First econ lesson: Don't pay $3.99/m for study material that has never been confirmed to be useful. There's plenty of free resources, right now, that are much much better.
This looks like a pure money grab, vibe-coded in the shortest possible time with, likely, vibe-generated study material.
> It's another form of the "How to Get Rich Quick" book where the answer is "Write a book about how to get rich quick".
I dunno if you're joking (or only semi-serious), but, TBH, the largest number of "how to grow your business" courses are all based on how the author/presenter grew a business around a book/video/content called "how to grow your business".
A good example of this is the "Stacking the bricks"(sp?) thing. I looked into so many of these paid courses, and the only experience the author is demonstrating is "how to make money teaching a course on how to make money".
There's an entire, almost incestuous, industry around this, with each "business-person" referencing other business-people's success stories using their "how to grow your business" course in their own "how to grow your business" course, with testimonials from course-completers who made some money out of their own "How to grow your business" course.
From the outside, it looks almost looks like a pyramid, but on closer inspection it appears to be undirected cyclic graph.
[EDIT]
I expect all this to collapse soon, as the cost of producing this useless material is now approaching zero. This means that the participants in this network can now each "produce" new material on a minute by minute/hour by hour basis. When the production of a product is close to zero AND the utility to the consumer is also zero, there is no way for anyone in this network to make money anymore, because the new entrants will be so overloaded with choices (millions of different courses to choose from) that they may never enter the network at all.
> When the production of a product is close to zero AND the utility to the consumer is also zero, there is no way for anyone in this network to make money anymore, because the new entrants will be so overloaded with choices (millions of different courses to choose from) that they may never enter the network at all.
Just because it doesn't work, doesn't mean we won't see it everywhere because the cost is still zero.
It's like catalytic converter thefts... Most places cracked down on sales of stolen converters, so there's no money in it anymore, but people still steal them cause they heard you could make money.
> Just because it doesn't work, doesn't mean we won't see it everywhere because the cost is still zero.
I meant the opposite when I said "collapse" - because we will be inundated with it (i.e. it will be everywhere), new entrants will be inured to it and simply not enter.
In the past, these networks had a health influx of new blood on a regular basis. It's hard to maintain this pipeline if every member is producing a 1000 books a week.
To add on, r/financialindependence has a good wiki that will also link back to Boglehead, but can cover some of the more advanced concepts and tie it into the FIRE movement (even if you don't want to RE).
I'm pretty sure the first lesson will be that you're a sucker and you could have gotten the same content for free if you went to "https://econteen.com/<free_content_path>".
How well can one learn financial literacy and how to manage money when one lacks financial assets and money of any significant amount?
I am not questioning that one can learn enough to pass the lessons, but often times, lessons fail to prepare for the real world.
I personally consider myself to be quite keen in the areas of financial literacy compared to most people. To be honest, I owe most of what I learned to two things:
1. Being addicted to Runescape in my youth back in the early 2000s. I am dead serious too. For a boring grindy point-and-click adventure, the game really had a lot of real world lessons packed in to it -- predominately to much of the game's economy depending on interactions with other players at the time.
2. Some unpleasant experiences growing up, but I do not feel like those had as much as an impact as #1, oddly enough.
One important point about the game is that I had stake in the game, so to speak. I put a lot of (wasted) time and (wasted) effort into the game in order to earn more and more fake, virtual currency. However, that in-game currency, at the time, had a lot of value to me. Every decision I made with the in-game currency had to be calculated and tact. "How do I earn enough for <x>?" If I spend <y>, I can afford <z>, but won't have enough for <a>" And so on.
I feel like in a lesson on a platform like EconTeen might lack that "stake" or "value" that MMORPG resources or real world money has. I am not trying to say EconTeen is a subpar product or anything like that. I am just thinking about myself, once a teenager, and I know I would have learned just enough to make it through these lessons as fast possible so that I may return to my video game as fast as possible.
You’re right. It wasn’t until I had any kind of real money that I had to actually learn financial literacy. I learned it as a kid but had completely forgotten because I grew up poor.
Looking at the listed curricula, this won't teach kids the skills they need to have financial literacy which is a very low bar needed to make financial decisions.
Listed Curricula:
Budgeting • Saving • Banking • Credit • Investing • Insurance • Taxes • College Finance • Career Planning • Entrepreneurship • Economics • Consumer Rights
This is so broad that the important parts won't have sufficient detail to understand the foundations. I can almost guarantee you they won't have talked about fiat currency, or inflation aside from the macro perspective which won't connect to anything at the individual level (Micro).
If you want your kids to understand finance and by extension money you start with Mises on Human Action, then The Theory of Money and Credit, then Menger/Hayek, a review of Adam Smith's 5 volume set, and later Socialism.
Don't you think that your book suggestions in the last paragraph are oddly focused on a niche branch of internet economics, one that happens to be particularly popular in the US and not particularly popular in Germany or Austria where they geographically originated from?
One would think that a discussion about teaching teenagers would focus on teaching them a broader view instead of tunneling them in one specific direction that happens to antagonize socialism and then only at the end teach them about socialism. That sounds eerily close minded.
I have different reasons for disliking socialism, reasons that are far more banal and simple to understand that don't even involve economics. I don't need an "economic calculation problem" that applies against market economies just as much as it does against socialism, etc.
The funniest part about Austrian economics is that Austrians (the nation and their people) practiced Austrian economics all the way until the beginning of world war two, at which point the Austrian economists got kicked out by an Austrian and fled to the US.
As a person coming to this fresh you need to understand the basis for money and economics before you can reason about it properly (and understanding what's missing to understand what's broken). You do so by building understanding based off past works that you know to be true, and where in-retrospect certain things are wrong how they were wrong (i.e. LVT in Adam Smith).
Austrian Economics which was previously just more classically called "Economics" prior to Keynes and the 1960s does just that following a first-principled approach, whereas the current state of academia for Introductory Economics does not, and instead creates a blindspot with contradictory material meant to confuse in a by-rote teaching strategy that fails objective measure in most cases.
We are talking about economics, and economic systems, its important to understand how such systems have previously failed. Facts don't antagonize opinion aside from when that opinion is wrong and must be discarded; it may antagonize the person who doesn't want to discard such an opinion. The facts are simply just the facts and they hold a supreme position in rational decision-making and related reasoning which is most accurate when based on objective facts (philosophy's metaphysical objectivity/identity/definition), regardless of individual personal belief.
The economic calculation problem is certainly the one that gets the most fanfare because quite a lot of the smaller still un-solveable problems eventually culminate in it with the chaotic whipsaws described, but there are many others mentioned in those 22 chapters; especially for the variants like Syndicalism, or surrounding logistics or transportation that are equally damning as well towards failure. Basic rational thinking says you don't want to use systems you know to fail in a way you can't control, perceive, or measure (after-the-fact i.e. hysteresis).
Its not antagonistic to Socialism unless you consider Socialism a devout belief, in which case I'd ask why one believes in something that isn't true and causes destruction for everyone; by definition believing and striving towards something that isn't true blindly is delusion, or non-hyperbolic evil (whichever you prefer, blindness leads to destructive acts which are evil acts).
The objective facts are what matter, and while many of the things that are now associated with Socialism in the common mind are quite right to aim for, they are hard problems and not solved, and it must not be done so blindly or in a way that will destroy oneself, their children, or their legacy/future as people of the money-printer seem to ignore. Cascading failure problems are the most difficult problems to tackle.
The facts are simply that those failure domains exist, and remain unsolve-able because of mathematical properties in the dynamics, and once the circumstances are created, there is very little control to avoid the downsides which is why it should be learned objectively; and any form of money-printing eventually over the currency's lifecycle will collapse to non-market socialism in the ways described, which is a worse problem when your population is at a level where the chaos of order breakdown causes Malthusian reversion by Catton.
If your food production suddenly fails from something that is generally predictable (having foreknowledge of these dynamics), and you can only grow enough to feed 1/5th of the global population, who decides who lives among the Nuclear powers? Combined the countries involved make up more than 1/5th of the global population.
> The funniest part about Austrian economics is that Austrians (the nation and their people) practiced Austrian economics all the way until the beginning of WW2, at which point economists got kicked out by an Austrian and fled to the US.
That is misleading. Austria was occupied and Annexed by Germany during the Anschluss of 1938 and the leadership that remained were loyal to Hitler throughout the War. The economists, academics, and the like all had people flee to the US during that War. The communists found a great friend in Keynes, but today the intelligent and educated know the errors of Keynes.
It would be a clear misrepresentation saying that they were kicked out by Austrians, when your home state is annexed by a Fascist State, and the material in question applies specifically to Statism or Central Heirarchies of which Fascism and Communism both apply by structural definition.
There is a reason quite a lot of those papers weren't published until well after WW2.
No video demo, all gloss with no substance, pricing is the biggest thing everywhere, and the "social proof" is fake to a contemptuous degree. It doesn't matter whether you made this with AI or not. Everyone will assume you did, either way.
This is going to be Hacker News till the crash, huh. We're hitting the "stock tips from shoeshine boys" stage of the bubble. Thank God my money's in real estate.
With so many subscriptions for everything these days, I'm turning back to good old books to educate the kids. You pay once, they don't disappear after reading unlike in Fallout games, so you can reuse them with all the kids :). Helping them enjoy reading early really makes a lasting difference!
Education tends toward public good will if the mission is to educate and improve learning outcomes.
I've been told there's tons of money in education! But the insight is the edtech stuff that makes money does not sell education. B2b up-skilling platforms for example sell the promise of higher earnings. Food safety, HR training sell compliance. College prep sells college acceptance, and so on.
The people with the foresight to pay for financial literacy will very likely already be financially literate.
I do agree there's money in discretionary learning. Music, dance, knitting, sports, you name it. In the scheme of things it seems niche. I don't intend to diminish the value of humans learning things.
My call out is when we think about changing outcomes for underserved groups of people, there's a hard reckoning that comes.
For example I dabbled in "teaching people to cook". It's one of the most transformative skills. After some months my takeaway is that people that pay for learning to cook aren't paying "to learn", they already know or want to get better or quite bluntly pay for food-porn, edutainment. There's thousands of published cook books of all forms. The barrier isn't lack of materials/content.
A person goes from zero to 1 learning to cook due to necessity, not my online saas course. Btw saas can work, people make a killing; but they're paying for network and "influencer" access, not cooking content.
This is what they sell, but it's outdated since the 50s and millennials+ have slowly realized it was largely false promises. (both sides are to blame just to be clear)
I think a lot of people underestimate the most valuable resource at universities: the access to specialized experts who love to talk with a curious and interested audience. Going through college by only kind of attending class and doing only the required work and exams, yeah the whole thing might feel like a scam, I could see that. But attending office hours, taking interesting gym classes, auditing a random class in a peripheral interest, involvement in clubs, and many other side quests will elevate that experience significantly.
If that were the only thing, yeah I could see it being a hard sell.. especially as costs have gotten a lot higher than when I went to university at the beginning of the millennium. But add in the peer network and the ease of making friends because of repeated random encounters.. and I think it's still worth it.
The whole "companies expect a degree, at least to show that you can finish a multi-year effort" was always an afterthought for me.
> I think a lot of people underestimate the most valuable resource at universities: the access to specialized experts who love to talk with a curious and interested audience.
You can get that access without paying tuition. Just show up and talk to the professors. They (most likely) won't kick you out.
If you knew exactly what you wanted (needed) to talk about, I don't think you would have an issue. You could always pay them to consult if the topic wasn't too boring.
However...
At least in the olden days, going to the class and listening to the professor's take on the subject could help you make connections that you wouldn't make in another context, or on your own. In current days, maybe you make those connections by watching YouTube videos. I (vaguely) remember a very interesting post by someone who said when they watched Talk Y at 2x speed, it seemed mediocre, but later they watched it at 1x and started making all sorts of connections from it.
I think that's one of the benefits of college. Experiencing life at 1x, with time to make the connections and do the creative thinking.
The creativity can also come from talking with your colleagues (fellow students).
> If you knew exactly what you wanted (needed) to talk about, I don't think you would have an issue. You could always pay them to consult if the topic wasn't too boring.
No, I mean you can literally read the same books and attend the same lectures as tuition paying students.
You can ask a professor if you can sit in class (even if you are not a student). Most will be overjoyed that someone is actually sitting in class just to _learn_, instead of just for the piece of paper at the end.
Yep, not disputing the data. Seems we agree: the premise is people go to college with the expectation of higher earning power. The product is earning power, less so "learning", but we don't have to argue semantics.
Now the more controversial stance is we can't say this earning power is causal. That's why specifically I said people buy the gateway ticket into these higher earning jobs. It's self-perpetuating.
I can't disagree with the data, what I can say is people that out-earn non-college people is not _because_ of college. The population represented by non-college goes really down really deep for large variety of socio-economic reasons let's just say.
College sells the forever student to a niche industry of E-learning Publishers, Special Interests (Thought Reform), and Student Loan Debt Servicers, limiting Alumni at the government's expense.
I appreciate this wasn't posted as a Show HN since it's impossible to see the lessons/curriculum without paying. If you want actual feedback, maybe create a dummy account that HNers can use to test it out.
As a parent, I find the landing page to be opaque and not something I would plunk down my credit card number for. Are the lessons videos? Chatbot interactions? Homework questions? How will I know if my child is learning anything? Unless I heard from a trusted friend that this was great for his kid, I would not sign up.
We got some, in home economics. Not sure that subject is really offered anymore?
That was mostly around budgeting. What we didn't get nearly enough of was time value of money, and the cost of credit/borrowing.
As a result a lot of people buy a car and it's just a payment. They have no idea what they are paying as a total price. They don't start a 401K because they have no concept how much difference compounding makes if you start saving when you are 22 vs. 50. Then they are upset when companies do stuff "to benefit stockholders" and never consider that they could have been a stockholder.
I tried to find a freemium option that didn't require me signing up or agreeing to spend $3.99 at some later date. Could be helpful to get more people deeper into the "funnel." Like maybe open up the first 1/x of one of the 22 lessons?
If that option is there I couldn't find it so consider that a single-user usability test or just user error.
This is a great use for privacy.com generated credit cards! Basically, you create a unique credit card number but set its budget to $1. They won't be able to start charging you until you raise the limit on the card. That's how I think all trials should work: requiring an additional confirmation to start charging you.
Also pretty ironic that this site is designed to trick you into paying for a subscription you've forgotten about...but that's the entire subscription/free trial economy of course.
You're forgoing the part of the sales cycle where you demonstrate what you are offering. It goes from telling me, briefly, to asking for a credit card.
I rarely to never give a credit card in exchange for a free trial. Not without some type of proof of concept, first.
It's like being asked for a credit card by someone who approaches me on the street and asks me to trust them.
Absent widespread recommendations, If I don't have a better idea of what I'm buying then I won't buy it.
Just a comment for institutional subscriptions: if you haven't found out already, you'll probably want to hire some sales people who have the ability to check boxes and get through district red tape. If you're doing it, make sure you keep the single classroom subscription price beneath the threshold of "reimbursible with a receipt" instead of "must go through the business office". The latter can really end up being very involved. (You'll still find reluctance to spend that way, but at least it makes trials viable.)
Source: gave up on the process. It seemed the larger the bureaucracy, the lower the conversion rate.
there was a company "Zogo" that built a phone app to do this and sold it to banks as a free perk to try to increase savings rates / utilization of financial products at the bank. Had some moderate success. Haven't heard about it recently.
First econ lesson: Don't pay $3.99/m for study material that has never been confirmed to be useful. There's plenty of free resources, right now, that are much much better.
This looks like a pure money grab, vibe-coded in the shortest possible time with, likely, vibe-generated study material.
It's another form of the "How to Get Rich Quick" book where the answer is "Write a book about how to get rich quick".
> It's another form of the "How to Get Rich Quick" book where the answer is "Write a book about how to get rich quick".
I dunno if you're joking (or only semi-serious), but, TBH, the largest number of "how to grow your business" courses are all based on how the author/presenter grew a business around a book/video/content called "how to grow your business".
A good example of this is the "Stacking the bricks"(sp?) thing. I looked into so many of these paid courses, and the only experience the author is demonstrating is "how to make money teaching a course on how to make money".
There's an entire, almost incestuous, industry around this, with each "business-person" referencing other business-people's success stories using their "how to grow your business" course in their own "how to grow your business" course, with testimonials from course-completers who made some money out of their own "How to grow your business" course.
From the outside, it looks almost looks like a pyramid, but on closer inspection it appears to be undirected cyclic graph.
[EDIT]
I expect all this to collapse soon, as the cost of producing this useless material is now approaching zero. This means that the participants in this network can now each "produce" new material on a minute by minute/hour by hour basis. When the production of a product is close to zero AND the utility to the consumer is also zero, there is no way for anyone in this network to make money anymore, because the new entrants will be so overloaded with choices (millions of different courses to choose from) that they may never enter the network at all.
> When the production of a product is close to zero AND the utility to the consumer is also zero, there is no way for anyone in this network to make money anymore, because the new entrants will be so overloaded with choices (millions of different courses to choose from) that they may never enter the network at all.
Just because it doesn't work, doesn't mean we won't see it everywhere because the cost is still zero.
It's like catalytic converter thefts... Most places cracked down on sales of stolen converters, so there's no money in it anymore, but people still steal them cause they heard you could make money.
> Just because it doesn't work, doesn't mean we won't see it everywhere because the cost is still zero.
I meant the opposite when I said "collapse" - because we will be inundated with it (i.e. it will be everywhere), new entrants will be inured to it and simply not enter.
In the past, these networks had a health influx of new blood on a regular basis. It's hard to maintain this pipeline if every member is producing a 1000 books a week.
What are some of those resources? Asking ̶f̶o̶r̶ ̶a̶ ̶f̶r̶i̶e̶n̶d̶ for myself.
The Boglehead wiki is a great resource.
Beyond the investment wiki pages, it has other pages on personal finance.
It ranges from a pretty basic level up to more advanced.
Just solid, basic financial information that works for most people.
To add on, r/financialindependence has a good wiki that will also link back to Boglehead, but can cover some of the more advanced concepts and tie it into the FIRE movement (even if you don't want to RE).
I'm pretty sure the first lesson will be that you're a sucker and you could have gotten the same content for free if you went to "https://econteen.com/<free_content_path>".
How well can one learn financial literacy and how to manage money when one lacks financial assets and money of any significant amount?
I am not questioning that one can learn enough to pass the lessons, but often times, lessons fail to prepare for the real world.
I personally consider myself to be quite keen in the areas of financial literacy compared to most people. To be honest, I owe most of what I learned to two things:
1. Being addicted to Runescape in my youth back in the early 2000s. I am dead serious too. For a boring grindy point-and-click adventure, the game really had a lot of real world lessons packed in to it -- predominately to much of the game's economy depending on interactions with other players at the time.
2. Some unpleasant experiences growing up, but I do not feel like those had as much as an impact as #1, oddly enough.
One important point about the game is that I had stake in the game, so to speak. I put a lot of (wasted) time and (wasted) effort into the game in order to earn more and more fake, virtual currency. However, that in-game currency, at the time, had a lot of value to me. Every decision I made with the in-game currency had to be calculated and tact. "How do I earn enough for <x>?" If I spend <y>, I can afford <z>, but won't have enough for <a>" And so on.
I feel like in a lesson on a platform like EconTeen might lack that "stake" or "value" that MMORPG resources or real world money has. I am not trying to say EconTeen is a subpar product or anything like that. I am just thinking about myself, once a teenager, and I know I would have learned just enough to make it through these lessons as fast possible so that I may return to my video game as fast as possible.
Robux, this needs to be in robux…
You’re right. It wasn’t until I had any kind of real money that I had to actually learn financial literacy. I learned it as a kid but had completely forgotten because I grew up poor.
Looking at the listed curricula, this won't teach kids the skills they need to have financial literacy which is a very low bar needed to make financial decisions.
Listed Curricula: Budgeting • Saving • Banking • Credit • Investing • Insurance • Taxes • College Finance • Career Planning • Entrepreneurship • Economics • Consumer Rights
This is so broad that the important parts won't have sufficient detail to understand the foundations. I can almost guarantee you they won't have talked about fiat currency, or inflation aside from the macro perspective which won't connect to anything at the individual level (Micro).
If you want your kids to understand finance and by extension money you start with Mises on Human Action, then The Theory of Money and Credit, then Menger/Hayek, a review of Adam Smith's 5 volume set, and later Socialism.
Don't you think that your book suggestions in the last paragraph are oddly focused on a niche branch of internet economics, one that happens to be particularly popular in the US and not particularly popular in Germany or Austria where they geographically originated from?
One would think that a discussion about teaching teenagers would focus on teaching them a broader view instead of tunneling them in one specific direction that happens to antagonize socialism and then only at the end teach them about socialism. That sounds eerily close minded.
I have different reasons for disliking socialism, reasons that are far more banal and simple to understand that don't even involve economics. I don't need an "economic calculation problem" that applies against market economies just as much as it does against socialism, etc.
The funniest part about Austrian economics is that Austrians (the nation and their people) practiced Austrian economics all the way until the beginning of world war two, at which point the Austrian economists got kicked out by an Austrian and fled to the US.
As a person coming to this fresh you need to understand the basis for money and economics before you can reason about it properly (and understanding what's missing to understand what's broken). You do so by building understanding based off past works that you know to be true, and where in-retrospect certain things are wrong how they were wrong (i.e. LVT in Adam Smith).
Austrian Economics which was previously just more classically called "Economics" prior to Keynes and the 1960s does just that following a first-principled approach, whereas the current state of academia for Introductory Economics does not, and instead creates a blindspot with contradictory material meant to confuse in a by-rote teaching strategy that fails objective measure in most cases.
We are talking about economics, and economic systems, its important to understand how such systems have previously failed. Facts don't antagonize opinion aside from when that opinion is wrong and must be discarded; it may antagonize the person who doesn't want to discard such an opinion. The facts are simply just the facts and they hold a supreme position in rational decision-making and related reasoning which is most accurate when based on objective facts (philosophy's metaphysical objectivity/identity/definition), regardless of individual personal belief.
The economic calculation problem is certainly the one that gets the most fanfare because quite a lot of the smaller still un-solveable problems eventually culminate in it with the chaotic whipsaws described, but there are many others mentioned in those 22 chapters; especially for the variants like Syndicalism, or surrounding logistics or transportation that are equally damning as well towards failure. Basic rational thinking says you don't want to use systems you know to fail in a way you can't control, perceive, or measure (after-the-fact i.e. hysteresis).
Its not antagonistic to Socialism unless you consider Socialism a devout belief, in which case I'd ask why one believes in something that isn't true and causes destruction for everyone; by definition believing and striving towards something that isn't true blindly is delusion, or non-hyperbolic evil (whichever you prefer, blindness leads to destructive acts which are evil acts).
The objective facts are what matter, and while many of the things that are now associated with Socialism in the common mind are quite right to aim for, they are hard problems and not solved, and it must not be done so blindly or in a way that will destroy oneself, their children, or their legacy/future as people of the money-printer seem to ignore. Cascading failure problems are the most difficult problems to tackle.
The facts are simply that those failure domains exist, and remain unsolve-able because of mathematical properties in the dynamics, and once the circumstances are created, there is very little control to avoid the downsides which is why it should be learned objectively; and any form of money-printing eventually over the currency's lifecycle will collapse to non-market socialism in the ways described, which is a worse problem when your population is at a level where the chaos of order breakdown causes Malthusian reversion by Catton.
If your food production suddenly fails from something that is generally predictable (having foreknowledge of these dynamics), and you can only grow enough to feed 1/5th of the global population, who decides who lives among the Nuclear powers? Combined the countries involved make up more than 1/5th of the global population.
> The funniest part about Austrian economics is that Austrians (the nation and their people) practiced Austrian economics all the way until the beginning of WW2, at which point economists got kicked out by an Austrian and fled to the US.
That is misleading. Austria was occupied and Annexed by Germany during the Anschluss of 1938 and the leadership that remained were loyal to Hitler throughout the War. The economists, academics, and the like all had people flee to the US during that War. The communists found a great friend in Keynes, but today the intelligent and educated know the errors of Keynes.
It would be a clear misrepresentation saying that they were kicked out by Austrians, when your home state is annexed by a Fascist State, and the material in question applies specifically to Statism or Central Heirarchies of which Fascism and Communism both apply by structural definition.
There is a reason quite a lot of those papers weren't published until well after WW2.
No video demo, all gloss with no substance, pricing is the biggest thing everywhere, and the "social proof" is fake to a contemptuous degree. It doesn't matter whether you made this with AI or not. Everyone will assume you did, either way.
This is going to be Hacker News till the crash, huh. We're hitting the "stock tips from shoeshine boys" stage of the bubble. Thank God my money's in real estate.
Another subscription...
With so many subscriptions for everything these days, I'm turning back to good old books to educate the kids. You pay once, they don't disappear after reading unlike in Fallout games, so you can reuse them with all the kids :). Helping them enjoy reading early really makes a lasting difference!
Knee jerk reaction: teens that need this won't have the money to pay for it
Education tends toward public good will if the mission is to educate and improve learning outcomes.
I've been told there's tons of money in education! But the insight is the edtech stuff that makes money does not sell education. B2b up-skilling platforms for example sell the promise of higher earnings. Food safety, HR training sell compliance. College prep sells college acceptance, and so on.
The people with the foresight to pay for financial literacy will very likely already be financially literate.
I'm conflicted.
What does college sell?
Btw, there's also money in actual learning things, look at eg music classes adults take just for their own sake.
(Of course, you could say that a guitar teacher is selling 'getting laid'. But that's perhaps going a bit too far.)
I do agree there's money in discretionary learning. Music, dance, knitting, sports, you name it. In the scheme of things it seems niche. I don't intend to diminish the value of humans learning things.
My call out is when we think about changing outcomes for underserved groups of people, there's a hard reckoning that comes.
For example I dabbled in "teaching people to cook". It's one of the most transformative skills. After some months my takeaway is that people that pay for learning to cook aren't paying "to learn", they already know or want to get better or quite bluntly pay for food-porn, edutainment. There's thousands of published cook books of all forms. The barrier isn't lack of materials/content.
A person goes from zero to 1 learning to cook due to necessity, not my online saas course. Btw saas can work, people make a killing; but they're paying for network and "influencer" access, not cooking content.
Gateway/access to professional-tier job market.
This is what they sell, but it's outdated since the 50s and millennials+ have slowly realized it was largely false promises. (both sides are to blame just to be clear)
I think a lot of people underestimate the most valuable resource at universities: the access to specialized experts who love to talk with a curious and interested audience. Going through college by only kind of attending class and doing only the required work and exams, yeah the whole thing might feel like a scam, I could see that. But attending office hours, taking interesting gym classes, auditing a random class in a peripheral interest, involvement in clubs, and many other side quests will elevate that experience significantly.
If that were the only thing, yeah I could see it being a hard sell.. especially as costs have gotten a lot higher than when I went to university at the beginning of the millennium. But add in the peer network and the ease of making friends because of repeated random encounters.. and I think it's still worth it.
The whole "companies expect a degree, at least to show that you can finish a multi-year effort" was always an afterthought for me.
> I think a lot of people underestimate the most valuable resource at universities: the access to specialized experts who love to talk with a curious and interested audience.
You can get that access without paying tuition. Just show up and talk to the professors. They (most likely) won't kick you out.
Kind of.
If you knew exactly what you wanted (needed) to talk about, I don't think you would have an issue. You could always pay them to consult if the topic wasn't too boring.
However...
At least in the olden days, going to the class and listening to the professor's take on the subject could help you make connections that you wouldn't make in another context, or on your own. In current days, maybe you make those connections by watching YouTube videos. I (vaguely) remember a very interesting post by someone who said when they watched Talk Y at 2x speed, it seemed mediocre, but later they watched it at 1x and started making all sorts of connections from it.
I think that's one of the benefits of college. Experiencing life at 1x, with time to make the connections and do the creative thinking.
The creativity can also come from talking with your colleagues (fellow students).
> If you knew exactly what you wanted (needed) to talk about, I don't think you would have an issue. You could always pay them to consult if the topic wasn't too boring.
No, I mean you can literally read the same books and attend the same lectures as tuition paying students.
You can ask a professor if you can sit in class (even if you are not a student). Most will be overjoyed that someone is actually sitting in class just to _learn_, instead of just for the piece of paper at the end.
College is not perfect and not for everyone but calling it "largely false promises" is laughably inaccurate: https://www.bls.gov/careeroutlook/2025/data-on-display/educa...
Yep, not disputing the data. Seems we agree: the premise is people go to college with the expectation of higher earning power. The product is earning power, less so "learning", but we don't have to argue semantics.
Now the more controversial stance is we can't say this earning power is causal. That's why specifically I said people buy the gateway ticket into these higher earning jobs. It's self-perpetuating.
I can't disagree with the data, what I can say is people that out-earn non-college people is not _because_ of college. The population represented by non-college goes really down really deep for large variety of socio-economic reasons let's just say.
College sells the forever student to a niche industry of E-learning Publishers, Special Interests (Thought Reform), and Student Loan Debt Servicers, limiting Alumni at the government's expense.
First lesson: Avoid recurring payments aka subscriptions.
My knee-jerk reaction was “look at all those emojis. Claude made this in 30 minutes.”
Right or wrong, that’s the aesthetic now.
I appreciate this wasn't posted as a Show HN since it's impossible to see the lessons/curriculum without paying. If you want actual feedback, maybe create a dummy account that HNers can use to test it out.
As a parent, I find the landing page to be opaque and not something I would plunk down my credit card number for. Are the lessons videos? Chatbot interactions? Homework questions? How will I know if my child is learning anything? Unless I heard from a trusted friend that this was great for his kid, I would not sign up.
We just launched the second version of EconTeen, a financial literacy platform built to teach middle and high schoolers how money actually works.
Most kids don’t get any financial education we’re trying to fix that.
22+ self-paced lessons 25+ real-world tools (budgeting, investing, taxes, careers, etc.)
Our first launch reached 2,500+ students, and we’re now gearing up for back-to-school outreach with teachers and schools.
https://www.producthunt.com/products/econteen?launch=econtee...
https://econteen.com/
I’d love any feedback, harsh or helpful. Thanks!
– Christopher
> Most kids don’t get any financial education
We got some, in home economics. Not sure that subject is really offered anymore?
That was mostly around budgeting. What we didn't get nearly enough of was time value of money, and the cost of credit/borrowing.
As a result a lot of people buy a car and it's just a payment. They have no idea what they are paying as a total price. They don't start a 401K because they have no concept how much difference compounding makes if you start saving when you are 22 vs. 50. Then they are upset when companies do stuff "to benefit stockholders" and never consider that they could have been a stockholder.
Then they are upset when companies do stuff "to benefit stockholders" and never consider that they could have been a stockholder
Some people think companies should have moral obligations toward their workers and customers as well as stockholders and executives.
> never consider that they could have been a stockholder.
They can’t to any meaningful extent.
Compound interest still sucks when you don’t have a meaningful initial investment.
I tried to find a freemium option that didn't require me signing up or agreeing to spend $3.99 at some later date. Could be helpful to get more people deeper into the "funnel." Like maybe open up the first 1/x of one of the 22 lessons?
If that option is there I couldn't find it so consider that a single-user usability test or just user error.
This is a great use for privacy.com generated credit cards! Basically, you create a unique credit card number but set its budget to $1. They won't be able to start charging you until you raise the limit on the card. That's how I think all trials should work: requiring an additional confirmation to start charging you.
Also pretty ironic that this site is designed to trick you into paying for a subscription you've forgotten about...but that's the entire subscription/free trial economy of course.
there is some great irony on the concept of putting in a debt driven option here
Could you make the curriculum visible on the landing page? I'm sure students/customers want to understand what kind of lessons they're signing up for.
Curious if your platform supports LTI 1.3 for easy integration with school LMSes?
It seems like an interesting idea.
I'd be intrigued, but would quickly click away.
You're forgoing the part of the sales cycle where you demonstrate what you are offering. It goes from telling me, briefly, to asking for a credit card.
I rarely to never give a credit card in exchange for a free trial. Not without some type of proof of concept, first.
It's like being asked for a credit card by someone who approaches me on the street and asks me to trust them.
Absent widespread recommendations, If I don't have a better idea of what I'm buying then I won't buy it.
Just a comment for institutional subscriptions: if you haven't found out already, you'll probably want to hire some sales people who have the ability to check boxes and get through district red tape. If you're doing it, make sure you keep the single classroom subscription price beneath the threshold of "reimbursible with a receipt" instead of "must go through the business office". The latter can really end up being very involved. (You'll still find reluctance to spend that way, but at least it makes trials viable.)
Source: gave up on the process. It seemed the larger the bureaucracy, the lower the conversion rate.
Is this about Finance or Economics?
Really love the idea! I tried going to the FAQ on mobile safari on iOS and can't scroll on the answer sections, so the text is cut off.
First financial lesson for teens. Control your subscription expenditures.
there was a company "Zogo" that built a phone app to do this and sold it to banks as a free perk to try to increase savings rates / utilization of financial products at the bank. Had some moderate success. Haven't heard about it recently.
Couldn't find anywhere (looked in F.A.Q. first) which age group this is most appropriate for. "Teens" is kinda vague!
Some clear requirement like "5th grade math" would be more appropriate.
They list a high school freshman in their reviews.
Based on whose economics?
I browse hackernews to get away from this kind of slop.