A gamified online chess academy for the 1,200 kids you already teach — and the ones you haven't met yet. Short videos with personality. Safe play against real friends. Live group lessons from your coaches. Weekly reports parents actually understand.
You described it on our call with more clarity than almost any first call I've had. This is the picture, reflected back. Six things the fully-built platform makes possible.
30-second to 3-minute lessons with real teachers and real warmth — not the monotone "pawn-takes-pawn" you find everywhere else. Tiered by skill, sequenced into a curriculum kids actually finish.
Kids earn coins for learning and playing, then spend them on ridiculous and wonderful things — pizza pawns, koala-bear knights, pieces that get sucked into black holes when captured. The loop that turns a lesson into a habit.
Real chess against other kids with no predators, no angry adults, no unfiltered chat — ever. Kids communicate through canned phrases and emoji. Friend requests require a yes from both parents. Sullivan's story doesn't repeat here.
Live group lessons where a PALS coach watches every board at once, then picks one game to walk through with everyone. Zoom does the video, we do the chess. Your coach's time stays on teaching, not on software.
Every Sunday morning, parents get a plain-English email: "This week your kid learned the fork — a knight move that attacks two pieces at once. Rating up 30 points. 8 games played, 5 wins." Parents who understand what they're paying for don't churn.
From your first 50 beta kids to 10,000 subscribers, on the same foundation. Phase 2 gamification, school licensing, tournaments, mobile apps — everything in the vision stays on the roadmap. Nothing gets orphaned by an early choice.
Chess.com, Lichess, ChessKid — they all exist. None of them do what you described. Here's what's missing today and what your platform puts in its place.
"Chess is the anti-video-game." — Kevin McConnell, discovery call
Each of these is a real experience kids, parents, and coaches will use. A few have live walkthroughs you can open in a new tab.
Live games with pieces that have personality. The same surface that renders a knight today will render a pizza-pawn and a black-hole capture tomorrow — without a rewrite.
Open interactive demoEvery board visible to the coach at once. Closed tournaments so only the kids in the lesson are playing each other. Post-game replay with one click. Attendance on autopilot.
Open interactive demoA plain-English email that tells a parent what their kid learned this week, celebrates the wins, and makes the subscription feel obviously worth it. This is the money shot.
Open interactive demoA working version of the four-bucket partnership model, with sliders for your upfront tier, your revenue ramp, and your Features Budget. Plug in your own numbers and see what the math does.
Open interactive demoCanned phrases and emoji only. No free-text chat. Bilateral parent approval for friends. Every interaction logged for incident review. COPPA compliance built in from the first line of code.
Walk through in the pitch meetingYour team uploads videos, writes modules, and previews exactly what a kid will see — without publishing. When it's right, one click sends it live. No "oh no, we made a typo" moments.
Walk through in the pitch meetingThis is the single most important architectural commitment in the whole proposal. It's the reason we can ship Phase 1 by January 2027 AND reach the fully-built vision — without rewrites.
Phase 1 builds the shared core, the chess engine, and the learning management system. Phase 2 layers the cosmetic economy on top — no rewrite, no migration, no "wait, we have to rebuild this part." Every subsequent capability (tournaments, school licensing, mobile, automated game analysis) plugs into the same foundation.
A complete, working, safe product. Enough of the vision to feel inevitable to parents, enough of the platform to grow into the rest without a rewrite. Nothing half-built, nothing hypothetical.
On our call you said the money conversation was the terrifying part. This is the antidote. Four buckets of payment plus an optional fifth for building what comes next. Pick how much you pay upfront, and everything else scales from there.
The question isn't "what's the cheapest way to pay for this?" It's: how much do you want Axios to be a long-term economic partner in your platform, versus how much do you want us to just build the thing and hand it over?
Both are legitimate choices. Our honest recommendation is Tier 3 — Balanced: a meaningful partnership without feeling extractive, manageable cash flow on your side, and moderate risk on ours that lets us commit to the January 2027 launch with confidence.
The full commercial model walks through every bucket and every month. It's in the spreadsheet we're sharing alongside this pitch — plug in your own numbers and see what the math does.
You were emphatic on the call: the brand cannot look AI-generated. This pitch uses a working placeholder — the warm orange, Comic Neue, the rounded cards — so we can show you the platform in motion. None of it is the final brand. Here are the three real paths forward.
Whichever option you pick, Allison stays on as the integration lead: translating the brand package into the platform, enforcing consistency, keeping design discipline. She's not off the project — she's focused on the part where her children's-theater eye matters most.
Three people actively working on your platform every week. One architect leading the hard decisions, two developers building in parallel so we never have a single point of failure. Sized exactly to the $230K Phase 1 budget.
Tenured Axios staff. Leads the build, owns the hard decisions, the three-module architecture, the safety and COPPA boundaries, and the scaling path from 50 to 10,000 kids.
Two engineers building in parallel from our CSU pipeline. The chess engine, the LMS runtime, the parent dashboard, the admin and coach portals. If one is unavailable, the other keeps the 9-month timeline on track.
Children's-theater background, painter, brand-voice enforcer. She's the bridge between whatever brand firm you pick and the platform — making sure what they deliver lands beautifully where kids actually see it.
Plus your team: you, Amy, your three-person spec team, Griffin and Sullivan as coaches, Allison's taste gut-checks. We don't need a twenty-person build to ship this. A small, focused group that knows the project top to bottom will ship faster and better than a larger one coordinating over Slack.
Nothing here locks you into anything. This is the shape of how we get from "interesting pitch" to "signed contract and kickoff" without either side feeling rushed.