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| Startup Name | Scholastico |
|---|---|
| What problem are you solving? | Schools do a few things very well. The tasks that every school does every day – like taking attendance or calculating grades – those have been automated for years. There are dozens of competing solutions for those standard tasks. Scholastico focused on the rare events that slip through the cracks. A few times a year a school needs to do one specific thing – like organize parent-teacher conferences or conduct student-teacher feedback surveys. The daily school software tools just don’t have features to do those things. Most schools end up wasting valuable manpower, spending days putting together complex spreadsheets or resorting to handwritten paper-based solutions. We have observed these offices, analyzed the tasks, and designed the perfect solution to streamline the process. |
| What is your solution? | We make amazing web-based software to help make schools run more effectively. Student feedback surveys, parent conference scheduling, after-school activity signups, and more. |
| Target Market | Businesses |
| How will you make money? | Less than $1 per student per year |
| Tell us about the market & founders, why is this a great opportunity? | Warren Apel and Kshitij Ahuja are the two co-founders of Scholastico. They met while working together at a large private international school in New Delhi, India. As Technology Director, Warren was in charge of purchasing software and planning the use of educational technology. In his social networks of other tech directors, he kept noticing certain voids in the market. There were plenty of learning management systems and student information databases – but no solid way to conduct secure voting, or to plan parent-teacher conferences. Other tech directors had cobbled together Google forms or used free survey tools, but no one was truly happy with their solutions. As webmaster and programmer, Kshitij had the ability to create the solutions. Over the next seven years, the two of them worked together to design, iterate, and polish the perfect solution to four challenges that every school faces. Warren is in charge of the user experience and interface design. He knows how school secretaries think. He’s worked directly with teachers and office staff, training them in the use of technology. At first, they offered the tools to friends of theirs at schools around the world. With every round of user testing and feedback, the products got better, smoother, and easier to use. In 2015, they started marketing and selling the solutions more widely and quickly gained a broad international client base. Now they have client schools of every type – from American public and private schools and universities to International schools in Europe, Asia, Africa, South America and the Middle East. |
| Founders Names | Warren Apel |
| Website | http://scholastico.com/ |
| Twitter Handle | @Scholas_tico |
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