87: Leading the Flock & Improving Innovation, Catching Up on Goosechase's Journey with Andrew Cross, CEO and Founder

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2:04 Join the professional community today. Unlock your potential with the Professional Journey. Check out our plans at HTTPS colon forward slash forward slash bit dot ly forward slash tbj 23. Hello everyone and welcome to another amazing episode of Add up Ed Tech. My name is Holly Owens. And my name is Nadia Johnson and we're your host. We're excited because we have a returning guest on the show today. We have Andrew Cross coming back to us on Ed up at Tech. He is the CEO and founder of Goose Chase. Andrew, welcome back.

2:49 Thank you so much for having me back. That's good, I hope. I guess I didn't mess anything up too badly the first time. So glad to be invited back. Definitely not, and we're going to have a lot of fun getting all caught up with you. But before we jump into some of the questions about all the things you've been doing at Goose Chase since we last talked, give us a brief intro, intro and reminder about your journey into this space. For the audience who hasn't yet, Listen to your episode 64 and we will link to that in the show notes so they can go back. But tell us a little bit about your journey and who you are. Yeah, absolutely. So as you mentioned, I'm Andrew Cross, Founder and CEO of Goose Chase. And then for those who haven't heard about us or our story, we actually started at a hackathon 12 years ago, which is so long ago to say, but we were focused on being a scavenger hunt app at the time and you know, early days.

3:42 With the product out there and what we found is that customers kept pushing the boundaries of what was possible. And for us, we liked that. We liked seeing them kind of go beyond what you're supposed to maybe do with the traditional scavenger hunt and what we really started to see over the years. Is it no longer really fit what a scavenger hunt could be considered? And we actually started calling these interactive experiences then and started realizing that we have a much bigger opportunity than just being a scavenger hunt app to create something really new and exciting that hasn't really existed before, something that our customers are really asking for. And so we've really set out to build kind of the world's first ever interactive experience platform to power all sorts of different experiences in the education context. A lot of times that means in class learning. So really experiential learning opportunities that can be used for field trips, for PTA events, teacher retreats and conferences, fundraisers.

4:33 And I think one of the coolest, most unique examples is during COVID, people actually used it to create the yearbook by creating an interactive experience to kind of collect all the different imagery. That's so cool. Yeah, right. When I heard this story, I kind of like, wow, I never would have thought that. And that happens so much for us. Really great idea. Yeah. Super, super cool and creative. I would have loved to be a fly on the wall for that one, yeah. Absolutely. Well, I that what you just don't realize I guess Andrew from begin to see and find her like what people take your technology and what they can do with it then they go, they take it to the next level, yeah. And I think that's the real magic for us with the platform is that we just help everybody, but in particular educators.

5:18 Improve the engagement, learning outcomes through these interactive experiences. There's so many different ways. There's a lot of different ways to get students up and out of their seats engaging with the material. I know creativity and play in the classroom is a huge deal right now and I think being able to partner with that kind of movement is really, really exciting for us as well. And I think about also I've I've used some and I I think it might have been Goose Chase that I use for professional development as a teacher, like it was a tool for us to get out and like kind of work with our team. So it's like team building as well. I've seen it be used for for cool things like that. So and I really enjoyed that part of our our professional development. But can you tell us a little bit about what's what's happening at Goose Chase? Like what's new, what are some new things that's happening, exciting things that's happening over at Goose Chase? Yeah, absolutely.

6:08 So one thing that I've been focusing on in particular is just growing our team. So we actually had, I think around 3 new team members start at the beginning of this year and then two new engineers actually started last week for us. And our philosophy in general is to have fewer people on the team, but get the right people and that's really time consuming. I think we're getting close to like 30 people now or something like that. So the team is growing. So that's definitely chewed up a lot of our time, but we'll pay dividends, you know, down the road with a lot of new feet kind of features and capabilities that we've got. We've been working on growing our community. I mentioned the last episode that we've got a creator community that we're we're going called The Nest. There's just a place for creators to come learn, connect and inspire each other. And really at the end of the day, we're trying to just provide as much value to our creators as we possibly can and just make it a spot that everyone can come and get better.

6:55 So lots of work's been going into that. I mentioned as well that we were working on rebuilding a lot of the foundations of our platforms. Obviously going from a scavenger hunt app to you know this huge interactive experience platform, lots of things that we need to do to help us some changes and simplifications and just allow for the platform to kind of grow and develop. So that's been making some great progress. I think ballpark end of year is when we think we'll be wrapped up that and then the features will come, you know fast and furious after that. And I think we did something well. We've been doing this. That's pretty unique. We did something that we've called the concept car which is technique from the automotive industry. I'm sure you've seen the, you know the fancy cars at the car shows previously and we thought about this cuz we've we've said we're creating this first ever interactive experience platform. How do we align our team internally on what that looks like?

7:48 And it was a big thing for us because we want people to all be working off the same playbook essentially and. We actually were able to do something, and that was absurdly cool, where we took all basically the features that people had been asking for and started just painting a picture of how those might all fit together. We took an example like a day at the zoo where you know this isn't all possible with the platform now, but you can wander around to the different exhibits where there's maybe QR codes and interactive map, you know, mission shortlisting cohorts of different groups can go through it together and just saw how that would all fit together. Or another one that we had was an immersive history lesson in the classroom where maybe there's multiple choice questions.

8:28 I know everyone's looking for this gate admissions where you're able to complete one and then that unlocks another one. Maybe and we're pushing boundaries here or some sort of like augmented reality aspect to it. Now just to be clear, like we're not promising we're building these at any given time in the in the short term, but I think it shows how big we can think about the platform. And how this all comes together and it went extremely well. So this is probably something that made the team even more excited about our future. So that's been a pretty big internal thing for us that we've got a pretty clear picture of you know where we're trying to go and the whole team is very aligned around that. And then obviously going out and talking to customers as well as a huge part of what we do just on it on a regular basis. But we've been making a really concerted effort to stay connected to really the community out there of creators that are are using goose chase and and loving it every day. I have absolutely loved watching your growth over the past couple years.

9:23 I know you've been at this for 12 years but the past like two to three years just watching the different changes. I use Goose Chase on some of my Amazon off sites with people and they're like what is this tool and they they out, they loved it. It like Nadia said team bonding. And I am so excited about what you're doing now and taking the platform to the next level because that's really going to offer people a lot of different options and the versatility with Goose Chase and I can't wait to see it. It's going to be amazing. Yeah, especially in the classroom. Like, this makes me like, can I go back to the classroom for a day just so that I can use it with students? Like it'd be be so much fun.

10:09 This is definitely a tool that we, when I teach my graduate level students that I expose them to because number one, you know, we're async, we're asynchronous and synchronous and mostly we're online, so they need to do some team bonding, you know, with that. But absolutely, like different, different teachers. And most of my students are teachers in New York City public schools. So they'll take it back to their classrooms and they'll just, like you said, like the yearbook thing, like they'll just be creative with it. Yeah, that's awesome. And I think I can genuinely say, and I never thought I'd be able to say this, but 12 years in, this is by far the most excited I am about Goose Chase's future, just because it feels like we've really tapped into something. So, you know, deep and profound and if there's a bit of a, you know, societal change, I think that's happening, that people are looking for interactive experiences in general in the world.

11:03 And I think we're able to piggyback and ride that wave a lot. And you know, it's why you see experiential learning be so important and creativity and play in the classroom. Be so important. We actually had an elementary teacher in North Carolina who had a student who really had never picked up a book, had no desire to and they tried one-on-one sessions, different reading materials and just nothing worked and. What they did is they actually created an experience for the students to really interact with the reading material in different ways. And some of the missions were super simple, like, you know, what's the last word on page 47? But others were more in depth, like what is the color red symbolized in this chapter? Or what are some examples of irony reflected in this book? Or even take a photo outside school demonstrating the themes of the book.

11:46 And what ended up happening is the student actually started to enjoy reading because it was fun and there's a purpose. It wasn't just following orders. And that's like such a good example for me of how you can really, I don't want to call it weaponizing, but really apply experiences to do things that really weren't possible before, maybe some of the traditional teaching methods. So I think, you know, that's just the educational focus there. But the idea of just interactive experiences as a whole, I think is just ready to kick off as a whole. Absolutely it is. And I love the adaptiveness of it too, because I feel like, you know, at certain times, like you're saying thinking out, thinking outside the box, but also giving the students the opportunity to choose their own experiences and what they do and put them more in control.

12:32 And this is at all levels, this is from K to 12 to adult learners that this, this needs to happen and that adaptability is essential, especially as you continue to to learn and you know the cliche lifelong learner. I'm so important there. So I want to know so you have you've you talked about the yearbook thing and you're talking about the situation with the the student and reading. Are there any other stories that you can share with us about what's been happening in the past year? Any customer things that you're willing you can put out there to the public? Yeah. So we had a really interesting school in Nebraska, their foreign language department, that actually had students learning Russian. And I think one of the missions they came up with that was so interesting to me is that they actually had challenged the students to go out and find another teacher and teach them a phrase in Russian and then record them practicing. And I'm sure you you can all relate. Students love, you know, flipping things and teaching a teacher and maybe getting a kick out of, you know, sometimes poor pronunciation that comes out.

13:35 But I think again, it's just such a clever way of adding that joy and. Activity. You mentioned letting students choose their own path and keeping them engaged and having fun that way. I think that's a good example. We also had an English language arts teacher who actually flipped the script, which I thought was really cool, where she had the students create the goose chase to show mastery of a topic or concept. And not allowed those students to show that they really get it, but it also made the other students in the class more excited because they were able to participate in experience crafted by their peers. So they were more into it. They put their best effort forward. So it was kind of this cool inversion of the usual way of things, but actually even more impactful in some ways there as well. So pretty kind of creative outside the box thinking there as well.

14:21 I am just like, I'm just, I'm just again, I'm just the neighbor with the growth of goose chasing, all the different things that you're doing and how things have changed since inception. So what about the upcoming year? It's been about 8 months since you were on the last episode of Edible Tech. You're just changing your logo and we're seeing some changes happening. Are there anything, anything that you can share without violating any NDA agreements about the upcoming year, what you have on the docket? Yeah, absolutely. So I I alluded before that we're kind of aiming to to wrap up our foundational work what we're calling internally as kind of 2.0 around the end of this year. So that's definitely probably top priority internally. We know afterwards probably gate admissions is going to be what we're going to be working on.

15:14 Hopefully our product team isn't going to be too mad at me for for teasing that no, no commitments, but that's definitely where we're thinking right now. That's definitely our most. Requested I'd say feature for years now. So we're really excited to potentially start working on that. Another thing that's really important for us, I mentioned that we were we're seeing this really creativity and play in learning wave out starting to pick up and we really want to position ourselves to be known as the tool for that. I think our view on life is so well aligned to that, that whatever people want to do to bring in play, bring in experiences to learning, we think we have this massive opportunity to to power basically all those experiences that can possibly be done. To the point where I don't know. If you remember way back in the iPhone App Store days there was the campaign of there's an app for that we wanna make.

15:59 I don't care that yeah, we wanna make there's an experience for that. I think. I think that really captures our view extremely well, saying whatever you need to do. There is an experience that would make you succeed at what you're trying to do, and I think people haven't really caught on to that yet, but they're starting to. And our goal now is just to really get out there in the world and help people see how powerful interactive experiences can be for what they're trying to do, both in education and outside of education as well. I agree. I think it's one of those things. Like I think the biggest take away that I got from my master's program and instructional design was like experience and experiential learning is so important. For adults.

16:40 But I think we're starting to move toward that like way when it comes to K12 education as well. Like we're starting to realize that kids need to be out of their seats. They need to be experiencing that. That's going to hold way more value than, you know, kind of where education was. In the past, before this kind of wave of technology. So I think I totally agree with that and I think that I think it's awesome that you're providing a tool for that kind of experience and experiential learning. I just want to mention here that don't forget that add up listeners can go and get 10% off their Goose Chase subscription by going to goosechase.com and then during the sign up process enter in the code add up 10 which is Ed UP10 to get 10% off of your subscription on Andrew we can't thank you and not for coming back on and telling us about all the updates to Goose Chase. I love Goose Chase.

17:40 It's like one of the first things I heard of when I first started this podcast and I started exploring things. So thank you so much for being willing to come back and share your updates with us. No problem. Thank you so much for having me back. That was a lot of fun, as was the first time. But it's extra fun this time. Let's put it that way. Yes, nice. So nice meeting with you and talking to you about Goose Chase. Likewise, Nadia. Are you ready to embark on a transformative journey towards a brighter future? Introducing The Professional Journey, a supportive community dedicated to guiding you towards your dream career and boosting your confidence along the way? Join our vibrant community of likeminded individuals who share ambition and Dr. Are you feeling lost and uncertain about your next career move?

18:34 Let us be your compass. Say goodbye to selfdoubt and hello to newfound confidence. Together we'll celebrate your triumphs, big and small. Take the first step towards your professional growth today. Join the professional Journey community and unlock a world of possibilities. Discover your potential, Find your new role and embrace the future with confidence. Join the professional journey today. Check out our plans at HTTPS colon forward slash forward slash, bit dot ly forward slash TV J23 you've just experienced and another amazing episode of Ed Up Ed Tech. Be sure to visit ourwebsite@edupedtech.com to get all the updates on the latest Ed Tech Happy days. See you next time.