EdUnity — a startup that automates the operations of educational centers

Tomiris Tenizbaeva, 22 years old, city — Astana, CEO of EdUnity, @tomiris__tt, @edunitykz

How it all started

I have been working in the education sector since I was 16. For several years, I worked as a teacher, first teaching English, then Russian as a foreign language. However, I decided to pursue higher education in project management within the mining industry. Nevertheless, the topic of education never left me.

Therefore, after graduating from university, I joined an IT company as a project manager, where we were developing an ERP system for private schools. This was a complex system with internal accounting, HR documentation, and document flow. We significantly simplified the work inside the private school "Mansap," but when we tried to commercialize the product and enter the market, we faced new challenges.

This became a reason to study other sectors of the educational market in Kazakhstan. Now we wanted to do the opposite: first find out what the market actually needs, and then focus on development. So we called educational institutions, visited them to communicate and find out what problems they face in their daily lives. According to statistics, 40% of educational centers close in their third year of operation, so we became interested in seeing the reasons behind this and figuring out how we could help them scale rather than close.

Many of them face client loss, difficulties with financial accounting and payment control. Thus, the idea for EdUnity emerged — a CRM system that helps not only manage potential clients but also work with subscriptions, attendance tracking, payments, and engagement of existing clients of the educational center.

The Team

After communicating with entrepreneurs, we presented our CRM system idea "on a napkin" and received demand confirmation in the form of payments even before development began. We saw demand during CustDev interviews, so we decided to go for it. Thus, as an already formed team with experience in developing accounting systems in education, we launched EdUnity.

While we were developing the MVP of the product, we simultaneously created our first advertisement to continue gathering feedback on existing problems and our CRM.

Initially, the team consisted of developers, the CTO, and me — the CEO, so I handled marketing, sales, and product development alone. It was challenging because when you focus on one aspect, other processes stop. Therefore, in September, our team grew: a sales manager and managers joined us, and we also engaged a marketing agency.

I am convinced that the magic of startups lies not in the product but in the team. My main partners in crime are Yuri Kozhushny, our CTO, who is responsible for development, and Adam Tangiev, the head of sales, who is responsible for sales, partner acquisition, and product management. Without them, EdUnity would not have happened.

Target Audience

We help private educational organizations. Language schools, creative centers, sports sections, private schools, online schools, and even tutors reach out to us. EdUnity allows educational centers to automate client work from two sides.

Businesses receive: an automated sales funnel, client dashboards, subscription tracking, attendance tracking, automatic payment reminders, financial and other reports, digitizing all business processes of the center.

Students and their parents, in turn, receive online access to all information about their studies, including class schedules, homework, grades, current subscription status, payment reminders, convenient communication formats with teachers, and student motivation through gamification.

Thus, EdUnity allows improving the lead processing process and increasing the client lifecycle of the educational center, enhancing service quality and increasing transparency. Our goal is to digitize and optimize all school processes so that entrepreneurs can spend less time on operational tasks and more time on the quality of education.

Incubation Programs

We did not manage to participate in incubation programs; we immediately applied for the Quick Start acceleration program from NURIS and got accepted. For 10 weeks, we actively worked with trackers and experts, almost completely redesigned our product, but it benefited us greatly.

I was inspired by the approach of the program's trackers and organizers — in addition to the large number of hard skills we acquired, they paid a lot of attention to psychological support. I love suffering and devaluing everything, so such warm relationships with mentors helped me work on myself and continue working on the project. As a result of the Demo Day, my EdUnity team received maximum investments of three million tenge for project development.

Today, we are going through the Sales Bootcamp from Astana Hub. I believe that the program will help us realize a new stage of startup development and properly build processes.

Difficulties

The main difficulty at the beginning of the journey is the need to handle a large pool of tasks independently. At the initial stage, the founder has to learn literally everything — financial and legal issues, marketing and sales, client accounting, and much more. In the morning, you act in your own advertisement, at noon you are a sales manager and customer service representative, and in the evening, you review corrections from lawyers in your documents.

This is interesting, but without proper support from the team and loved ones, it is easy to burn out from such a load. In this regard, accelerators and bootcamps help because you feel that you are not alone and people want to help you.

Another difficulty is client habits. We often encounter situations where an entrepreneur recognizes the value of the product for the business, pays us, but at the integration and training stage, we meet sabotage from employees. At the same time, an accounting system will never work correctly without employee involvement.

Therefore, during the training stage, we "sell" the system to company employees again. We explain how it can simplify their lives and why it is important and necessary for the educational center. After such ice-breaking, we usually move on to the technical aspects of training.

Achievements

We fully entered the market in September, but on the platform, there are currently more than 1000 users from different cities in Kazakhstan. The greatest interest is shown in Astana, Almaty, and Kyzylorda.

Despite the fact that the project was born relatively recently, we are actively developing relationships with strong partners. Currently, among EdUnity's friends are organizations such as NURIS, Nobel Fest, Scholarium, and Astana Hub.

At the same time, we attend various conferences in the field of education. For example, at the Connected conf conference dedicated to thinking about the future in education, we participated in the Speed Pitch competition, where all three jury members, who were also investors, expressed interest in EdUnity. Although we are not currently considering venture investments, this is a great indicator for the project.

Since the project is in the early stages of active development, we are considering SAFE investments and are open to communication.

Plans

By the end of the year, we plan to make EdUnity more flexible — our clients will have more opportunities to individually customize the system to the needs of their center. Currently, we are working on integration with payment systems and banks, as well as calculating teacher salaries. I think this will greatly simplify the lives of entrepreneurs.

Another direction of EdUnity is gamification of learning. When students earn points for certain achievements during their studies. Currently, each educational center independently rewards students using the EdUnity point system.

We, in turn, want to create a universal currency, EduCoin, which students can earn to open a showcase, choose, and receive discounts and gifts from our partners, whether it be cafes, stores, children's entertainment events, and so on. Therefore, if you are an entrepreneur and can offer something interesting for students — let's make learning more interesting together; we would be happy to communicate!