Stop Googling. Start learning.

There is nothing better than learning to do something new.

Learn it yourself

Take the camera off auto. Get a real loaf out of that starter. Fly a drone before you decide to buy one. Back a trailer. Drive a stick. Run a chainsaw without getting hurt. Learn to drive a boat so that next time you are at the lake you can rent one and get off the dock without an audience.HowDoI is not for hiring somebody to do it for you. It is for finding the person who will stand next to you until you can do it yourself.

• HOW IT WORKS

How it works

1) Tell us what you want to learn.
2) We match you with someone local who does it for real.
3) You meet up and learn it with your hands.One hour, one skill, one person. No course to enroll in and nothing to finish. Everyone is ID verified and payment runs through the app, so you both know who you are meeting.

• Why we built it

Every town is full of teachers. We help you find yours.

Why we built it

I spent nearly two decades making documentaries for National Geographic, Discovery, and the History Channel about people who are really good at doing things. Fishermen, bush pilots, homesteaders, woodsmen. I loved that job, but the best part was never the filming. It was the hour before or after, when the cameras were off and I could ask how do you actually do that, and they would show me. That is how I learned to run a boat, drive a four-wheeler, maintain a chainsaw without hurting myself, wire a house for solar, weld.An hour like that is hard to come by these days. Most of us don't know the neighbor who knows how, and a video can't watch you do it wrong and tell you why.This app came out of wanting that hour for myself and having nowhere to get it. During COVID my family and I were converting a van into a camper, and we looked at a bunch of old school buses we thought about buying. I had never driven one and had no idea how to learn. What I wanted was somebody in my town with a bus and two hours who would let me drive it around an empty parking lot. Same story with backing a trailer down a ramp to get a boat off it, which I promise you YouTube has never successfully taught anyone.These are skills that used to get handed down. Somebody's dad or uncle or the guy down the road showed you, and for a lot of us that person isn't there now.The teachers still are. Every town has the woman two streets over who keeps bees, the guy who has been welding since he was seventeen, the retired mechanic, the neighbor who can drop a tree exactly where he says he will. Most of them would be glad to show somebody how, and most of them will never be asked. Every one of those hours leaves two people better off than it found them.My wife Shannon and I started HowDoI in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, where we live, and we are building it out one town at a time.Paul and Shannon Taggart, foundersThe app is in testing on Apple TestFlight now, with a Lancaster County launch coming soon.

• Teach a skill
• Investors and partners

You already know something worth teaching.

Teach what you know

If you can back a trailer, run a saw, drive a stick, keep bees, pull a real loaf out of the oven or take a good photograph, somebody within ten miles of you is trying to learn it right now.You set your rate. You decide what an hour of your time is worth.
No prep, no curriculum. You do the thing you already do, out loud, for one person.
We handle the booking and the money. You just show up.
You say yes or no. Every request comes to you first.We are putting together our founding group of teachers in Lancaster County right now. Get on the list and we will reach out personally before we open.

• Get on the list