Developers Studyapps raised $ 200,000 on Napartner startups
Team Studyapps managed to raise $ 200,000 on Napartner . The investor of the educational platform for schools was the Cross Capital Foundation.
I bring to your attention an interview with the project manager Mikhail Pikhota, who shared his invaluable experience in negotiating with investors on the start-up exchange.
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Michael, good afternoon. Tell us a little about the project. How did the idea come? How did the project develop at the initial stage?
Good afternoon, Oleg. We started at a time when several of our employees worked in private schools in Moscow. At that time, electronic diaries were just beginning to gain popularity. And so it happened that no one offered a product that took into account the specific needs of private schools. Almost everyone wanted to create another big “social network” and from the height of this goal, the niche of private schools was not interesting to anyone.
The schools in which we worked focused on the personal, individual development of each child. And had a number of features. These schools had non-standard assessment systems. Calculated specific ratings. Pupils reflexed their learning activities. A lot of attention was paid to the awareness of learning. Due to difficulties with the rooms and the incoming teaching staff, the schedule could change during the day. There were many “mixed educational groups” - groups in which children were united according to their abilities, and not according to age. Etc. Now, we understand private schools much better and can talk longer about their features.
Considering that fitting an e-journal to the needs of a particular private school is a competitive difference, for which about 300 private schools in Moscow and St. Petersburg will be ready to pay, we began developing our e-journal and soon registered Homo Practicus LLC.
We found the initial capital fairly quickly - in our pockets). Of course, we talked with investors, told about ourselves. But the goal was to attract investment at an early stage. Many experienced businessmen advised us that if you can do without the money of others, do not take it. In the future, we still had to attract investment for development, but now we are not sure that anyone would invest our initiative at that stage. As the guys from large investment funds like to say - it is not a billion dollar idea).
You believe that at the initial stage, no one invests. Why?
Invest, if they believe in your idea just like you. There are two main reasons for which “they do not believe.” And, as for me, they are right.
1. There are so many young guys who “think” and “confident” that the idea will work. But this is just a conclusion. Unfortunately, the human mind is not able to analyze all the facts. Or some moments may simply be out of sight. Therefore, try at this stage to think less and check more. The best way to check is the real sale of your product. The more customers, the better.
2. The lack of the right people in your endeavor. You may not have the necessary qualities personally (such as perseverance, decisiveness, fighting spirit, understanding of the market, having business experience). Or you may not have any team at all. You can't do much alone.
How did investment help you grow? What results have been achieved?
Since we have a fairly narrow niche and sales were mostly direct, we invested a lot of resources into StudyApps: design, reliability, customization.
Now we have one of the most attractive products on the market. And we are proud of it.
How do you customize your platform for a particular school?
Yes, we respond to all needs. First of all, we try to understand the nature of such a request. Sometimes it happens that solving a problem for a school is on a different plane. If the request needs to be solved by updating the StudyApps functionality, then we do it. The truth is sometimes not as fast as we would like. For example, in one of the schools there was a need to preserve the typical mistakes of a student. We gladly responded to this proposal and improved our “Compass Development”. Now students take into account the typical errors in the subjects, in order to find out where they should go, how to develop.
What are your future plans?
We distinguish 5 main areas.
1. Building the right structure for our platform. As it turned out, the data contained in StudyApps are not only related to teachers, children and parents. Included also state. structures, independent organizations, assessing the quality of education, regulatory bodies.
We restructured the platform so that it could satisfy the interests of all these organizations.
As a result, we have the only educational platform with a “double cloud” architecture. One cloud for personal use by the school. Another - to communicate with the state.
This allows the school to maintain its due share of independence, but at the same time to fully report to state structures in a convenient and clear format for the school.
As our experience shows, the new platform architecture turned out to be interesting and to public schools too.
2. Further strengthening in the niche of private schools. Such schools have a lot of problems that can be solved by means of it-technologies.
3. We also plan to be implemented in schools that are trained under the International Baccalaureate (IB) program. There are several thousand such schools in the world. Working with Russian schools, we decided on the ib-functionality in our platform. After translating the interfaces into different foreign languages, we will offer StudyApps to ib-schools in other countries.
4. Also a special direction is the construction of individual educational trajectories of students. The introduction of some elements of the tutor model of learning.
Our platform offers convenient tools for building individual educational trajectories.
5. Support in StudyApps of new GEFs (Federal State Educational Standards). We consider these standards to be correct and consonant with our desire to show as much attention as possible to each child.
What advise young entrepreneurs?
Try to sell your product as early as possible and to as many potential buyers as possible. (If your market is a little massive).
Many who like to say that money is not the main thing in the "great business". But judging by your experience, this is a very sure indicator that you are moving in the right direction. If you get paid (consciously, and not out of pity, compassion, or for the fact that you stop pestering them), then someone has a problem that your product solves. Act in the same direction. If everything is very sluggish - it's time to change something.
P / s: We will wait for the next interesting deals, in the meantime you can support Michael and ask your questions in the comments.
I bring to your attention an interview with the project manager Mikhail Pikhota, who shared his invaluable experience in negotiating with investors on the start-up exchange.
')
Michael, good afternoon. Tell us a little about the project. How did the idea come? How did the project develop at the initial stage?
Good afternoon, Oleg. We started at a time when several of our employees worked in private schools in Moscow. At that time, electronic diaries were just beginning to gain popularity. And so it happened that no one offered a product that took into account the specific needs of private schools. Almost everyone wanted to create another big “social network” and from the height of this goal, the niche of private schools was not interesting to anyone.
The schools in which we worked focused on the personal, individual development of each child. And had a number of features. These schools had non-standard assessment systems. Calculated specific ratings. Pupils reflexed their learning activities. A lot of attention was paid to the awareness of learning. Due to difficulties with the rooms and the incoming teaching staff, the schedule could change during the day. There were many “mixed educational groups” - groups in which children were united according to their abilities, and not according to age. Etc. Now, we understand private schools much better and can talk longer about their features.
Considering that fitting an e-journal to the needs of a particular private school is a competitive difference, for which about 300 private schools in Moscow and St. Petersburg will be ready to pay, we began developing our e-journal and soon registered Homo Practicus LLC.
We found the initial capital fairly quickly - in our pockets). Of course, we talked with investors, told about ourselves. But the goal was to attract investment at an early stage. Many experienced businessmen advised us that if you can do without the money of others, do not take it. In the future, we still had to attract investment for development, but now we are not sure that anyone would invest our initiative at that stage. As the guys from large investment funds like to say - it is not a billion dollar idea).
You believe that at the initial stage, no one invests. Why?
Invest, if they believe in your idea just like you. There are two main reasons for which “they do not believe.” And, as for me, they are right.
1. There are so many young guys who “think” and “confident” that the idea will work. But this is just a conclusion. Unfortunately, the human mind is not able to analyze all the facts. Or some moments may simply be out of sight. Therefore, try at this stage to think less and check more. The best way to check is the real sale of your product. The more customers, the better.
2. The lack of the right people in your endeavor. You may not have the necessary qualities personally (such as perseverance, decisiveness, fighting spirit, understanding of the market, having business experience). Or you may not have any team at all. You can't do much alone.
How did investment help you grow? What results have been achieved?
Since we have a fairly narrow niche and sales were mostly direct, we invested a lot of resources into StudyApps: design, reliability, customization.
Now we have one of the most attractive products on the market. And we are proud of it.
How do you customize your platform for a particular school?
Yes, we respond to all needs. First of all, we try to understand the nature of such a request. Sometimes it happens that solving a problem for a school is on a different plane. If the request needs to be solved by updating the StudyApps functionality, then we do it. The truth is sometimes not as fast as we would like. For example, in one of the schools there was a need to preserve the typical mistakes of a student. We gladly responded to this proposal and improved our “Compass Development”. Now students take into account the typical errors in the subjects, in order to find out where they should go, how to develop.
What are your future plans?
We distinguish 5 main areas.
1. Building the right structure for our platform. As it turned out, the data contained in StudyApps are not only related to teachers, children and parents. Included also state. structures, independent organizations, assessing the quality of education, regulatory bodies.
We restructured the platform so that it could satisfy the interests of all these organizations.
As a result, we have the only educational platform with a “double cloud” architecture. One cloud for personal use by the school. Another - to communicate with the state.
This allows the school to maintain its due share of independence, but at the same time to fully report to state structures in a convenient and clear format for the school.
As our experience shows, the new platform architecture turned out to be interesting and to public schools too.
2. Further strengthening in the niche of private schools. Such schools have a lot of problems that can be solved by means of it-technologies.
3. We also plan to be implemented in schools that are trained under the International Baccalaureate (IB) program. There are several thousand such schools in the world. Working with Russian schools, we decided on the ib-functionality in our platform. After translating the interfaces into different foreign languages, we will offer StudyApps to ib-schools in other countries.
4. Also a special direction is the construction of individual educational trajectories of students. The introduction of some elements of the tutor model of learning.
Our platform offers convenient tools for building individual educational trajectories.
5. Support in StudyApps of new GEFs (Federal State Educational Standards). We consider these standards to be correct and consonant with our desire to show as much attention as possible to each child.
What advise young entrepreneurs?
Try to sell your product as early as possible and to as many potential buyers as possible. (If your market is a little massive).
Many who like to say that money is not the main thing in the "great business". But judging by your experience, this is a very sure indicator that you are moving in the right direction. If you get paid (consciously, and not out of pity, compassion, or for the fact that you stop pestering them), then someone has a problem that your product solves. Act in the same direction. If everything is very sluggish - it's time to change something.
P / s: We will wait for the next interesting deals, in the meantime you can support Michael and ask your questions in the comments.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/162731/
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