Description: This is an interview of the founder of the Edsby in which he will share his experience of founding Edsby and his advice to some other similar companies.
Edsby is building a new social learning platform. The background in the education space is very extensive.
They first created a product called first class, and they ended up rolling out the product to school boards all around the world. So they have good experience in the education sector and specifically on the needs and challenges of school districts which are the major users of the previous product and the key target user for the new product.
With the old company, they had a lot of experience with school districts and they saw how there weren’t good solutions available that would touch the students, the teachers and the parents and pull everything together. The idea of Edsby is to build something new and modern that took advantage of all the transformative technologies to enable us to create a solution that is easy to use, and easy to deploy, as well as loved by the kids, the teachers and the parents while knowing what is going on at school.
Edsby had done a good job of following the plan. They followed on lead customer in the first year, they set a goal to have 20 customers in the second year, then they set a goal for the 200 customers. So the transaction is very good for the product which is relatively early in the maturity curve.
They put in an application for a chance to get a little bit of visibility and didn’t think much about it until they got the call saying they had made the final 10 and it was exciting to come down and have a chance to present to the group here and to see the other nine companies as well. There were a lot of interesting things happening and and it was great to see the other companies as well.
They hadn’t expected to be winning but they were very excited about that for lots of reasons including it’ll bring more visibility to initiative and how they are trying to transform education and bring it into the modern era.
In terms of advice for other companies who are thinking about entering this next year, they think it would be a great thing for them to make the business plan which would be the key to success from a financial perspective.