Building a Global Education SaaS Company From India: WizIQ CEO Harman Singh (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: I don’t know if you’ve read it, we’ve released a book called Bootstrapping Using Services where we deal with this topic extensively. We have companies that have gone up to $25 million in revenue using bootstrapping using services. This is a very viable strategy. However, you have to do it right.

Harman Singh: I agree with you. I wouldn’t do a lot of things I had done in those days. It survived only because of one reason—perseverance. There was nothing else that got us to this point.

Sramana Mitra: I understand. Frankly, I used to think a lot like you when I started out. That was a long time ago. I started my first company in 1994 while I was still a graduate student at MIT. I didn’t know any of this stuff. I’m talking of an era which >>>

Building a Global Education SaaS Company From India: WizIQ CEO Harman Singh (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: The angels invested on what thesis? Typically, investors look for investment thesis. What was the investment thesis?

Harman Singh: The thesis was that educators want to be connected to students over the Internet. That thesis never changed. The business model was unknown, but this thesis hasn’t changed. It wasn’t about B2B or B2C. This is all about whether educators can be connected to students online. We went on and the company Educomp invested some money into the business. The good thing was that we had users. Thousands of educators were using our product although for free. That was when we experimented by introducing a $50 a year membership. However, $50 per year is a very small amount.

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Building a Global Education SaaS Company From India: WizIQ CEO Harman Singh (Part 3)

Sraman Mitra: In those four years, what kind of revenues were you pulling? How many people did you have? What was the scale of the business that you had built?

Harman Singh: We reached about a couple of million dollars in revenue.

Sramana Mitra: How many people did you have?

Harman Singh: We had about 50 people in India.

Sramana Mitra: So all your software development was in India all that time?
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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?
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Thought Leaders in Online Education: John Miller, Chief Operating Officer of Hands-On Learning (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: Anything else that you want to conclude with?

John Miller: The thing that I’d share with you is I have a true passion for this. I came out of retirement to join HOL to focus on this STEM issue. K-12 initiatives are two generations away. Dr. Bared of Intel was quoted as saying that if they had to start Intel again, it wouldn’t be in the US, not because the intimation isn’t here but because the workforce isn’t here. My father and his father really differentiated the US economy through manufacturing. That’s gone today. In my generation and future generations, it’s been innovation that differentiated the US in the world economy.

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Thought Leaders in Online Education: John Miller, Chief Operating Officer of Hands-On Learning (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: What do you forecast will happen to these online universities that are charging almost full price or maybe 10% less than the physical schools?

John Miller: There’s an emergence of a new model that is far more cost-effective, that I think will become pervasive. An example is an organization called StraighterLine, which is a low-cost solution set providing students with highly cost-effective distance education in the general education field. They have articulation agreements with a wide span of four-year schools.

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Thought Leaders in Online Education: John Miller, Chief Operating Officer of Hands-On Learning (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Talk to me about your business of working with a thousand universities and hundred thousand students. What does that business entail?

John Miller: That business focuses on supplying the lab kits that are required for STEM courses. What our company has done is develop a multi-solution package depending upon what experience the school and the instructors want to bring to their student base. Essentially, our scientists create the experimentation and intellectual property to fulfill the learning objectives that professors and instructors have defined for their courses. What historically has been done in the four walls of a lab now can be done in the students’ homes through the solutions that we provide. >>>

Thought Leaders in Online Education: John Miller, Chief Operating Officer of Hands-On Learning (Part 3)

John Miller: One of the challenges they have coming back into education is the whole on boarding process and preparing the employee to come back in. There’re a number of demands that really come into play here. When you start to think about regaining your study skills and the ability to do time management with the demands of, potentially, a family and certainly full-time employment, it becomes challenging. Our program, working with education, enables their on boarding process to educate and help these people coming back into education from the workforce, so they can continue to grow into these new roles on a career path. >>>