Michelle Brown had a simple idea: Build a free online library of reading materials for teachers and students.
Turning the idea into a nonprofit called CommonLit was not nearly as simple. She had to raise money, hire software engineers, and secure the rights to readings that would appeal to kids with varying interests and reading levels. For a while, she took no salary and funded the organization with money from her wedding.
When Brown, a 31-year-old alumna of Teach for America, finally got CommonLit off the ground, it took off like a rocket — with a boost from Fast Forward, a San Francisco group that works to accelerate the growth of tech-focused organizations.
CommonLit attracted 1 million registered users in 11 months — about as long as it took Facebook to reach that milestone. The website now has about 3.8 million registered users, which includes about 206,000 teachers and 3.6 million students. It’s adding another 100,000 users weekly. More than a third of U.S. public high schools and middle schools use the platform.
“We’re in the highest growth period we’ve seen,” Brown says.
From Itta Bena to Boston
Brown got the idea for CommonLit after experiencing first-hand the contrast between schools that have money, books, and technology and those that don’t. She taught seventh grade for two years at a public school in Itta Bena, Miss., a small and very poor town with few books and no reading curriculum. She then spent two years teaching at Roxbury Prep, a well-resourced, high-performing charter school in Boston.
“CommonLit was my attempt to build the tools that I wish I had when I was in the [Mississippi] classroom,” she says.
She began to develop CommonLit while studying at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, which gave her a $5,000 grant to test the idea as part of her master’s thesis. She subsequently won a competition for a $50,000 award from Teach for America and was chosen to be incubated by Fast Forward.
“The value of Fast Forward was technical mentorship and unrestricted cash,” she says. “That’s what an early-stage tech company needs.”
Just Like 7th-Grade Teaching
Soon after, she obtained a $3.9 million grant from the U.S. Department of Education that let her hire her first full-time employees, build a robust website, and assemble a library with thousands of books and stories, including works by such celebrated writers as Nikki Giovanni, Zora Neale Hurston, and Joyce Carol Oates.
Today, Brown oversees 21 employees from CommonLit’s offices in Washington.
What’s harder: running a startup or maintaining order in a seventh-grade classroom?
“It’s pretty remarkable how many similarities there are,” she says. “Staying organized. Predictable routines. Teaching is great preparation for this work.”
