We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Anthony Fizer a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Alright, Anthony thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. We’d love to have you retell us the story behind how you came up with the idea for your business, I think our audience would really enjoy hearing the backstory.

Back in 2015 after a game of pickup basketball at Rhodes College, Jack (Co-Founder) approached me with the idea of developing a website for his physics classroom at Soulsville Charter School. At this time, I was employed as a software engineer for USPS so I was able to conceptualize some of the resources and efforts that would be needed for such an endeavor. We discussed the details and later that week, we had the first prototype of Positive Physics up and running.

We continued to refactor and enhance the functionality as we received feedback from users (both students and teachers). Throughout the years, we continued to grow our user base through our efforts in forums, social media, and word of mouth. In 2018, we had a user base of 50 pilot teachers and 2,000 students. A year later, we were up to 130 teachers and 4,000 students. In 2020, the numbers increased to 550 teachers and 16,000 students.

We were concerned about a possible drop in usage since a lot of schools were returning back to in-person learning vs virtual learning, but that has not been the case. Thankfully our website has proven to be an extremely useful tool in helping students overcome obstacles they may encounter while learning physics.

With any business during the early stages, you always have to manage the product/services you are putting out to ensure that they can adopted in a way that encourages continued use. We were able to work through this and continue to build upon the solid foundation we built years ago.

As of this current school year, we have over 2,000+ teachers and 43,000+ students in over 60 countries.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

I first got into the software engineering world somewhat by accident. I was always interested in computers and technology, but had initially planned to major in architecture or art. At the time I attended Rhodes College (2008-2012), architecture wasn’t an available major so I was planning to go with art. I was able to attend a introductory computer science course my freshman year and had an amazing professor which later became my advisor, Professor Sanders. From there, I continued to take more computer science and math courses, officially declared my major during my sophomore year, and graduated with a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science from Rhodes College in 2012.

I (CTO) along with fellow co-founder Jack Replinger (CEO) have been able to develop and maintain a website that has been used by teachers and students worldwide. One of the primary purposes of the site is to be a tool for the teachers in the classroom to help students understand physics better by breaking down problems into building blocks that are easier to comprehend. We also added another team member (Scott Dodson) that assists us with a lot of the enhancements, helping us tremendously during our inclusion of things such as Google Classroom.

I would say I am most proud of the expansion and growth of our website. It has continuously grown and the usage has increased throughout the U.S. and worldwide, despite it starting off in a physics classroom in South Memphis by two people who had the idea and enough tech experience to build it. It truly shows what we are doing is making a difference and improving the lives of teachers and students in the classroom. We have received countless responses from teachers telling us how much our site has helped, which makes it truly worth it and reenforcing the notion that what we are building is making a difference.

There are other applications out there that do something similar to what we do. Although there are some things we have in common, we put emphasis on making a tool that assists teachers rather than an application that replaces teachers. Our features are growing on an almost weekly basis, with many of the suggestions coming from the teachers. To just name a few, teachers have the ability to manage problems for each section of students, track students’ progress, and manage their rosters. Students receive instant feedback from problems they have answered so they know immediately whether their answer is right or wrong.

They have unlimited extra practice as well as assessments to gauge the overall comprehension of specific physics concepts. Most of the skills also have accompanying videos and notes to help break down the concepts even further. We are in the process of allowing teachers to create their own problems and categorize them into their own skills, which we believe will be a game-changer and definitely set us apart from others.

How about pivoting – can you share the story of a time you’ve had to pivot?

I would say the biggest pivot I’ve had to make was the transition to working on Positive Physics full-time at the beginning of this year. During this transition, I had to resign from my position as Team Lead and Senior Software Engineer at ECS, Federal. That was my first IT job upon graduating from college and the majority of my skills and techniques were learned there. Although in a lot of places it’s cliche, a lot of us actually felt like family and could go out after work to have fun, talk about our personal lives, and it was clear that we had each others best interest at heart. Despite it being stressful at times, I thoroughly enjoyed the challenges and it helped to sharpen my critical thinking skills and responsive time to problems. The balance between working a full-time job and coming home to work on Positive Physics wasn’t completely unbearable, but often included a lot of long days and nights. Once we were able to acquire the funds to financially support us and the business, I put in my resignation and Positive Physics became my main focus and occupation.

Any insights you can share with us about how you built up your social media presence?

On social media, most of our audience was attracted through continuous posting on all platforms and included brief descriptions of the features and services offered. Almost every day, I would post something about Positive Physics. Especially during the early stages, I was very persistent with my content sharing. Thankfully with us posting in different groups and forums on social media, our website was able to spread by word of mouth as well. We have not spent any funds on social media advertising, but we plan to in order to gain even more exposure.

My advise on social media growth would be to control the content you post and make it as professional as can be. I utilize my personal account to post about the business because it is easier for me to maintain and I am very conscious about what I post about my personal life. I have friends that have a different personal and business account, which they say is easier for them and helps keep the divide between personal and professional life. Despite whatever route is taken, as long as the posts give the audience some insight into what the business does and how it can be of help to them, it should be effective.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.positivephysics.org