Not Enough Teens Were Using Its Product, So This Company Started Displaying Ads

Slader is the Wikipedia of homework.

Students stumped by a math or science question in their textbooks can consult the Slader site or app to not only get answers to problems, but help on how to actually arrive at those answers.

It's obviously aimed at younger teens and students, but it took some experimentation to build to the 750,000 active users on the site last month. For one thing, Slader had to drop its ad-free interface!

Think like a skeptical teen for a moment. If you're getting homework help on an ad-free site, you start to wonder where the catch is. Slader monetized its site with three ads per page and it gained users.

The app currently catalogs 450 math and science textbooks (more are added all the time) and lets students browse by chapter to a specific problem. Yes, the answer is there just like it would be at the back of a high school math book, but the answers are user-generated and quality controlled. Users write out all their work and explain specifically what they're doing and why.

Kyle Gerrity and Scott Kolb met in high school and even shared the same formative math teacher. They founded Slader as a perfect middle ground between hiring an expensive tutor and mindlessly copying the answers out of the back of your textbook - students get the specific help they need on the specific problem that's escaping them.

Their old math teacher, now retired, is among the most active users on the site.