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

Olutobi, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. What’s the backstory behind how you came up with the idea for your business?

Inspired by the very real and devastating issue of rising childhood illiteracy paired with a lack of digital skills facing students at my former elementary school and elementary schools across the United States, I created Type-Along, a company offering an online platform that provides elementary school kids with literacy and typing activities themed around their interests to help them develop reading skills and a love of reading simultaneously.​ Years of volunteering at my former elementary school have put me face to face with a growing number of kids who view reading as a difficult, boring waste of time. In these kids, I see my old friends. In this school, I see my family. Reading enabled me to take advantage of so many opportunities like entrepreneurship. Reading opens doors, and I don’t want these kids to grow up in a world with more closed doors than open ones. In Houston, 72% of 3rd Graders are reading below grade level and schools have stopped teaching typing/keyboarding widely due to the advent of the smartphone and iPad. I wanted to change the mindset surrounding reading and introduce a new literacy culture with Type-Along. Backing up a little, the actual idea for the product came from a class I took over spring break freshman year of high school hosted by DiscoverU called Discovering your steam: Ideas in action. Here my groupmate and I were tasked with developing a solution to one of the UN SDGs. I chose number 4, ensuring access to quality education, because education has always been very near and dear to my heart. We spent a while researching which specific problems we wanted to tackle and finally we settled on reading. Our mentor suggested that we include typing within our product because she believed, personally, that it wasn’t taught enough and that there were too many adults who couldn’t do it properly. I had never really considered typing education as super important or even relevant to reading, so I struggled to integrate it into our platform. However, we soon realized that it could potentially help in teaching reading skills like phonics and alphabet recognition. We decided we would blend reading skills with typing through songs. Type-Along would be a platform where students would type along to the lyrics of a popular children’s song to practice reading with subtitles, letter identification and practice typing. However, we soon realized that this wasn’t going to be useful or really practical given the speed at which songs play. So we decided to separate the typing segment. After the program, I was introduced to Ms. Daniel at JA Southeast Texas who sent me on the track of turning this idea into a business. However, due to an inability to make such a large commitment, my partner decided to leave, and I began trying to fix this product on my own. So for around 4 months, I was working on improving the idea and making it make more sense. This required that I spend a lot of time researching the best ways to teach reading, so I could determine how I could ground this product I believed had potential in methods that had already been proven to work. I talked to teachers about type-along 1.0 and most of them found it interesting but didn’t really know how helpful it would be. Using their feedback and the research I gathered, I developed type-along 2.0 which separated typing from songs and had it at the beginning of an activity as a way for kids to practice spelling. In this iteration, activities were grouped by reading skills with songs that reinforced the idea. However, over time, the more I thought about it, the more I realized that I was seriously limiting myself by only having songs, and I also realized that problems with reading aren’t only about lack of skill, they are also about lack of motivation. The brainstorming recommenced, and I began looking for ways to connect the activities to kids interests. Drawing on inspiration from youtube kids, I came to our current version of type-along, version 3.0. It offers activities based on children’s interest that include typing segments, a subtitled video where reading is explicitly connected to their interests, self-guided reading, and an assessment. I felt this would work because it connected a lot of the things that research has already shown work separately to help kids learn to read: phonics, sounding out words, subtitled videos, reading passages that are relevant to kids, mentorship. Type-Along is working to connect all of these into a platform capable of not only training kids to read but helping them to see how it connects to their lives out of school. This all occurs alongside the added benefit of typing education. When I came up with the idea of type-along, I didn’t think that no one was doing this. In elementary school, I used typing.com and starfall and iStation and all of the other programs elementary schools provide for kids to help them read. What got me excited and believing that this idea could really make an impact was the fact that I couldn’t find a platform that was doing it all.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers

I got into business through the Junior Achievement Company Program. I joined with my business idea, Type-Along, in the fall of 2021. My background volunteering at my former elementary school has played a big role in my decision to jump into the education technology sector. Funny enough, all my life I had dreamed of working at a company like Google as a software developer or ML researcher. However, discovering business and entrepreneurship has really transformed the future I see for myself. At Type-Along, we offer subscriptions to our online platform that provides elementary school kids with literacy and typing activities themed around their personal interests, in order to help them develop reading skills and cultivate a love of reading. For parents and educators, we help them to address the issue of childhood illiteracy and hatred of reading which together can form a wall between kids and their dreams because illiteracy denies them access to opportunities and changes the trajectory of their lives. By integrating typing, reading, and writing into one platform through our activities, learning to read becomes more affordable and time-efficient. We replace the need to have 2, 3, or even 4 platforms. Type-Along still allows kids to learn more about their interests similarly to how they would by watching YouTube or Netflix kids but because of the educational aspect it provides a more meaningful and entertaining replacement for traditional media time.I am most proud of our current work to get the platform released. We have just expanded our team and hope to start moving faster towards releasing the platform. The biggest thing I’d want potential customers to know is that Type-Along has a mission to help kids find for themselves the drive and motivation they need to learn to read and love to do it. Our first and biggest priority is making sure kids can read and want to do it. Despite our ages, Type-Along is a company filled with really smart, driven, and talented teens who want to help this next generation be the best that they can be.

Are there any books, videos or other content that you feel have meaningfully impacted your thinking?

There are a couple of Ted Talks that have really helped me in developing the ability to communicate to others what my business is. For the longest time, I didn’t know how to explain to people who I wanted to join the team or who I wanted to sell to what exactly they’d be making or what they’d be buying. After watching the Ted Talk “The four-letter code to selling anything” by Derek Thompson and “It’s Not Manipulation, It’s Strategic Communication” by Keisha Brewer I realized that I had to stop trying to convince people that they needed some new innovative product that I was making. I needed to connect with them and I needed to show them that it solved their needs. It sounds simple, but it took me a while to finally learn how to do that, and I am still learning.

What’s a lesson you had to unlearn and what’s the backstory?

I had to learn that I can’t do everything by myself. For most of my life, I have been that girl who would do most of the work in the group project. This was great because I could go as fast or as slow as I needed, and I didn’t need to worry about really making sure that we were all on the same page during the process of creating something, just that everyone knew what they needed to say when presentation time came around. However, something I learned quickly in business is that taking everything onto your shoulders is not going to work at all. I need to delegate, set clear objectives, provide resources in case members of the team need more help, making sure that over the course of a project or task that everyone is on the same page. Most of all, I need to one, trust that my team members were competent, skilled and talented and let them work on their own, and second I had to stay organized and keep the boat steady. I can’t just decide to do things whenever I feel like it because all of these tasks and responsibilities are being completed by other people who have other commitments and whose time and energy needs to be respected. So in short, I had to unlearn doing everything on my own and learn to trust and share the burden of bringing this product to life with everyone else on my team. I also had to learn how to speak slowly, for the past 5 years I have done speech and debate which means I’ve developed the habit of trying to fit as many facts and stats into a short 4-6min time segment as possible. However, for business this hasn’t really been working out too well. I’ve learned that speaking slowly and telling stories, not just stating facts, is often more powerful than speaking quickly and hammering my audience with lots of facts and figures and features.

Contact Info:

• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/typealong.co/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tobi-adeyeri/
• Other: https://linktr.ee/TypeAlong