that these are online, not printed. You might say, OK, I get the flashcards part, but what about the friends? Well, we offer social networking capabilities for friends to share flashcards with one another.

How did we come up with this idea?

Unfortunately, my kids have learned too much from me…they have management in their DNA. This means that they like to delegate their work because they are inherently lazy. They expect to get by on their looks and quick wit, not hard work (fortunately my wife provided the good looks).

Unfortunately, the school work was too often delegated upward to me: “Hey dad, can you help me with…” which really meant: “Hey dad can you do…while I play?” Try as I might, I couldn’t find a way to get them to work. Instead, they preferred to use Myspace and Facebook.

So one day I’m riding them about school work while they play on Myspace. I’m pushing them to do flashcards because history has proven that when they do flashcards they get straight As. They say, “Why can’t we do flashcards online?” “Yeah”, the other chimes in, “and why can’t we share them with friends like with Myspace?” I didn’t realize until later that this really meant, “why can’t the studious kids in our class creates flashcards that we can use?”

Not being one to turn down a free focus group, I started asking questions, like “would you want pictures on them?” and they responded with “yeah, and sounds too”. So it went like this for a little bit, until we had a feature list for this thing. Then we teamed up with some crack developers I know and got the thing built. Fortunately, my development team gave me a ton of feedback that made it even better.

You may have heard the story of the ant and grasshopper, my kids are avowed grasshoppers. In fact, just the other day I pointed out to my son that a classmate had added a deck of spelling words (we have a very cool spelling service). His response: “I know, I used them and got 100% on the test.” Some things never change.

Grasshoppers unite!

So my kids prefer to do as little work as possible. Being of the computer generation, and being lazy, they constantly say things like “Why can’t the computer do that for me”. This provides the impetus to continue to refine what we do, to make it easier for my kids to do as little as humanly possible and still do well in school. This means that you’ll see more and more improvements to the system that frankly do the work for you.

So why should I create flashcards?

You could just bite off of someone else, but creating flashcards is part of the learning process. Speaking of biting off others, you can find a deck that is close enough to your needs and simply copy it and make your own modifications…why start from scratch? If you are really good, you can convince your teacher to create the flashcards and provide them for the entire class. If you can pull that one off, you’ll have a career in politics!

How do we make money?

I want to sincerely thank you for taking the time to think about our financial situation. Making money is really overrated…until you run out of it. But seriously, because we have no full-time employees, it doesn’t cost too much. So I just continue to fund it with my kids’ college education fund. But hey, who am I kidding they’re not cut-out for college anyway. In fact, they abhor reading, so odds are they’ll never read this far on this page anyway…please don’t tell them.