Why we took the hard call and shut down our EdTech startup.
“Back in 2020, during a conversation with Ricky Gupta, we questioned why financial literacy is something most of us gain only when we’re much older, missing out on the early starts that could have compounded. As an experiment, we created a small WhatsApp group of 50 parents in our circle and began teaching their kids money management & personal finance. Impressed with the results parents witnessed in their kids’ understanding of money, they began asking us to teach kids various other life skills that they felt were important but not taught in schools - Entrepreneurship, Public Speaking, Arts, Yoga, Mindfulness etc.
We partnered with the best educators across various fields and conducted classes’ everyday on a wide range of different subjects - Arts, Craft, Dance, Yoga, Storytelling, Vedic Maths, Chess, Science Experiments, French, Spanish, Coding, Football, Martial Arts, Zumba, and Cooking etc. These classes were in a ‘one to ∞’ format with the belief that the best educators in their field should teach everyone! Our WhatsApp network organically grew to 1000s of parents across spanning multiple WhatsApp groups in a matter of a few days. Parents across the country were looking for ways to engage their kids in lockdown and seemed to have found our range of diverse classes useful!
At one point we had over 2000 kids sitting in the same live class! Kids and parents both loved
it!
When we set up Superlearn, Our entire tech stack at this time was just WhatsApp groups + Zoom/YouTube, all this while having spent less than INR 3 lakh. We were scrappy and focused on delivering our core value proposition in the most cost efficient way. We felt we had got some sort of PMF and raised a $300K USD pre-seed round from Incubate fund India and a few angels.
Fresh with funds, we expanded our team, started building product & spending on growth. All
these increased our burn significantly. We needed to do another raise, for which we had to boost growth, which further increased expenses. We were confident we would raise a decent round, we kept hearing about massive rounds all over the place.
But, the raise didn’t happen! We spoke to probably 60+ funds over a period of 6 months and no one seemed to be buying the edtech story anymore. It was clear the party was ending. Not just VCs, even parents seemed to have seen too much of edtech. With hyper funding in the space, Indian parents had been bombarded by different companies all trying to sell them some product or the other.
To add to it, with things returning to normalcy outside, the first casualty was online classes. We
began seeing a dip in the number of kids attending our classes. With a few months runway left to even figure out a pivot, we took the tough call of shutting the company and returning whatever money we have left back to our investors.
It’s been a couple of months since we took this decision. It felt gut-wrenching then, but in
retrospect, seems like the best decision we could make as we lost conviction in the market ourselves. We were moving towards a vision, but weren’t prepared for the changing tide of the market.
We got a few things right & made lots of mistakes as well. Accepting failure is hard, but it provides an opportunity to look back at your decisions through the privilege of experience. I’ve seen myself grow immensely in the last 2 years. I can’t say I know what it might take to build a successful startup, but I’m better equipped with understanding what not to do.
After a couple of months off, I’m recharged and more refreshed than ever. Onto the next!”