Building a Global Education SaaS Company From India: WizIQ CEO Harman Singh (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What were the specs that they wanted?

Harman Singh: There was a technology called Smile technology for education programs that wanted to deliver video-based along with some other content. These days, people would not know what that is. But in those days, it was really hot. We worked with professors and discuss what they needed. They had recording studios and we were the programming guys who put the whole thing together by integrating instructional design with technology. That’s when I got close to streaming media whether it’s real-time or video streaming. I was an engineer at that point but I learned a lot of about how business is done. I got into sales and project management. Those few years, we sold to many customers including our university.

Sramana Mitra: All of this was around the Smile technology of real networks to deliver video content?

Harman Singh: Not all of it. A lot of it was that. We would use .NET framework to build some custom workflow. I remember we had a project for Duke University. They had a program for gifted and talented kids in high school. There was a lot of learning content including assessments and advance learning material. We worked very closely with that program at Duke. We also worked with the Nursing School at University of North Carolina. Two things were common in everything that we were doing. One was that the professors were using the technology that we were building to deliver content. Students on the other side can consume that content. That was a learning experience for me over three or four years of interacting with the professors. In 2006, I decided to build something like what we’re doing right now.

Sramana Mitra: You started working with North Carolina and related schools in what year?

Harman Singh: 2002 to 2006.

Sramana Mitra: So in 2002 to 2006, you did this business of offering this platform around Smile and .NET to various universities and community colleges?

Harman Singh: Yes.

Sramana Mitra: These were mostly services projects?

Harman Singh: Yes. Pretty much, all of them were services.

Sramana Mitra: We see this theme over and over again. We actually call it bootstrapping using services because we have seen lots of products having been bootstrapped by vendors providing services around a certain technology and domain area, learning that really well, and then coming up with product ideas and productizing them into more scalable businesses.

Harman Singh: Absolutely. That is similar to what we did. After four years of all that exposure, we came out with this idea that what if there’s an Internet platform into which the educator and the student can log in and connect with each other. In those days, Facebook and LinkedIn were coming up. They were not as big as they are now. They were the talk of the town, of course.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Building a Global Education SaaS Company From India: WizIQ CEO Harman Singh
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