It’s a very unique project: students have the ability to be involved in almost all of the roles of the project - from mentoring high school teachers to writing new course content and working on backend systems. There are 2 professors who oversee the project, and a handful of awesome full time staff to guide and manage the CMU students.

It’s crazy to see how it’s grown over the years. They just recently added an option to take CMUs 15-112 online with credit-by-exam at the end of the year: https://www.cs.cmu.edu/news/2023/cs-academy-credit-by-exam

Congrats on a successful end to a fun high school project! Stories like this are always fun to read.

I’m unsure how many tracking IDs you can create in your account, and as far as I’m aware and can tell, you cannot pass specific UTM codes or other identifying information along with a click to Amazon that is passed back to you on the reporting side. Meaning, you could track users you send to Amazon, and where you’re sending them, and you can see outcomes, but Amazon only provides the tracking ID back to you as a reference (this ID is meant to be used on a site/channel wide level, but as I mentioned above could possibly be abused depending on how many you can create)

It’s awesome when a competitor can enter the market.

On a side project last summer, I was able to work with a company running education niche groups. To join 10 of their groups (total reach probably around 30k audience) was $500 per month billed on PayPal. Could make a post per day in all 10 groups, so 300 posts. The conversion rate was better than any other paid advertising we had tried and the targeting was much easier.

It’s easy to get started: find a few Facebook groups you might be interested in joining, go to about this group, add the admin as a friend/send a message request, and ask about advertising opportunities. Be sure to show them your project, and why you think it would be beneficial to their audience, that will help your case!

Also - have you thought about going to teachers with your product (assuming it’s compass letters from your post history), getting them on a free subscription, and hoping the kids go home and tell their parents they want to get the letters too?

One of my biggest side projects for many years was a student tool centered around test scores. It was a niche use case with a huge amount of students using the tool on one day per year (1m+). There was exactly one competitor. I had a better domain but a much worse site in terms of design, speed etc. We were nearly the same in traffic, until I decided to monetize the site with a lot of Google ads. Immediately, Google shot my site up in the rankings, and actually seemed to penalize the competitive site. My traffic went up 10x and the competitive site remained flat. This happened for 3 years, then the niche use of both of our tools was “patched”.

[1] https://support.opensea.io/hc/en-us/articles/1500009575482-H...

Additionally, will it be any harder to get around a system like this than a traditional anti-cheat system? Theoretically - for the average player at least, it might make cheating worse - assuming the cheater runs their cheats in a realistic way, in your world, there is now no detection software pinpointing the cheaters!

I think the important aspect that keeps the project useful is by using the same metrics that you would use to evaluate any business. I’m able to run this company completely in my spare time, and it’s reached a point where only a week of work is needed per year to keep it stable. Traditional metrics, front end analytics and some anonymized data collection, as well as social media sentiment review show extremely positive user feedback. As well as continued growth every year.

It’s important to remember that it’s your baby and your idea still has to follow traditional success metrics. And also, for a side project, success metrics don’t have to exclusively be “billion dollar company with VC funding in 3 months that is my full time job that I’ve invested my whole life into.”

There will need to be a bigger driving force to get amp out of popularity. As long as AMP pages unlock preferential treatment in search results (mobile carousels), sites that want to compete will be forced to use them.