Fiveable Blue

An April Fools feature announcement that eventually made it into the actual product offering

The #FiveableBlue Post

Background

Fiveable is an education tech startup that I worked at for over two years. When I was there, it focused on affordable AP (advanced placement) test prep content for high schoolers looking to earn college credit while in high school.

Like many companies, Fiveable strategizes every year to come up with some fun April Fool’s announcement. in 2022, they announced that AP testing would be administered via virtual reality, and in 2024 they announced a reband to “Fourable”.

Less than a year after posting an April Fool’s announcement I created implying that they’d expand their offering to the SAT, ACT, and other tests, they actually added it to the product offering.

Strategy

In 2023, no one had prepared anything for april fools, and Twitter Blue (the paid version of Twitter that had fewer ads and gave users a ‘verified’ icon next to their username) had recently been announced. I quickly mocked up the below announcement and quickly got approval to post it (and lots of laughs from coworkers).

The #FiveableBlue Post

This announcement is a simple recreation of what Fiveable’s blog looked like at the time using mockup tool Figma. There’s not much else to say so I’ll highlight a few details:

The ‘Aceable Family of Companies’ is a nod to the origin of the name Fiveable. The “Five” in “Five-able” refers to a score of 5, which is the highest grade that can be awarded to AP test-takers. Hence, Fiveable makes tests “Five-able” and therefore “Aceable” felt like the natural name for a potential family of companies.

Each name in the text bubble is the highest possible score suffixed by “-able”, implying test takers could ace the test if the used the company’s products.

Reflection

Sometime in the second half of 2023 after I left the company, the Fiveable announced that they were now supporting students through their standardized college testing.

Adding the college entrance exams was probably already on the roadmap, but the timing of how it all unfolded will always be memorable for me.