How has the journey been for Snapwiz so far in the US, India and other parts of the world?
<Madhu>: The journey has been wonderful. Our learning experience as an individual to start something from scratch and get is where we are, is tremendous. It’s been a great experience with our partnership with Wiley Plus. We are expending to create more personalized courses and more personalized content that increase engagement of students.
You have implementation in US and also in India now, what difference have you seen in these two markets and what have been the challenges of both respectively?
<Madhu>: The solution that we built is generally applicable to everywhere. We have content that more into English. So, I would say, currently in English-speaking country, we are explicitly trying to leverage best solution in US and India market. The basic need in both these markets is very similar. They have very similar kind of student, teacher, parents and administrators relationship, though, at administrator, you started seeing some differences.
Well! There are large differences as well, education in US is primarily government funded, whereas, it is largely private in India. This thing brings about a lot of challenges not really with product but more really how the whole business works, who pays for it and what is every participate in the ecosystem looking to get out of it. There is lot of accountability at an administrator level in the US. You have school principals, school districts. In India, I think, it’s a little bit different at the administrator look at to the certain degree but there is no government oversight on those numbers. So the learning process is slightly different.
One of the big changes is, how data privacy is critical for us, very safely guided in the US, but it is not so well-guided in India.
Overall, there are from a product point of view, we have a lot of similarities with couple of differences how we need to go about it. But there is huge opportunity in both markets. The company need to be little bit different in both these markets, the value proposition should be little bit different to ensure that as a business, you can succeed in the market.
What is the biggest need for your startup?
<Madhu>: That’s a good question. I think the biggest need for us is probably content that is good- that needs to change and adapt to users specific. Our biggest need would be to have content and some level of curation on top of it, to be able to leverage that content within our platform.
The schools we work with allow our solution and really asking for more specific content to be made available on the platform for them to work on. This is something we are actively working on, as far as the other aspect of business, whether it is financial, funding development, etc. Those, I think, we are more or less comfortable with. At this point in time, we are profitable and rapidly growing company.
What/Who motivates you? Any thought leader or companies with innovation which you follow for success?
<Madhu>: Certainly, being in edtech is extremely exciting while at the same time pretty challenging as well. The challenges are primarily is, as technology entrepreneur what you build by itself can only do so much to influence the leaning outcome of the student. Content is the integral part of the solution as well as adoption and appropriate use all the people that are involved. End of the day, you are helping every student to reach their full potential. It gives satisfaction that you have created a product and people are using it and they like it and provide feedback.
What are the future plans for Snapwiz?
<Madhu>: We have come a long way back, now edtech is all about data, machine learning, is about personalized learning experiences, changing content dynamically, suites the need of students. So there is so much more that needs to be done. So, it is so much more about the cutting-edge of understanding machine learning, artificial intelligence to provide those personalized learning experiences for the student.
We are completely focused on enhancing our solution to serve the ultimate need to understand the student. Our focus to the next year is really on users’ accusation for K-12 as well as undergrad segment in our partnership with our publishers. We want to focus on adoption meanwhile work very closely with teachers, students, administrators and to create a solution that they really want.
Watch and listen to the entire interview video here.
