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Gamifying Edtech For Kids | Prerna Jhunjhunwala @ Creative Galileo
317 Plays2 years ago
Prerna was just in her twenties when she decided to start a playschool. Over the next five years, that playschool dominated its category in Singapore, and was eventually acquired for almost 35 mn dollars - Prerna did all of this with almost no external funding. She is now running her second startup through which she aims to impact the lives of millions of children in India and Southeast Asia.
Know about:-
- Starting a pre-school in Singapore
- Launching the app
- Gaining traction through performance marketing
- Future roadmap
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction and Journey of Prerna Jinjinwala
00:00:00
Speaker
Hi, I'm Prerna Jinjinwala. I'm the CEO and founder of Creative Galileo. I'm here today with Akshay to share more about my journey.
00:00:20
Speaker
Hi, I'm Akshay. Hi, this is Aurabh. And you are listening to the Founder Thesis Podcast. We meet some
Building Unicorns: Insights from the Founder Thesis Podcast
00:00:27
Speaker
of the most celebrated charter founders in the country. And we want to learn how to build a unicorn. Prerna Chunjunwala
Success Story: From Playschool to Multi-Million Dollar Exit
00:00:37
Speaker
was just in her 20s and had recently moved to Singapore when she decided to start a playschool. Over the next five years, that playschool grew from one branch to five branches, dominating its category in Singapore
00:00:50
Speaker
and was eventually acquired for almost 35 million dollars. And Prerra did all this with almost no external funding. And if this
Emergence of Creative Galileo in the Digital Era
00:01:00
Speaker
phenomenal achievement was not enough, she is now running her second startup through which she aims to impact the lives of millions of children in India and Southeast Asia. When the lockdown hit, she saw the need for a digital product that would engage the students in her playschool. And when she did not find anything she liked, she decided to build one herself
00:01:20
Speaker
and called it Creative Galileo. Today, Creative Galileo has been downloaded millions of times on the Play Store and it has some of the best retention and engagement metrics in the industry. And Prerna is packed by some leading VCs in her second journey of starting up. Listen on to this fantastic conversation between Prerna and Akshay Tath about building and scaling educational businesses.
00:01:44
Speaker
So I
Educational Ventures and Addressing Inequality in India
00:01:45
Speaker
was always very keen on education. I wanted to build because I'd spent so much time in tier two, tier three cities. I had seen how education is one of the greatest equalizers that exists, right? Unfortunately, in a country as large as India, there is huge amount of fragmentation. What is available to a child in tier one cities in the top schools is really not available in tier two, tier three, no matter how talented the kid is, right?
00:02:10
Speaker
just not the same opportunities. So I was very keen on doing something in education. I was 24 years old. Nobody was going to shell out a huge amount of money to give to a 24-year-old to start a big school or something. So I said, cool, let me start a small preschool.
Little Paddington's Unique Educational Approach
00:02:26
Speaker
So I went and acquired a small preschool in Singapore, which was in almost the heartland of Singapore, really. Nobody even knows where COVID is when you talk to ex-bats in Singapore, but that's where I started the journey.
00:02:39
Speaker
From there on, Little Paddington became one of the fastest, most acclaimed preschools in Singapore. We opened five branches and we got a huge exit, one of the largest exits in early preschool years that has happened recently. So we got a pretty big exit with Little Paddington. For the Little Paddington journey, so how did you find the initial acquisition, like you acquired a school, right? So how did you find that?
00:03:08
Speaker
It was a mix of equity and debt. So equity money, I had some and family gave some. So it was a mix. And that's how I started Paddington. It was not a huge investment, right? Like it was not some huge shaking number. But what we exited was at about over $34 million. So we got a pretty good exit over there in five years time for the work that we put in.
00:03:35
Speaker
So tell me how you like, how did you build value from maybe it must have been like a half a million or less to 35 million. So how did you build that value? Yeah. One thing that I was very particular about is that I wanted to provide children hands-on learning. I wanted education to be fun.
00:03:56
Speaker
and not road learning that paper pay the child is constantly forced to be on paper and just paper can make a child learn like I did not ascribe to that idea for me education is really about experiences and for us to give those experiences to the children so that they remember what they learn and I always think about my childhood I really don't know what I learned in geometry for a good four years of my life I can't remember it I can't remember the what
00:04:25
Speaker
what the table then the periodic table I really can't remember it just because all I learned was on a piece of paper focus that you have to memorize all these things but had somebody made it a little bit more fun for me I would have probably found some application of all that that I had learned
00:04:45
Speaker
That's what I wanted to do. I wanted to make education very applied. So we started to do very fun things, right? If we were teaching children about cars, we used to ask all the parents to bring their cars in. The children used to do car washing. We used to show the engine of the car, parts of the car. We used to make the children paint the tires and things like that.
00:05:05
Speaker
So it was very about experiencing touching and feeling education rather than just making it on a piece of paper. So that was a very different thing which is not happening in Singapore. We were one of the first schools to build a digital room in our school. So basically children can color a fish and it animates on the wall.
00:05:25
Speaker
The whole room becomes like an ocean and children have coloured some fishes and the fishes are like floating across the walls. So we started to do all these really fun things and we grew very organically. We were not taking any external capital for growth or anything. We were just growing organically.
00:05:40
Speaker
Within
Operational Efficiency and Financial Success
00:05:41
Speaker
six months all our centres used to hit capacity and throughout the year we used to operate at 92 to 95 percent capacity because the demand for our schools was so it really became a very very fast growth story really.
00:05:56
Speaker
There is enough, is it like a high margin business for it to be able to sustain setting up the next campus? It's not, to be very honest. If you look at the industry average in Singapore, it's between 8 to 14 percent, a beta margin. With Paddington, we were operating at a 40 percent beta margin.
00:06:17
Speaker
because our occupancy rates in itself used to be so high. So for a typical school, the occupancy rate is between 75 to 82%. We used to operate at 92 to 95%. So just the sheer occupancy rates used to be so high. And obviously, our model was a model that was very cost efficient, right? We were not the most expensive school, nor were we the mass market. We were a very aspirational school.
00:06:44
Speaker
Most parents are aspirational, right? So we priced it very well. And we used to have a lot of facilities in our schools. We used to have huge playgrounds. We have digital life. We used to have United Nations Atelier. We used to have coding. We used to have coding at the preschool level. We were one of the first schools to start coding in Singapore.
00:07:05
Speaker
Yeah, so we have these small robots which they can do simple codes in. They used to learn how to make da Vinci bridges and things like that just to give that analytical mindset to the children.
00:07:16
Speaker
How did you scale? Because a school is very human intensive and high touch service. It's not a product where like you create an app and then it scales. Here, every school, every new campus that you open, you need to make sure that the consistency is there in the experience, customer experience. How did you scale that?
00:07:38
Speaker
The one thing that I've been extremely lucky with is the human capital, right? Like,
Scaling Success Through Strong Team Retention
00:07:43
Speaker
I have been so kind to have the best people work with me. And not just the best people work with me, but the best people work with me for years on years. Most of my schools, the people who started the school were the people who were still there with me when I was exiting the school.
00:08:00
Speaker
Some people started with me as teachers and progressed into VPs, into principals. So they were a part of the ethos of the school when we started. Those were the guys, when our furniture came from China, we didn't have enough money to get workers to make those furnitures, right? Screw them up. A lot of these teachers...
00:08:20
Speaker
Yes. And a lot of those teachers has assembled those furniture with me when we were doing it together. And then those were the teachers who eventually scaled to being VPs and principals. So more consistency in ethos, consistency in culture was not a very difficult thing to do because we've always valued our people and our retention was incredible. Really our retention of our staff members, of our team was one of the best in the country. That helped us scale very well.
00:08:51
Speaker
And so what made you want to exit? What kind of revenues were you making by the fifth year when you were closed? I think I'm allowed to say that, but it was, it was a pretty good number, right? It was, I like to say single, mid single digit millions. Yeah. A very decent revenue. No, no revenue. That was profit. Revenue was mid single digit millions was profits and, and revenue was double digit. Let's just say that around. Yeah.
00:09:22
Speaker
So we were doing very well even in terms of revenue and profits. Each campus would be earning a couple of million dollars annually. Yes, around that. So we were doing very well like that.
COVID-19's Role in Digital Learning Innovation
00:09:34
Speaker
So what made you want to exit?
00:09:37
Speaker
Yeah, what happened is when COVID hit and we were charging, our school fees was not cheap by any standards. In India term store, it is almost, I would like to say 1,20,000 to 1,50,000 a month. That's what I was charging in terms of school fees monthly.
00:09:55
Speaker
And when COVID hit, we were not given much time for preparation, right? We were supposed to go online in four days time. And obviously being a premium provider, I was very passionate about what I do. Anything substandard, I would not allow it to happen in my school. If we are doing it, we have to be the best at it.
00:10:12
Speaker
So I started to scout for programs which I could do with my children because 30-40 minutes a teacher can hold the child's attention on screen, okay? They're doing language or numeracy or whatever. What happens beyond that 40 minutes? Because a school hour for us was from 9 to say 3.30.
00:10:33
Speaker
40 minutes, but what do you do after that? If you're asking the parents to pay, you need to justify that payment. You can't just say that, oh, you pay me the same amount of money for 30 minutes of online class. It's not fair. So I started to talk to the giants, right? It was ABC learning from America, Homer from
00:10:54
Speaker
homework, lingo kids, to build like an entire app system that was available for children to do classes and that parents and teachers could get updates out of. But the more I tried to do it, the more I realized how impossible it was becoming because the standard of learning in Asia, which is Southeast Asia and India is not the same as in US and UK because Asian parents are a lot more focused on phonics, numeracy and things like that and children are more advanced.
00:11:23
Speaker
that what a six year old child is doing that a three year old child is doing in our part of the world.
00:11:29
Speaker
I was like, look, like how do I make this happen? So with that, I just built the app with creative Galileo, where I thought that the learning will be a lot of fun and children's favorite characters are there and they are playing these games with their favorite characters. And at the same time, they're learning. So I just launched it and I was like, look, children are stuck at home while I'm using this app to build something of an engaging platform for the children. Let me just put it for free on the Play Store.
00:11:56
Speaker
If children who are at home and don't have much to do, at least they'll get something to do. And I was expecting like, okay, two, 3000 downloads we will get. We were, I didn't even take a separate server for it. I was hosting it from the Paddington server initially. And within six months, we had a million downloads at no consumer acquisition costs. I was not doing any marketing. I was not doing any publicity. And we were just scaling incredibly. And the more I thought about it, the more I realized that my
00:12:26
Speaker
Passion is providing education to a huge amount of people. The reason why I wanted to do schools in the first place is because I realized how big of equalizer, how can we democratize education. And this was my opportunity, which I kind of stumbled upon almost by mistake. And I was like, you can't do two great things at the same time. I was very passionate about my schools.
00:12:53
Speaker
And I could not allow that my attention is moving and the school's quality slips. I continue, need it to be top-notch and continue it to scale while I'm focusing on something else. And my team was just too strong. They don't deserve for me to be focused on something else, half-heartedly doing something and half-heartedly doing something else.
00:13:13
Speaker
So for the betterment of my team, for the betterment of the growth of Paddington, I thought that if I'm going to be more involved in this, it's better that somebody equally passionate comes and runs that, so that that can scale at the same pace that it was scaling before. Okay, got it. Help me understand what was it that you put out there? What did it look like? That version one of the app which you put out there which got a million downloads, what was that?
00:13:40
Speaker
The one thing that having worked with children for so long and wanting always to make education an experience, I always knew one thing that
00:13:50
Speaker
Children are the most loyal customers. If you have a daughter and she likes Elsa, everything has to revolve around Elsa. Similarly, if you like Chota Beam as a character or Little Singham as a character or any of these famous Indian characters, you want your world to be revolving around that.
00:14:11
Speaker
So we went and we did a research, we mapped the Google trends, we saw the bug data, we saw the YouTube trends and we zeroed in on one character which was little Singam and we believed that it was a very popular character, it stood for the right ethos and we were like look we will create learning journeys but the jockey for all these learning journeys will be little Singam.
00:14:30
Speaker
So for children, it is I am playing a game with my favorite character, Little Singham. But every single game is teaching them either English or numeracy or creativity or gross motor skill or some general knowledge or science related topics.
00:14:45
Speaker
But in a fun, gamified universe, you see, of their own. So that was my first version, which was just Little Singham as a character and different learning journeys mapped around it. So you did the licensing deal with the Little Singham IP owner? Yes, we did a revenue licensing deal.
00:15:06
Speaker
If you like to hear stories of founders then we have tons of great stories from entrepreneurs who have built billion dollar businesses. Just search for the founder thesis podcast on any audio streaming app like Spotify, Ghana, Apple Podcasts and subscribe to the show.
00:15:27
Speaker
Okay, so the app was paid? So initially it was absolutely free. And we had that understanding that look, this is a huge opportunity, right? Everyone was realizing at that point that how big of a game changer at tech can be. So when we, and all these IPs are incredible IPs, they have great affinity for children.
00:15:47
Speaker
But unfortunately, in our country, we were not doing anything to use those IPs and the popularity of those IP to make something good, some learning happen out of it for the children. And nobody was utilizing that opportunity. So I came on the landscape and I said that, look, let's build something big out of it. And why did you choose an Indian character considering that the kids you were teaching were in Singapore? Would they connect with Little Singapore?
00:16:15
Speaker
So, to be very honest, my idea was always to make it for India as an audience. My natural
Leveraging Indian Characters in Edtech Market
00:16:21
Speaker
affinity, having grown up in India, spending so much time in Thea 1, Thea 2, Thea 3 cities was India. And India, in my view, is going to be one of the largest edtech markets in the world because of its sheer population. Southeast Asia will not ever match up to that scale of population. And India is a young country, right? Most of our population is
00:16:43
Speaker
below the age of 25. So I strongly believe that that is my opportunity. And there is really no player doing in India. There are 4,500 ad tech players, but nobody is doing what I am doing, building a platform with multiple characters, multiple learning journeys. And so I thought it is my opportunity. And why Indian characters is because when I went and looked up the bug data, the YouTube trends, the Google trends,
00:17:09
Speaker
I was myself very surprised because the top 10 characters were all Indian characters. Disney did not even feature in the top 10 viewership characters of India, right? Either it was Indian characters or Japanese characters. So I was like, this is my opportunity. There are these characters children love. They are all fragmented in India. Let them just bring them together. Every single character is lined with different studios at different places, not creating a wholesome holistic environment. So that was my opportunity.
00:17:38
Speaker
got it okay interesting like who owns the little singer might be
00:17:44
Speaker
I think it's a joint ownership between Rohit Chetty Studios and Reliance Animations. Okay. Okay. They made the single movies and that. Yes. This was a brand extension in a way. Yes, that's right. Okay. Got it. Got it. Okay. Like when you launched the app, it was what all, what were the learning experiences like? Was it like fill in the blanks or match matching or what was it?
00:18:09
Speaker
No, it's not just simple fill in the blank. Some was, was like a running game where you're collecting ABCD as coins. Temple run, but it's ABCD. It's not really a coin. Every time there is repetition of ABCD, it's getting registered in a child's mind.
00:18:26
Speaker
They were memory card games, but the memory card game is about if the child was learning about fireman as a module. So the memory card game was all the equipment's fireman use, right? Like a fire hose reel, a helmet, a torch and things like that to build on the vocabulary of a child.
00:18:42
Speaker
We had some numeracy related games, colors related games, but it was a very basic thing which we rolled out as a version one, which in itself was doing such incredible numbers. Okay. Okay. Then like
Expanding Creative Galileo's Appeal and Reach
00:18:57
Speaker
you decided, okay, you want to do creative Galileo full-time and you got an exit from little, pardon, then what next? Tell me that evolution journey. Did you like.
00:19:06
Speaker
build a version 2 of the app. We built, since then, I think we built collaborations of the app and constantly evolving and growing. We started with one character, but today we have almost 60% of the top characters of India onto our platform already. Give me some other names.
00:19:26
Speaker
We have Shakti Man, we have Darwin and Nudes, we have Golmal Jr, we have Tanish, we have Bal Krishna, we have like Bahubali. We are launching very soon with a couple of really big other characters as well. So really a Supandi, Shikari Shambho.
00:19:48
Speaker
All the ACK characters, Amna Chitrakatha is also our partner for those traditional stories or cultural stories of India. So we have a whole huge range of partnerships that we have. One of our partners is Periwinkle,
00:20:03
Speaker
They have all these educational videos for children, which is very focused on curriculum. So with their curriculum and our job case, we make it even more fun for the children, building quizzes on top of that, so that we can check what children are understanding or not understanding.
00:20:21
Speaker
And I am assuming version one would have been through some vendor. Did you then build an in-house tech team after that? Yeah. So now we have a 25, 26 people tech team already. And it's just been a year. So from zero to 26 has been, I think, a pretty incredible journey.
00:20:39
Speaker
And we've been pretty frugal in the way we've grown. We've not like just gone ahead and built like a 200 people thing where we didn't have the, where we had to, we planned our capabilities because really I'm a second, third time founder. My, my co-founder Nikhil, he was heading India's India. He was the GM India for ViewClip, which was sold to PCCW in 2014 or 15.
00:21:07
Speaker
for $270 million then and then he was heading 17 emerging markets with you as a brand. So I think he also has a lot of experience in business development and running huge teams. So we've been able to optimize our team while making sure our growth is being very incredible.
00:21:25
Speaker
Okay. Okay.
Growth Strategies: Partnerships and Marketing
00:21:27
Speaker
Okay. And what is your go-to-market strategy now? Like initially it was all organic. So we've still very much been a very organic growth company. We have not spent incredible amount of money in doing Google pay ads and Facebooks and branding and all those things.
00:21:43
Speaker
We believe that if the business has legs, it should grow organically and that is how your product proves virality. That is happening for us. So we are focused a little bit more on that. We are looking at some B2B partnerships, very interesting ones to assist or back that distribution growth that we've been achieving so far.
00:22:05
Speaker
So that B2B partnership would be with like say a school chain or something like that? Yes, it's with schools, it's with telecom partners, it's with other YouTube channels and things like that. Got it. But even for driving organic growth, there are growth hacks that can be done like in terms of say using YouTube as a top of the funnel, putting out videos there which lead to a problem. Yeah, so all that we do, right?
00:22:29
Speaker
So tell me about all of those, like how to build organic downloads for your app. What are your lessons on that? So what we obviously experimented a lot with different versions, what we figured is performance marketing works the best for us. So we coupled down on that thing instead of spreading ourselves. We do have Instagram presence and a Facebook presence, but we really focus more on performance marketing with Google Ads. Other than that, we did get a lot of traction.
00:22:59
Speaker
Also because our partners have millions and millions of users on their YouTube channels. So we with their help used to post our videos on their channels as well seeded over that. So we did get a fair bit of traction from there also. We tied up with little Syngum games and things like that also which were already at 30-35 million downloads.
00:23:22
Speaker
to put our ad space and things like that over there. So that was a very target audience who already liked Little Singam or already coming and playing with the character. So for them to come and check us out was a fairly easy transition for us to get. So those were some of the things that we did. So in a way, these characters are your social media influencers, like Little Singam acts as an influencer for you. You don't really need real world influencers. You already have these virtual influencers.
00:23:51
Speaker
Absolutely, absolutely. And for children, they are the influencers. I don't think a child really goes and sees what a lady is posting on Instagram for their influencers, like those characters who they relate to. So absolutely right. For the reason why we were able to scale so fast.
00:24:10
Speaker
and keep our consumer acquisition cost solo. Okay. Okay. Okay. And does the child choose which character he wants to work with or is it that some lessons are with some characters, some lessons are with some characters? How does it happen? So at this moment, some are with some and some are with some, but we are building the entire platform very modularly. So the idea is to move towards the format that they can choose their favorite characters and all the games and videos get customized to that.
00:24:36
Speaker
Got it. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. And what is the age group you're targeting for this? 3 to 10. Okay. Okay. Okay.
Tailored Learning Journeys for Children
00:24:47
Speaker
Are they like learning journeys based on age and all? Yeah. So they're learning journeys based on age. They're learning journeys also based on the interests of the child.
00:24:59
Speaker
If the child is interested in numeracy, there's a learning journey on numeracy, language, creativity, arts and aesthetics, discovery of the world, which has concepts like geography, culture, history, social and emotional learning, which has things about moral stories and things like that. So we have quite a large
00:25:21
Speaker
variants in terms of what all children can do on our platform. On top of that, it is not just divided on age group, but also on the aptitude and the ability of the child. So if the child is a high performing child, automatically more and more difficult question answers will show up or difficult games will show up so that we can challenge the child and make sure they're learning new concepts and make sure that
00:25:47
Speaker
They are learning concepts that are slightly more challenging for them. But at the same time, what we also do is review of concepts. If we know that a child is struggling, very simple thing. Some kids are not able to differentiate between a P and a Q letter. They constantly keep getting confused. Now, for a teacher to figure that out will take at least six months time where they are like trying to figure out the test or the probability that there is this thing.
00:26:15
Speaker
But for us, what happens is that when the child is playing constantly on the games, we can figure out that the child is not understanding. And those live updates can go both to the parents and to the teachers at the same point of time. So we make sure those personalization in that journey is also there on top of the age groups.
00:26:35
Speaker
Okay, like once a parent downloads the app, then what? Like you ask the parent to input the age of the child and then... Yeah, we have two journeys at the point of download. One is the parent, one is the child. The parent journey is slightly more exhaustive where they input the age, the name, the abilities, whether the child can do basic English, whether the child can do three-letter words and so on. So that when the child moves into the platform, it's already customized to the child's learning.
00:27:03
Speaker
But if the child is entering the platform, obviously they are coming with a single purpose of playing on the platform, right? They don't want to be answering so many questions and answers. So the child journey almost takes them directly to the platform based on the age and then the customization inside starts happening based on their playing history or what are the games that they are playing again and again and the understanding that they have.
00:27:30
Speaker
So like a child sees maybe some eight, 10 cards, each card representing one game when they log in and they can just tap one. And this could, these cards could be a mix. Some could be numeracy, some could be alphabets and so on, something like that. Yeah. So we have different journeys planned for the children. One is say different cards, which is the library zone, which has basically all the games and videos inside it, whatever the child wants to click on. Separate to this that there are two different journeys. One is.
00:27:59
Speaker
learning journeys which is basically based off the curriculum in India. So the Indian curriculum where there is the Nipun Bharat program where they give a framework, we want the children to know these things in early years by the age of three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten. So that learning journey follows the curriculum. Okay, so the child really has to
00:28:23
Speaker
Pass one stage to the second stage to the third stage to the fourth stage almost like how it happens in school but in a game of five universe.
00:28:31
Speaker
And the third journey is thematic. If I'm a child, right, I don't want to go through this very serious journey, which is very almost like a gamified multiverse, but I, it has a textbook, a chapter by chapter that you have to cross to. But as a child, I really enjoy cars. So they're thematic journeys in which you can actually go inside the world of transportation.
00:28:53
Speaker
And you learn through that, but you will learn numbers and alphabets and so on and so forth in that universe of cars also. So there are three separate types of journeys for children. So these would be like three tabs and they can like switch between these tabs to decide which way they work. That's right. How do you do the stakeholder communication? Like you said that you can flag issues to parents and teachers. So how does that happen?
00:29:20
Speaker
So for parents, we have a parent zone where we send out regular notifications to the parents and parents can come and see what are the games that children have played, more games are in which space, less games are in which space, whether we believe that there are some skills that are emerging, if there are some skills that are excelling, if there are some skills that are performing, if there are some skills that are just purely still developing.
00:29:45
Speaker
if there's any particular insights we have for the parent through our thing. So that's the parent zone. Teachers app, we are in the midst of creating and hopefully launching it in the next couple of months where teachers can essentially assign homework of these games because we are anyway aligned to curriculums in India. What happens is that the teachers right now are almost like, okay, on an average, a child spends two hours a day on a screen.
00:30:14
Speaker
We are saying instead of wasting their time on a screen, it's the same games and videos that they are playing, but they are learning something. And if the teachers can assign games and videos through our app, then children will happily do the homework rather than forcefully getting their homework done.
00:30:29
Speaker
And at the same time, they will learn and they will excel because there will be a continuity. The more they play, the more they will want to play also, and the more they will learn as well. Got it. This would essentially happen when the child is subscribing in a B2B model, where you are selling the app to a school, and then the school is rolling it out for the students. Then the teacher can make use of homework assigning and tracking progress and all of that.
00:30:59
Speaker
That's right. That's absolutely right. Okay. Okay.
Democratizing Education in Tier Two Cities
00:31:03
Speaker
And what is the pricing like? So we are going to be working for B2B at obviously a different price point and the consumers direct to consumers at a different price point. But what we are looking at based on the current market competition is close to say 1500 to 2000 rupees a year. Okay. Okay. Which is extremely affordable.
00:31:27
Speaker
Yes. And the idea was anyway, it was what we were building or what we wanted to create is something that is for the masses. It is not just a tier one.
00:31:38
Speaker
very high end, something that most people in India cannot afford. We want to go and luckily for us, almost 55% of our downloads are coming from tier two cities and below. Tech in India has always had this problem where they are getting most of their customer base from tier one. They're not able to crack the tier two market. But for us, very organically, we have cracked the tier two market and tier three markets as well.
00:32:04
Speaker
So for them we have to make sure that the price point is very affordable and we have to make sure that the children are learning because you see that just the number of very good qualified teachers speaking the right English, teaching them the right concept is in dearth. So if anything that can help them give that support in a fun and engaging manner where a parent is not forcing
00:32:30
Speaker
a child to sit and study, but they are enjoying the process of study. Why not?
00:32:35
Speaker
I think we need solutions like this. And this pricing is like in stark comparison to by Jews used to have probably still has the product they built with Disney, which which I guess would be like the most direct comparison for creative. Yeah, it would be I think 25. That's absolutely right. And look at average and they are actually getting to a different market segment in my opinion.
00:33:02
Speaker
Because our big, average Indian child says, what is Elsa? Or what is Moana? Or what is cars? They will just look at you completely blankly like, what are you talking? We have no idea what's Moana or Elsa, right? Or what is cars? Lightning McQueen.
00:33:17
Speaker
But the average Indian, what is little singer, what is little singer? They will know about it. They will be like, right? Those are the children who are our audience. Those are the children who need what we are building.
00:33:32
Speaker
I've experienced that by just Disney app. So I'm assuming Creative Galileo would have a similar look and feel and approach on how the different games are and things like that. Yeah, with a few different things, right? Our journeys are adaptive, which not the same for everybody. And it is more, I would like to say a little bit more gamified than
00:33:54
Speaker
that it's a more gamified version. And how many kids use it right now? We have about 7 million downloads of which about over 650,000 monthly active users. Okay. Amazing. And have you started with like B2B deals also like where you're tying up with schools?
00:34:21
Speaker
Yeah, so we've shortlisted and spoken to a couple of schools who we want to run our pilot program with. So we didn't want to start our pilot with 50 schools. Obviously, we won't be able to handle that kind of scale from the get-go. So we've started with, we've had the conversation with couple of schools and we will first run our pilot with those schools. And after that, once things go well for three months or say four month timeline, then we open it up.
00:34:48
Speaker
Okay, okay. So what do you think will be the way forward? Will you see more through the direct-to-consumer channel? Will you see more happening through schools? Where do you see Creative Galileo a couple of years down the line? I think Amherst will always be our first is where we want to scale first because I think that is the ethos of the company really. What B2B is a very
00:35:15
Speaker
Personal thing for me because I used to run schools and I see how in India teachers are just not prepared with proper lesson plans. Teachers are not prepared with what is the right thing to teach at a right age group. What are the right kind of activities to do? What are the different levels of motor skills at which age group? What are the different levels of even as basic as fine motor skills, right? At what age children should be using thick crayons, thin crayons, pencils.
00:35:45
Speaker
I feel like that learning is just not there. Through our app, we have, we're also creating a teacher section, which kind of provides teacher all the resources that they need to run a strong lesson.
00:36:00
Speaker
So it doesn't matter even if you don't have the best teacher on board, but the teacher will know how to run a lesson because there's an opening of the lessons that these are the questions you should ask. These are the songs you have to sing. This is the closing along with the resources needed to conduct those lessons as well. So it's a very personal thing for me because I believe that children deserve more. We need to do something about the early education system.
00:36:26
Speaker
If you just think about it, right, time and again, science has said that children below the age of eight are developing at an unprecedented pace. Most of the brain development happens between the age of zero to eight years of age. And it's unfortunate that's the least of the focus area in the education system right now. And I don't think children deserve that. I think they deserve more.
00:36:52
Speaker
Okay, that's pretty, this actually seems like a pretty big opportunity. So what
Transforming Early Education with Pedagogical Support
00:36:57
Speaker
they exceed was a pioneer of in terms of equipping schools with pedagogical resources so that teachers can teach better. You could be that partner for schools at earlier levels. We could be that partner along with providing that gamification module for the children, along with providing a live update to both
00:37:19
Speaker
parents and teachers, which makes the life of our teacher very easy because very acutely I realize this problem. How much time does the teacher spend on creating report cards for the children? And obviously they struggle with the language English, the right sentence structure and so on. So if we give them templates and if they are able to customize the templates to their needs,
00:37:47
Speaker
It will save a lot of time for the teachers. So based on my understanding of running schools, having very deep involvement of schools in India also, we are building the teacher's app, which also communicates with the parents. I'll tell you one thing I did in my schools, right? So we, I built an app very similar to this when I started my schools, because I felt like, I feel like parents today want to know what is going on in my child's life.
00:38:15
Speaker
So it was a very simple thing like when children used to come in attendance instead of marking present absent on the on the on the ID register.
00:38:24
Speaker
We used to click a photo that your child is present and it would automatically go to the parent. And in the early morning parent is going to the office, they used to see a smiley face of their child entering the school. It has a lot of like comfort factor to the parent also. And it was also key to a major activity, right? We did a Mexican Fiesta, all the children are dressed in
00:38:46
Speaker
dressed as Mexican in Mexican clothes and things like that. And the teachers could just take photos and post it on the app and parents can see it and it almost like an Instagram, but for parents and children and the school. So those are some small features, but it made a big difference in the life of a parent and the life of a teacher.
00:39:04
Speaker
And the trust that a parent has in the school also increases. So like Paddington had its own app, like a parent app? Yes, yes. Which is fairly unique. I have not really heard of schools having their own apps so far, at least. Because when I started, no, there were no apps. When I started was about six years ago. Apps is still a very recent phenomenon, which has happened in the last two, three years. And that too for preschools, the bill could be named up.
00:39:30
Speaker
And when I made that app, I made it six years ago. So that time there were really not much solutions available right in the market. And it was just something that I wanted to do.
00:39:41
Speaker
Amazing. Amazing. Okay. I actually think your school business could actually end up being the bigger part because each deal will net you more revenue because it's a bulk deal. And there are so many of these unbranded preschools all over the country. So you could actually give them branding. So they could become creative Galileo school. For example, that could be...
00:40:07
Speaker
Yeah, we built the app and we have to see how it goes. But to be very honest, we've seen success in there is still to prove itself. But success decide to a certain extent for a one and a half year old company has already proved itself. So this is like chasing after something else when you have already a goldmine in front of you. And even when we talk to the investors and we are going to be announcing our
00:40:32
Speaker
a pretty decent Series A right now. We've closed that round also. Everyone who sees our data says that one thing for sure. This is one of the best head tech data that we have seen. So consumer may, consumer may be already doing really well. Though there is absolutely no reason to not focus on that first. These other things are projects that we are building to support that a little bit more.
00:41:00
Speaker
And hopefully they all take independent scales of their own. You need not be stuck to A or B. They both can be independently really huge. And that's how I suppose business are built. You diversify and make sure each diversification is as strong as the other. So you said that your investors said this is the best edtech data that they have seen. What
Creative Galileo's Impact and Engagement Metrics
00:41:23
Speaker
are some of those metrics can you share? Like engagement metrics, retention metrics, just
00:41:30
Speaker
So we have like about our highly engaged users give us about 27 sessions per month, which is saying that a child is almost coming back to our platform on a daily basis. And that doesn't happen if a parent is forcing a child. That only happens if the child is asking the parent again and again. And this is almost over 20 to 25% of our user base. That's a huge user base coming back almost daily on our platform.
00:41:58
Speaker
So that is one thing. And the second thing that is very interesting is our retention data. So our highly engaged users or the power users are, our M1 retention for them is close to 70%. Right. 69%. What is M1 retention? Sorry. I don't know.
00:42:20
Speaker
and that shows royalty. So Johamari highly engaged users, power users, who almost 70% come back on an M1, which is again a very powerful data because the biggest thing is that the bucket is very leaky. But the fact that even at an early stage, you can retain 70% of your
00:42:40
Speaker
I'll engage users too and one is a strong powerful data to be targeting. Let me end with, do you have advice for aspiring founders and especially women who are aspiring to be founders?
00:42:56
Speaker
So for women, I would say prioritize a lot. We all have a lot going in our lives. We are mothers, we are wives, we are daughters, and more so we are startup founders, so prioritize. But it doesn't matter whether you are a man or a woman, a founder has to just have great perseverance and a lot of dedication to what they're doing.
00:43:19
Speaker
And if you have that, it doesn't matter whether you're a man or a woman, you will just excel. So that's my only advice.