Make First is built for the teen. The gates, the coaching, the whole shape of the twelve weeks exist to get your teen from an idea to a business a stranger paid for, with your teen doing the work. But parents are the ones deciding whether to enroll, and a parent who can’t see what’s happening isn’t in a position to judge whether it’s working. So here is a plain answer to a fair question: what does a parent actually see.
Weekly group office hours with the founder. This is the most direct visibility today, and it’s live now, not a promise for later. Every week, the founder meets with founding families to talk through what’s stuck, what shipped, and what the next gate needs. If your teen is quietly falling behind, this is where it surfaces before a whole stage stalls out.
The Scoreboard. Your teen keeps a running record of the Firsts they’ve earned, the weekly profit and loss, and the hours logged in the business. Right now this is something your teen updates by hand, and a parent can ask to see it at any point, the same way you’d ask to see homework or a report card. It isn’t automatic yet, and we’re not pretending otherwise.
Gate evidence. Every stage ends with a gate, and every gate produces something concrete: a public URL, ten named people who confirmed a problem, a stranger’s payment, a P&L with a running total. That evidence is written down as part of the checkpoint for each lesson, so a parent doesn’t have to take a teen’s word for “it’s going well.” There’s a URL to open, or a number to check.
Now the honest part. A dedicated parent view inside Make First Studio, one place to see the Path, the Scoreboard, and what shipped this week without asking your teen to pull it up, is in the works. It isn’t built yet. Today, the way you get that visibility is the office hours and asking your teen to show you the Scoreboard directly. We’d rather tell you that plainly than build a page that implies something exists before it does.
The same goes for the Maker Portfolio, a public page showing a teen’s earned Firsts, their live product, and their weekly updates, meant to become real work they can point to on a college application or instead of one. It’s on the roadmap, not on the site today, and every place we mention it, it carries a status that says so.
We built it this way on purpose. A parent view that overstates what exists is worse than no parent view at all, because it teaches your teen the exact opposite of what this whole program is trying to teach: that appearances can substitute for evidence. Every capability in Make First Studio carries an honest status, whether that’s live, founding cohort, private beta, or in the works, and the guarantee itself only pays out against evidence your teen actually logged, not against a story about how it went.
If you’re the kind of parent who wants to see progress without hovering over your teen’s shoulder every day, weekly office hours plus a Scoreboard your teen shows you is what exists right now, and the founding cohort’s experience directly shapes what the dedicated parent view becomes. If that’s not enough visibility for you yet, that’s a fair reason to wait. We’d rather you enroll knowing exactly what you’re getting than be surprised later by the gap between what we said and what was actually there.