The Long Road to Edutainment: Tabula Digita CEO Ntiedo Etuk (Part 6)

SM: Which other districts besides New York City have you been successful in?

NE: Up until this point, we have been very focused on four major areas: New York, Florida, Illinois and Texas. Those four states plus California are where most education dollars are spent. California worried me because it was far and because the state does funny things with its budgets.

We now have New York City, which is the largest school district in the country with 1.1 million kids. We had Orange County which is the thirteenth largest, Broward which is the sixth largest, and Chicago which is the third largest. More recently we went into Buffalo. In Texas we have Garland, Plano and others. It is probably in 30 districts there. We hit cash flow break even last year.

As a result of showing that you can sell to school districts, here is what is happening to education globally. Everyone is moving digital. Schools and parents both want it. The big problem is that vendors who provide the schools with products and services still have paper-based, old-school stuff. They do not know how to translate. We built our educational games as a platform on which we can build our own educational content and sell directly. Once that was proven we knew we could sell to those businesses. That was how the Pearson deal got done.

SM: Talk about the Pearson deal.

NE: They are the largest textbook company on the planet. We were able to convince them that we could help them sell textbooks. Curriculum from their textbooks can get played in our games. The cheat codes, or instructional codes, would come from their textbooks.

SM: How was it distributed?

NE: It was distributed with the textbooks. On the first page of the textbook, where it would normally say the name of the Pearson textbook, there is a picture of our game and steps for the kids to jump in. There are three benefits to that. First, by tying it to the textbook Pearson can sell more textbooks. Second, there is a CD-ROM that went out to the teacher, who can then play and if they want it they can upgrade. Their sales force is selling, as is ours. That becomes a new revenue stream for them and scales our sales force dramatically. Third, if the school did not buy it but the child wanted to try the game, they could log on and buy the game from us.

This has given us a new way to address the consumer market and follows our philosophy. It has been a hard thing for VCs to get behind because it has never been done before. They like comparables and analogies. We were considered hit-driven because of the video game aspect, and I have had to prove otherwise.

SM: To the extent that you are comfortable revealing it, what revenue level are you getting to this year?

NE: We are still sub $10 million. We had cash flow break even last year.

This segment is part 6 in the series : The Long Road to Edutainment: Tabula Digita CEO Ntiedo Etuk
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