State-compliant hour logs for homeschool parents

The idea

In reporting states, homeschooling comes with genuine legal paperwork: Missouri wants 1,000 logged hours with a core-subject split, New York wants quarterly reports, Pennsylvania wants portfolios. Most parents keep it in a notebook or nowhere, then spend a panicked June reconstructing a year of hours from memory before a review that genuinely frightens them, because the downside is an escalation with the district.

Homeschool planners are built for planning lessons, and none of them output a Missouri-format hour log or a New York quarterly. The per-state templates are both the moat and the marketing: fifty pages of “how to log homeschool hours in [state]” content targets searches with real volume, high anxiety, and weak answers.

Who pays

The parent pays $8/month or $60/year for the whole family, and the buyer motivation is fear of failing a review rather than love of organisation, which makes retention strong through the school year. Distribution is state-specific homeschool Facebook groups and co-ops, HSLDA-adjacent communities, and the state-by-state SEO content, with signups clustering each August and panic-signups each spring.

MVP scope

• 30-second daily log with subjects, hours, presets, and work-sample photos
• Per-child dashboards tracking progress against state-specific thresholds with pace warnings
• State report templates for MO, NY, PA, OH, and VT plus a generic format
• PDF portfolio export of dated work samples by subject
• Family-defined school-year date ranges
• Skip for v1: lesson planning, curriculum content, grading/transcripts for high school, co-op features, and umbrella-school integrations

Build HourKeeper, a compliance logging app for homeschool parents in reporting states. Stack: Next.js (App Router, mobile-first PWA), Supabase (Postgres, auth, storage), Stripe for subscriptions.

Core flow: the parent sets up children and picks their state, which loads that state's requirements profile (e.g. Missouri: 1,000 hours with 600 in core subjects and specific location rules; New York: quarterly reports and annual assessment; Pennsylvania: portfolio plus affidavit). The daily log is built for 30 seconds at the kitchen table: tap a child, tap subjects, enter hours or tap common presets, optionally snap a photo of a worksheet or project that attaches to the day. A dashboard per child shows progress bars against the state's specific thresholds (hours logged vs required, core vs non-core, days count where the state counts days), with pace warnings if the family is running behind for the school year.

Reports are the product: one click generates the state-formatted output, e.g. a Missouri hour log by subject and location, a New York quarterly report skeleton with hours and subject narratives, or a PDF portfolio compiling dated work-sample photos per subject. Ship report templates for the five strictest states (MO, NY, PA, OH, VT) and a generic format for the rest.

Pages: daily log, per-child dashboard, reports, work-sample gallery, state settings, billing.

Non-obvious detail: school years are family-defined date ranges, not calendar years, and everything scopes to them.

Pricing: $8/month or $60/year, covering all children in the family.