I caused the problem I ended up building for.

Holly and I spent two years crossing the country in a fifth wheel with our two kids, Duke and Amelia. For 15 years I've built the platforms other organizations ran on.

We parked in Fort Myers and started homeschooling in September 2020. We loved it from the first week. What we couldn't find was other families.

The communities were out there, but good luck finding them: buried in social media posts, spread across group chats, run by a few parents doing it all themselves. We missed sign-ups, showed up at the wrong park, and heard about things after they were already over.

Church is where it finally clicked. The kids made real friends, started serving on Sunday mornings, and we had a community that let us thrive.

In December 2024 I started a homeschool group through our church. It passed 40 families almost at once, and with everyone spread across texts, social media chats and posts, keeping them informed got out of control just as fast. I had my taste of what leaders live with.

F

By spring I knew both sides of the table.

Standing in the outdoor pool at the new Great Wolf Lodge in Naples, I remembered that months earlier I had signed my two kids up for rock climbing classes with a small homeschool group. Once a month for three months, paid up front. The first one was tomorrow, and the next two landed on their theatre class. We weren't going to make any of it.

So I messaged the leader to pull them out. She updated her spreadsheet by hand, refunded three months for two kids, and went looking for other children to fill the seats, because she had been at capacity. I had just made her afternoon harder, from a pool.

I couldn't let it go. I turned to my wife, Holly. "I think God just gave me a vision for a platform to build for homeschool families. Co-ops and microschools list their classes and everything else they offer. Parents like us search by our kids' ages and what they're into, and see it all on a map. I can see every page of it."

Holly said, "Knowing you, you'll figure it out if you want to."

I build platforms for businesses on WordPress, and I suspected this one couldn't be built there. I started there anyway, because it's what I knew.

The first commit was May 17, 2025.

Seven rebuilds on four different stacks: twice on WordPress before it proved me right, then Strapi with Astro, then Next.js, and finally Rails, which is what you're reading now.

Each one got closer to what a leader actually needs, and what a parent will actually use.

Early on I saw a post from Ali Locke, who runs The Homeschool Hangar, and felt the Lord say I needed to get in touch with her. Mutual friends put us together. Our first conversation ran over two hours.

That call is why Famlo has two sides. Parents needed the map. The leaders we kept talking to needed everything behind it: the roster, the automation, the ease of it all.