We're starting something a bit different on the blog: a running, honest account of what it's actually like to build Homeschool Central. Not the polished version, the real one, including the parts we got wrong and the moments that surprised us. This is the first post in that series, and it felt right to start at the beginning, with the question we get asked most often: why these three locations?
It started with one
The Mornington Peninsula wasn't a market we researched our way into. Marit lives there, and has for years. I (Marnina) used to live there too, and now live nearby on Phillip Island. Between us, we know the area, the families, a good chunk of the local businesses, and the rhythm of homeschool life there, not because a spreadsheet told us to, but because we've actually lived it.
So the original plan was simple: build Homeschool Central properly for the Peninsula first, get it right, then figure out where next.
Then the waitlist told us something different
We opened a waitlist before we'd built much of anything at all, just a landing page connected to our email list and a pitch deck we could send to businesses. We expected a slow trickle. Instead, we hit 100 families in the first two weeks, then kept growing by roughly a dozen a day after that.
Then one day I logged in and the list had grown by 150 people in under 24 hours. That was the moment we knew we weren't just building something nice for our own community, we were onto something families genuinely wanted, and wanted badly enough to sign up for a platform that didn't exist yet.
We started going back and forth on what that meant. Did we need to launch nationally, straight away, to meet that demand? It was tempting. But when we actually looked at the postcodes behind the signups, two things stood out that we hadn't expected: a large number of families from the Dandenong Ranges, and, more surprising to us, a strong cluster from the Sunshine Coast in Queensland, a region neither of us has a personal connection to at all.
Why we didn't just launch everywhere
Launching nationally on day one would have meant spreading ourselves thin across dozens of regions with almost no local content in any of them. A family logging on and finding two events and one provider in their area isn't a directory, it's an empty page with a nice logo. We'd seen enough half-built platforms to know that's the fastest way to lose trust before you've even earned it.
So instead of chasing the biggest possible footprint immediately, we picked three areas, the Mornington Peninsula because we know it inside out, the Dandenongs because the waitlist told us the demand was real and close by, and the Sunshine Coast because the numbers were too strong to ignore even though it meant building local knowledge from scratch in a region we'd never worked in before.
The plan now is to properly populate each area, real businesses, real events, real community, before we open the next one. Slower than launching everywhere at once, but it means every family who joins actually has something meaningful waiting for them in their own backyard.
What's next
We're currently deep in populating all three areas ahead of launch, and we'll keep sharing what that process actually looks like, including the parts that have been harder than we expected. Next up in this series: what our waitlist has taught us about what families actually want from Homeschool Central, which turned out to be a fair bit different from what we assumed when we started.
If you're on the waitlist, or thinking about joining, thank you for being part of building this from the ground up. It genuinely shapes what we build next.
Homeschool Central is Australia's dedicated platform connecting homeschool, unschool and world school families with local classes, camps, events and providers. This post is part of our Building Homeschool Central series, an ongoing, honest look at what it takes to build the platform.