"It Just Happened On Its Own" Franck Jones, Node Chronicles, On Their Unexpected Preorder Wave

HackerNoon Reporter: Please tell us briefly about your background.

Hi Hackernooners. My name is Franck Jones and I’ve been working in tech since I was a freshman in High School. I started making eCommerce websites in 1998, around the time Google got started. I taught myself to code by reading big fat books, apprenticing, and using IRC chat rooms.

What's your startup called? And in a sentence or two, what does it do?

We are Node Chronicles and we make comic books, apps, and games that teach computer science and electrical engineering. Our app allows readers to scan symbols, legends, and elements found in the books so you can unpack and collect cool items and learn more about them as you go.

What is the origin story?

I tried to teach my kids how to code when they were little and they hated me for it. They wanted to play video games and sports, or hang out with friends. I realized the way I was trying to teach them was boring and annoying, so I worked on a project to make it more fun.

Now kids say our products are one of the most fun ways they’ve ever learned, and adults love our products too! Our products share stories about spooky science discoveries, quantum phenomena, and other crazy inventions people like Alan Turing, Nikola Tesla, Linus Torvalds, and Ken Thompson created. We mix fiction with non-fiction and incorporate real-life mysteries, clues, turmoil, and adventure into our plotlines.

What do you love about your team, and why are you the ones to solve this problem?

My partner in crime Christian Colbert is an absolute genius illustrator, colorist, storyteller, and letterer. Mostly, just he and I work on the comic books, apps, and NFTs right now. The way he draws on the tablet, the expressions, the faces, the action - he’s ridiculous. He’s truly one of the best in his field.

If you weren’t building your startup, what would you be doing?

If I wasn’t building this startup, I’d be working on another startup - possibly an adaptive learning startup, or a new kind of search engine, or some sort of AI workflow tool to improve work efficiency. I’d also probably have a day job, like CTO or UX Director at one of my friend’s startups.

At the moment, how do you measure success? What are your core metrics?

Right now, our success is measured by our learning assessments being collected and analyzed by a top university. Users participating in our study take an assessment before and after using our products and we measure their motivation levels, topics remembered and ability to articulate technology history and problem spaces.

We also pay attention to every review, survey, and interview, looking for even the faintest negative opinions. Sometimes, it’s the few and far between negative reviews that tell us the most.

What’s most exciting about your traction to date?

We had a huge wave of over 1,500 people pre-order our products. Teachers, adults, industry professionals, and comic book lovers all responded in distinct groups, which helped us understand the personas and product-market fit. We did no marketing to get that phase going, it just happened on its own. Now, people are pissed off because they want more, and more, and more. We’re working on our next round of funding at the moment to be able to hire a dozen or more people to become a real studio focused on our dream.

Also, we can’t say who, but one of the most popular rap stars in the world might be featured in our next episode, to help get the message across that tech is dope and you don’t need to be a social reject or a nerd to be involved. We hate when people call our beloved programmers and scientists geeks and nerds. We call them G-Neeks because they’re actually quite GANGSTA in our opinion.

What technologies are you currently most excited about, and most worried about? And why?

I’m excited about systems found in nature becoming a part of technology, like reading and writing data into DNA, atoms or photons, which can exist forever in nature and self propagate. I’m excited about getting rid of wires, certain hardware, corporations, and governments who want to control everything.

I’m also worried about the personal privacy of information, especially kids and vulnerable communities, and I’m worried about fake news, confusion, and population collapse, where people have no source of truth.

We hope the Ten Branches of Technology featured in Node Chronicles, called AxiomX, can someday be a common ground amongst a highly intelligent population, and that people’s priorities soon align with core truths around the technologies the world needs to prioritize, like climate change, clean energy, pollution, crime, and others.

What drew you to get published on HackerNoon? What do you like most about our platform?

Hackernoon found us. Great minds think alike.

What advice would you give to the 21-year-old version of yourself?

I wish I could give the 14-year-old version of myself a message: pick one coding language and learn everything you can about it. Start a project and make 1,000 code commits to it before jumping into something else. Become a grandmaster at something relevant by age 18, even if someone else is already doing it. Then start learning other technologies. And stay in school. Go to a university on a mission, with a library of objects and a toolkit that you’ve created, knowing already what you are good at and want to do.

What is something surprising you've learned this year that your contemporaries would benefit from knowing?

There is an endless sea of possibilities out there, just when you think everything’s been done. Getting good at something takes time. Not 1 year. 3, 5, and 10 years. No matter what industry you choose to disrupt, year 5 and beyond is euphoric.

You will never know that feeling if you give up. So pick something that you can envision yourself doing for the rest of your life before you commit. If you don’t know what that is, do some soul searching.