About Homeschool Hive
My wife and I wanted to homeschool our kids. We wanted them to have a community, friends to learn with, do things together. Only one problem — where do you even find that?
I'm Carl VanderLaan. My wife Holly and I homeschool our two kids, Duke and Amelia. We love it. But when we first started, we quickly realized that finding other homeschool families to do life with wasn't as easy as we thought it would be.
The communities were out there, but good luck finding them. Everything was buried in Facebook posts, spread across group chats, run by a few parents who were doing it all themselves. We'd miss sign-ups, show up to the wrong place, or just not hear about things until they were already over.
Holly, Carl, Duke & Amelia
Why I built Homeschool Hive
I kept thinking — there has to be a better way. One place where you can find communities near you, see what's going on, sign up, pay if you need to, and just know where to be and when. That's it. That's all we needed.
And the parents running these communities needed something too. They were burning out trying to keep everything organized. They needed less work, not more.
Why I'm the one building it
I build software for a living. I've spent my career taking messy, manual stuff and turning it into tools that actually work. So when I saw this problem up close in my own family, I just started building.
I care about getting this right. Homeschool families deserve something that's built with them in mind, not just another app trying to grow fast and figure it out later.
What we believe
Holly and I care about faith, family, and real community. This isn't just a side project for me. It's what I wish existed when we first started looking for our people. I'm building it so families like ours can spend less time trying to find and coordinate everything, and more time actually being together.