Search
Grown-up name Search engine optimization
At crayon level Help people find the lemonade stand.
Color the sign. Draw the arrow. Circle the corner with the most people walking past.
Digital Crayon Books
Why are we waiting until college to explain a website?
We make coloring books that teach a five-year-old how search engines, money, websites and artificial intelligence actually work. The child colors a lemonade stand. The child also learns why nobody finds a lemonade stand parked behind the house.
The premise
A four-year-old cannot learn SEO. A four-year-old can absolutely learn to help people find the lemonade stand.
Those are the same idea. One of them is a certification course and the other one is a picture of a lemonade stand with an arrow pointing at the sidewalk.
Most early learning books teach colors, shapes and farm animals, which is fine, and then stop. The concepts that decide what an adult's income looks like get held back for twenty years, on the theory that a young child could not possibly follow them. Children follow them fine. What children cannot do is read a whitepaper.
So we stopped writing whitepapers.
Translate, do not dumb down
The same concept, at crayon level
Nothing here is watered down. The concept arrives intact. What changes is the delivery: coloring, matching, tracing, counting, repetition, and a small project at the end.
Artificial intelligence
Grown-up name A model learns patterns from training data
At crayon level The computer learned by looking at lots of examples.
Circle the examples that would help it learn. Cross out the one that would teach it something wrong.
Money
Grown-up name Revenue, cost of goods, and margin
At crayon level Mia spent two dollars making bracelets and sold them for five.
Color the three dollars she gets to keep.
The ladder
It grows with the child
The concepts do not change as a reader gets older. The work does. A five-year-old colors a website. A twelve-year-old builds one. Same subject, four rungs apart.
Crayon Years
Coloring books. One idea per page, one crayon at a time.
Question Years
Activity books. Matching, counting, and the first real why questions.
Builder Years
Project books. The child makes something that exists when the book closes.
Founder Years
Business books. Price it, sell it, keep the receipts.
Where this came from
Somebody's parents asked a question every single night
The honest origin of this whole thing is one question, asked at the dinner table, in a certain tone, for roughly eighteen years:
Did you build something today?
It is a joke. It is also the most useful question anyone ever asked me, and I have never stopped answering it. Digital Crayon Books is that question with better illustrations.
The grown-up line carries the humor on purpose, so the children's books do not have to. The Asian Parent's Guide To The Universe is for the adult holding the crayon box. The books the child actually colors stay sincere.
Start here
Two hundred words and a crayon glossary
The Crayon Glossary is the free part. Every entry says the thing twice: once the way you would say it to a five-year-old, and once the way you would say it to an adult who is about to spend money on it.