The Idea - Software for Preschool and Home School Curriculums (curricula)

About a week ago, I lay awake at night thinking about what to do. I was looking for an easy startup idea, something that I could spend about $1000 and a month's spare time on to see if I could come up with a "minimum viable product" and find out if the idea develops any traction.

My wife (Kelsey) had just started doing preschool at home for my two small children. They love it. Harmon is 2 1/2 years old and Sammy (Samantha Jane, aka "Jambo") is just 1. Kelsey did some research and found an online curriculum that goes through the alphabet one letter a week and has coloring, songs, and various activities. It's pretty cool. She's added some of her own ideas and it's a great success.

We're also thinking about homeschooling. Since we plan on traveling (between the USA and Ecuador, and eventually sailing around the world), having a curriculum that we can adapt to our lifestyle is a must. Kelsey's all for home school, but I'm a bit more traditional, and well...pedantic -- in complete contrast to my attitude as a student.

I started thinking that if you were building a curriculum for yourself and it was more free-form and less rigid than a typical school, you might want to have an easy way to check off what you'd done. It might also be nice to have a source for people to find, compare notes on, and collaboratively develop curricula (curriculums?)

So that was my idea. I'd build a website that would hopefully develop into a resource for finding preschool curriculum information (based on my wife's research and experience) and create a simple checklist program that would allow you to keep track of what you've covered. Admittedly, the checklist is probably overkill for pre-kindergarteners, but if I had a working system by the time my son was in first grade it might be of use to us, if no one else. I figured it would be easy enough to adapt the checklist to use grades if we wanted to do that.

I also have a friend who develops software for public school teachers to work with home schoolers. I don't know the details of it, but it helped me thinking there might be a business value to the idea.

So now I had an idea. The next step was to create a plan and see if it was worth developing.