Building a European EdTech Unicorn from Vienna, Austria: Felix Ohswald, CEO of GoStudent (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: For those three years, you ran this site of letting students ask questions and answering those questions?

Felix Ohswald: Yes.

Sramana Mitra: Was there financing involved?

Felix Ohswald: Yes, we raised about €3 million.

Sramana Mitra: From whom?

Felix Ohswald: Business angels and individuals.

Sramana Mitra: In Vienna?

Felix Ohswald: Vienna, Germany, and Switzerland.

Sramana Mitra: What was their expectation? How was this business going to monetize?

Felix Ohswald: The assumption was that as soon as the student community reaches a certain size, we will be able to monetize using a combination of advertisements and partnerships. That was the story that we told back then. That didn’t work out. At that time, Pioneers Ventures invested in the business.

Sramana Mitra: Then what was the pivot?

Felix Ohswald: Along this journey, we realized a couple of things. One of the key learnings was that when it comes to K-12 education, the parent is the decision maker. You need to get the parent on board. For the homework chat, parents were skeptical. Parents felt that this would be like a cheating platform. It was very hard for us to convince parents that this is not a cheating platform.

The second thing is we had more and more requests from kids asking us if they can have a proper one-on-one session with our teachers. First, we have a self-onboarding process. We integrated a tutoring marketplace in our app that allowed parents and kids to book a teacher and schedule the lessons. What we also discovered is that when it comes to education, you want to tell parents what they need. We wanted to be like a managed marketplace taking them on the journey and supporting them all along the way.

Just connecting them to a teacher was not enough, we wanted to be the platform that supports you from the first moment you reach out to us. We pivoted the model to target the parents directly. Once they sign-up on the platform, we give them a phone call where we try to understand what they need and where they need help. We connect them with a teacher. In the platform, make sure that all the scheduling and communication are covered by us until the kid finishes school.

Sramana Mitra: Tutoring marketplace has become common at this point. Can you talk about the competition?

Felix Ohswald: Eight to nine out of 10 tutoring services are still booked offline. Most of the tutoring takes place offline either by individuals, freelancers that offer their services in the local neighborhood, or by institutional companies that have proper learning centers in the city. In the US, you may have heard of businesses like Kumon that have physical centers where you can send your kids to. In the online space, you have a lot of unmanaged marketplaces. These are platforms that connect you to teachers but don’t support you along the way. We are pretty unique in the online space with that approach.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Building a European EdTech Unicorn from Vienna, Austria: Felix Ohswald, CEO of GoStudent
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