Why I Started Asobo

A lot of you know pieces of what I’ve been working on over the past few years, but I wanted to start writing more intentionally about the journey.

This blog will be a place for me to share what I’m learning while building Asobo Education, including product updates, lessons from classrooms and pilots, conversations with educators, and broader thoughts on where learning technology is heading.

For the first post, I wanted to start with the story of why I started Asobo in the first place.

Before Asobo, I started TutorSmith, an online tutoring platform. At the time, the idea was pretty straightforward: make it easier for students to find academic support. I had tutored students myself, and I knew how much one-on-one help could matter when a student was stuck.

But the more tutoring I did, the more I noticed something.

Students rarely needed help with only the assignment in front of them.

A student might come in needing help with algebra, but after a few minutes, it became clear the real issue was fractions. Or multiplication fluency. Or integer operations. Or reading the problem carefully enough to understand what was being asked.

On paper, they were struggling with the current lesson. In reality, they were trying to build on top of a foundation that had missing pieces.

That pattern kept showing up.

A student would be labeled as behind in math, but the issue was not that they were incapable of learning math. They had missed something earlier, kept moving forward anyway, and eventually the gap became too big to ignore.

The same thing happens in reading, science, and almost every subject. Students fall behind gradually. A small misunderstanding becomes a larger one. A missing prerequisite makes the next lesson harder. After enough of those moments, the student starts to believe the subject itself is the problem.

“I’m just not a math person.”
“I’m bad at school.”
“I don’t get this.”

Those beliefs are not formed overnight. They come from repeated moments of confusion that go unresolved for too long.

At first, I thought tutoring was the answer. And for many students, tutoring can be incredibly helpful. But I started to see the limits of a model that only steps in after the student is already struggling.

The deeper problem was not just that students needed more help.

The deeper problem was that students, teachers, and parents often did not have a clear enough picture of what was actually going wrong.

What skill was missing? Was it a misconception, a careless mistake, a vocabulary issue, a prerequisite gap, or something else? What should the student practice next? How could a teacher see that pattern across an entire class before it became a bigger problem?

Those questions eventually became more interesting to me than tutoring itself.

As I spent more time around classrooms, the problem became even clearer. Teachers are already constantly trying to identify who needs help. They see it in student work, facial expressions, class discussions, exit tickets, and test scores. Most teachers have strong instincts about which students are struggling.

But instincts are not the same as having time.

In a real classroom, a teacher may be responsible for 20 or 30 students at once. They are managing behavior, pacing, grading, parent communication, lesson planning, accommodations, interventions, and administrative expectations. Even when a teacher knows a student is struggling, it is hard to quickly diagnose the root cause for every student and assign the right next step.

The issue is not that teachers need to care more. They already care.

The issue is that the system often gives them clarity too late.

A test score can show that a student missed a standard. A dashboard can show that a class performed poorly on a topic. But too often, those tools stop at the surface. They show what happened, but not enough about why it happened or what should happen next.

That is the gap Asobo is built around.

Asobo started as a shift from:

“How do we get students more help?”

to:

“How do we help teachers identify and eliminate skill gaps before they hold students back?”

That shift changed everything.

It meant the goal was not just better practice questions. It was better diagnosis. Better visibility. Better feedback. Better support for teachers. Better learning experiences for students that feel engaging instead of discouraging.

At its core, Asobo is built around a simple workflow:

1. Identify where a student is struggling.
2. Diagnose why they are struggling.
3. Act with targeted practice and support.
4. Track whether they are actually improving.

That sounds simple, but it is the part of education that is hardest to do consistently at scale.

I started Asobo because I believe students should not have to wait until they fail a test to get help. Teachers should not have to dig through disconnected data to figure out what a student needs. Parents should not be left wondering why their child is falling behind. And students should not internalize years of missed support as a personal weakness.

I also started Asobo because I think we are entering a new era of education technology.

For a long time, edtech has been mostly about digitizing what already existed: digital worksheets, online quizzes, content libraries, dashboards, and practice platforms. Some of those tools are useful, but many still leave the hardest work to teachers: figuring out what the data actually means and what to do with it.

The next generation of learning tools should do more than deliver content.

They should help create clarity.

They should help teachers understand student thinking, identify patterns, catch gaps earlier, and respond in ways that are practical in a real classroom. They should make learning more personal without making teaching more overwhelming.

That is the future I am trying to build toward with Asobo.

I know we are still early. There is a lot to learn, and I am constantly reminded that education is more complex than any product roadmap. Every conversation with a teacher, school leader, student, parent, or researcher adds something new to the way I think about the problem.

That is part of why I am starting this blog.

I want to document the process of building Asobo honestly. I’ll share what we are learning from pilots, what we are changing in the product, what educators are telling me, and how my own thinking evolves along the way.

Some posts will be practical. Some will be reflective. Some will be about product. Some will be about the larger question that keeps pulling me deeper into this work:

What would school look like if every student’s gaps were visible early enough to do something about them?

That is the question behind Asobo.

And this blog is where I’ll be thinking through it in public.

Looking forward to having you all join me on this journey.

Best,

Austin Ketola