Three children have played it, and I'm happy

3 August 2026 · by Larry

Another one of my daughter's friends came and played today. Nobody asked him to. He just opened it and had a go, for fun.

I was far happier about that than I expected to be.

The honest number

Three children have played StudyLab so far. Not three hundred, not three thousand. Three.

I know how that sounds. If this were a business, three would be a disaster — a thing to be fixed with advertising, or a growth plan, or one of those pop-ups that begs you to sign up before you're allowed to look around.

But it isn't a business. There's nothing to buy here, no ads, nothing I'm trying to sell you. I built it for my own child, and then it seemed a waste not to leave the door open for anyone else. So three children playing isn't a small number to me. It's three more than I started with.

What I'm actually measuring

If I'm honest, the thing I keep checking isn't how many people came. It's whether the one who came chose to. Whether a child opened it because they wanted to, and not because a parent stood behind them saying they had to do twenty questions before dinner.

That's a much harder thing to earn than a visitor count, and it's the only number I really care about.

Why I'm saying it out loud

Partly to keep myself honest. It would be easy, six months from now, to start chasing numbers and quietly become the kind of site I built this to avoid. Writing down what I thought when there were three of them makes that harder to do.

And partly because I think a lot of people making small things feel they ought to apologise for being small. I don't think they should. Something used by three children who enjoy it is a real thing.

If your child gives it a go, that's genuinely enough for me. And if something's broken or a question looks wrong, tell me — there's a feedback button on every page and it comes straight to me.

— Larry