Building a European EdTech Unicorn from Vienna, Austria: Felix Ohswald, CEO of GoStudent (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: You said you talk to parents to map out a journey. Can you double-click down on that a bit? How much tutoring does a family require?

Felix Ohswald: On average, a family consumes eight sessions per month. That’s two sessions per week. One session is about 50 minutes in our case. On average, one kid has about two teachers. Over the whole learning journey of the kid, the child uses up to two teachers. Most of the time, this is in one particular subject. In a market like Germany, the number one reason why families take tutoring is that a kid struggles in a subject.

From Developer to Solo Entrepreneur to $5M+ Revenue: Sporcle Founder and CTO Matt Ramme (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: We have touched the big milestones in 2009. You have started monetizing enough to get yourself salaries. You have brought in the CEO who’s helping you monetize. What is the next inflection point?

Matt Ramme: From the very beginning, I had a link to send feedback. People had a lot of ideas. We would take that and we’d build it. We needed to not be the ones creating all the content. Everybody has these ideas. We need to let them do it. I already created tools just for ourselves. I spent most of 2009 getting the tools to a point where they can be publicly useable where anybody can create their own quiz.

Building a European EdTech Unicorn from Vienna, Austria: Felix Ohswald, CEO of GoStudent (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What about Indian companies? There are a whole bunch of players that are doing really well like CueMath.

Felix Ohswald: Two markets that have always been quite advanced when it comes to education businesses are India and China. China had some regulation changes last year that made it difficult for these businesses to operate. In India, you have about 10,000 active EdTech companies. The thing is a lot of the players are focused on their core market. India is already so big that there is enough room for the companies to operate.

From Developer to Solo Entrepreneur to $5M+ Revenue: Sporcle Founder and CTO Matt Ramme (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: It was just the two of you at this point.

Matt Ramme: Yes. In March of 2009, we made this our full-time job and got paid by the company.

Sramana Mitra: Tell me about the monetization. Were you using an ad network to monetize?

Matt Ramme: Originally, it was AdSense. We’ve used a variety of different ad network providers over the years. What’s interesting is how much I’ve learned about the ad world in the 15 years of doing the site. It wasn’t necessarily what I thought I would learn, but I know a lot more about how the ad networks in the world work. We bought our own ad server for a while. Things are constantly changing.

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?

From Developer to Solo Entrepreneur to $5M+ Revenue: Sporcle Founder and CTO Matt Ramme (Part 3)

Matt Ramme: Another big interest was puzzles and watching Jeopardy. I’ve always been a fan of that. As I got into that, my wife and I would play a lot of crosswords. What I kept finding is that the more I do it, the more I realize there’s a certain subset of trivia data that, if you know, you can get farther into it.

For example, knowing all the states and state capitals, knowing the presidents, and knowing all these lists of data that are well-known. During this time, I was trying to learn more myself. By learning it myself, I was using pieces of paper as flashcards. At that point, I’m like, “It seems like there’s a better way to do this.”

Building a European EdTech Unicorn from Vienna, Austria: Felix Ohswald, CEO of GoStudent (Part 1)

This is a terrific story of a European EdTech venture that has raised $600 million and is scaling extremely well after three years of not finding a monetization model.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the beginning of your journey. Where are you from? Where were you born, raised, and in what kind of background?

From Developer to Solo Entrepreneur to $5M+ Revenue: Sporcle Founder and CTO Matt Ramme (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What was the thesis of Sporcle?

Matt Ramme: I didn’t know. I had an idea to build a website. I didn’t know what it was going to be. I liked the creation of websites. If you’re familiar with the March Madness Bracket for collegiate basketball where millions of people do it every year. They try to predict all the way out to the end. I thought that was an interesting idea, but it would be cool if I could do it for other sports or other leagues. I built a product that allowed people to predict other sports.