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Greetings! It looks like you’re either interested in learning more about Edzo, or you’ve landed on this page by accident. Either way, I’m hoping to show you that learning about a company doesn’t have to be boring. Because a company isn’t just spreadsheets and analytics, sales and marketing, product and manufacturing. It’s a collection of people striving to create value for the world, and that’s worth knowing about. So this isn’t just a story about a company. It’s a love story, a tale of adventure, risk taking and blind faith, self-doubt and unwavering belief. And the story has only just begun. Here goes… They’d only just started dating, and Jill had just met Scott’s grandparents, so when they found themselves sitting under a mango tree on the family farm in Bli Bli, cows grazing the hill below and sugar cane stretching across the valley, neither of them expected the conversation that would change the course of both their lives. Jill was a primary school teacher and Scott was a web designer. That afternoon, Jill mentioned something that had been bugging her: she’d spent hours the night before making a classroom poster, cutting, gluing, laminating, and the whole process felt like a waste of time she could’ve spent on her students. So Scott made her a poster that weekend. Designed it properly, full color, and printed it at Officeworks. Jill pinned it up in her classroom on Monday, and by Tuesday, three of her colleagues had asked where she got it. That was the moment. Not a grand vision or a business plan. Just a poster on a classroom wall and a few teachers asking where it came from.

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Starting small, staying close

What followed was an email newsletter: free teaching resources sent to a mailing list of 35 friends and family. There was no product, no company, just a design tool, a cheap web host, and an idea. Six months later, the mailing list had grown to 50. No one in their right mind would look at stats like that and think they’d created something customers wanted. But they kept going, guided by a simple mantra: two years of pain for a lifetime of gain. Every night after work, Scott would design resources while Jill planned and reviewed them, making sure they actually worked in a classroom. Weekends disappeared. TV got replaced with Illustrator. Nights out got replaced with customer support emails. Every dollar went back into the business, and they hired three staff before taking their first paycheque.

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The first sale

Then came the first sale, and the game changed. Someone they’d never met, in a city they’d never been to, paid actual money for something they’d made. It was a small amount, but it felt enormous. That was the real validation. Not friends saying “great idea,” but someone opening their wallet and saying, “this is worth something to me.”

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Care deeply, grow naturally

There were no investors, no venture capital, no pitch decks. Just two people who cared deeply about making something useful for teachers, and growth that came from one place: word of mouth. Teachers telling other teachers. That trust was earned by caring more than anyone else in the space. When a teacher emailed asking for a specific resource, they made it. When someone had a billing issue, Scott replied within five minutes. When teachers shared resources on social media, they responded to every single comment. In December 2013, they had 8,000 A2 posters printed. Scott and Jill, with the help of family, rolled, stuffed, and taped over 2,000 mailing tubes filled with four posters each. It took weeks. They loaded them into a Hyundai i30 hatch, box upon box stacked to the rafters, and drove them to the post office. Nobody would call that scalable. But nothing scales a business like word of mouth, and word of mouth comes from doing things that surprise people, things that feel generous, things that feel human. They learned to crave the unscalable.

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Give more than you take

From the start, the goal was to provide so much value that people couldn’t help but stick around. They wanted a teacher to download a single unit plan and feel like they’d already gotten their money’s worth, knowing there were thousands more resources waiting for them. Everything was built around that idea: give generously and expect nothing in return. Blog posts, teaching videos, free resources shared on social media. All of it was designed to be genuinely useful, never to funnel people toward a sale. If a piece of content didn’t educate, inspire, or entertain, it didn’t get published. Over time, that generosity built something no ad campaign could buy: loyalty and trust. Teachers came back because they’d genuinely been helped. And they told their colleagues, because when something genuinely makes your life easier, you want to share it.

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A decade of lessons

Over ten years, that mailing list of 35 grew to hundreds of thousands of teachers worldwide. The team stayed small, stayed bootstrapped, stayed profitable, and kept answering support emails personally even as the numbers grew. Along the way came lessons you can’t learn from a business book:
  • Stay close to your customers. Scott and Jill personally answered over 10,000 support tickets. That closeness shaped every product decision.
  • Discipline beats inspiration. Showing up every night after work, for years, when nobody was watching. That’s what builds something real.
  • Think in decades. They always optimized for trust, even when short-term metrics tempted them otherwise.
  • Grand visions come from doing the work. They didn’t start with a master plan. They started with a poster. The vision grew from there.
  • Bootstrap wisely. Every dollar mattered. That constraint bred resourcefulness and kept them honest about what customers actually needed.
When the time came to move on, they’d helped millions of teachers and saved them an estimated 40 million hours of prep time. Forty million hours given back to teachers. Hours they could spend on their students, their families, themselves. That’s a number worth being proud of.

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Why we’re starting again

Same founders. Same values. Same belief that learning can be better. But new energy, new ideas, and a decade of hard-won wisdom to draw from. Edzo is the next chapter. Every lesson learned, every mistake, every breakthrough, every late night rolling posters, every resource crafted, every ‘Missing Mona Lisa’, every five-minute support reply. All of it feeds into what we’re building now. But Edzo isn’t a repeat of what came before. This time, it’s an interactive platform where learning comes alive, where resources aren’t static PDFs but living, adaptable, trackable activities that work both on screen and off. Where teachers stay in the driver’s seat, and technology and AI truly gives them superpowers. We’re still small. Still bootstrapped in spirit. Still obsessed with doing the unscalable. We still believe that businesses that care, thrive. And we’re just getting started.