We turn mandatory learning into experiences people actually recommend — starting with the course tens of thousands of Floridians are required to take every year: traffic school.
Education is usually treated as information delivery. But when people feel respected and empowered, they attempt harder things and persist through obstacles. We're building the new media of excellence for education — Duolingo's product experience combined with Disney's character, story, and emotional power.
The long-term goal: make emotionally intelligent, character-driven learning available in the categories people currently endure rather than choose — and turn mandatory learning into a trusted relationship with room for repeat purchases, adjacent courses, referrals, and educational media.
Compliance training is expensive, confusing, punitive, and built on the assumption that learners have no choice. A person who gets a traffic ticket is already frustrated — they have to pay the ticket, protect their license, and then spend more time and money on a course that feels like extra punishment.
That's exactly why it's the perfect first proof. It gives us a clear, measurable test:
The state requirement already creates the customer pipeline. We don't have to prove people need traffic school — they're required to buy it. Our only job is to become the best available option.
If we can take something people are forced to consume and make them feel good enough to recommend it, we'll have hard evidence that our deeper system works everywhere else.
Florida Basic Driver Improvement is the first proof point: a four-hour course that meets the state's requirements while making the experience genuinely enjoyable, clear, and human. One statewide approval serves all Florida counties — no county-by-county rollout — and the same platform and production system then expands to other states and regulated continuing-education categories.
A clear, delightful, mobile-first course experience — the opposite of today's clunky, punitive compliance portals.
Original characters, story, and emotional power that make a required course feel worth finishing — and worth telling a friend about.
The platform is designed to send completion data to the DMV and transactional confirmation to the customer — the full certificate workflow.
Already built: a working prototype, the initial Florida traffic-school curriculum, scripts, characters, and designs — user-tested across four generations (Gen Z, millennials, Gen X, and boomers). The consistent feedback: it felt legitimate and fun compared with existing traffic-school products.
"I was a homeless, dyslexic child. One of my happiest memories was finding soggy donuts in a trash can. That small moment of joy gave me enough emotional space to dream — and I started going to the library every day."
That's the whole thesis in one memory: a small feeling of possibility is what makes hard learning possible. Jesse is now building learning experiences that give other people that same feeling — and he has an unusually complete toolkit to do it.
A rare combination in one founder: an expert curriculum designer who has taught more than 60,000 students, a doctoral-level education researcher studying how media shapes emotional regulation, a full-stack developer and current CTO of a security & geofencing company, and a proven audience builder who grew an educational YouTube channel past 180,000 subscribers in under four months. Jesse leads the software, curriculum, product, animation, and media work.
The traffic-school platform isn't a first attempt at the thesis. It's the latest in a decade-long pattern of shipping media that helps people learn and cope.
An art-therapy app to help kids ages 6–17 cope with anxiety and depression — built in consultation with art therapists, with a self-guided consumer version and a healthcare version for doctors and hospitals, plus a medical advisory board. Covered by Kidscreen, a leading kids-entertainment industry publication.
Linc Thinks, an animated series teaching preschoolers about ADHD and being on the spectrum. Animation and design work for the Canada Media Fund and Virgin Media. Across all of it: character, story, and emotional intelligence in service of learning.
The same instinct — emotion as part of the learning technology — now aimed at a mandatory, revenue-clear category.
Brayhaus and Linc Thinks are cited as evidence of prior product work and earned media, not as current revenue or the product being funded here.
Because the category is mandatory, demand doesn't have to be manufactured. And because we make the experience genuinely good, we open room for repeat purchases, adjacent courses, referrals, and educational media — turning a one-time requirement into a relationship.
One competing operator reportedly serves about 120,000 customers per year at roughly $40 per course — implying approximately $4.8M in annual gross bookings for that single operator.
Treat this as competitor-reported evidence, not an independently verified market-size fact. The broader Florida opportunity and any larger annual scenarios require further sourced research before being stated as a forecast.
Focused founder time, software, compute, AI credits, content production, regulatory preparation, and limited design or animation support. The goal is to finish the product and submit it for approval.
After the product is approved: government listings, targeted outreach, mailers, grassroots efforts, organic content, and paid media — to make the course visible and the obvious choice.
Currently a sole founder leading software, curriculum, product, animation, and media. Focused funding brings in one or two specialized contractors — likely designers or animators for compositing, editing, and finishing the character-led content, and to repurpose course material into organic and paid marketing assets.
Jesse continues to own the product, curriculum, platform, and overall creative direction.
We are not trying to make a novelty course. We're taking the most unavoidable, most punishing learning experience we can find and proving we can make people feel good about finishing it. Get that right, and the same system extends into every category people currently endure rather than choose.
Duolingo of the platform. Disney of the content. Compliance training is just where we prove it.