School management app, Myly, aims to double its count of partner schools following funding from SIDBI
The founders, Madhup Bansal and Gaurav Mundra, came up with the idea to create a school management app after realising how they were both absentee fathers who had no clue what was happening at their childrens’ schools.
Mundra says that the startup idea stemmed from “catching up over masala chai and discussing our guilt with each other.” Having acquired management degrees, Bansal and Mundra both had jobs that required them to travel frequently and hence, very little involvement with their kids’ schooling.
Looking at their wives single-handedly deal with messages in the students school calendars, fees payment dates, circulars etc, they were inspired to digitise whatever they received through archaic paper diary systems and printed paper circulars.
They spoke with other parents and realised this would be a great way to save time. After setting up EduCommerce private limited in September 2014, they did extensive market research and quit their jobs within three months.
Initially, the app was named as schoola2z. But after realising that coaching centres and hobby classes were also willing to use the app, the team changed the name to Myly. Today, the non-school institutions account for 10 per cent to 15 per cent of the revenue.
The team enabled an SMS notification option in addition to the app. “While 80 per cent of users access the app, the rest who have feature phones rely on the SMS option,” Mundra says.
They also tried out various pricing strategies. They had priced the product at Rs. 10 per student per month. Schools were hesitant to use the application. So they made the app free.
Once schools began using it and as more parents started installing the app, the company introduced a freemium version. Now, they have introduced a fully-paid model pricing it at Rs. 10 to Rs. 15 based on the number of services availed per month for each student.
“If you are building a SaaS offering, you should have a time horizon of 7 years,” Gaurav Mundra recalls his mentor’s advice.
While parents are the end users, the company bills the schools for the usage of its services.
They had found a Chennai-based company to do coding for the application in the initial days. Today, the application development is done in-house.
He remembers a mentor telling him, “If you are building a SaaS offering, you should have a time horizon of 7 years.”
The company raised Rs. 2 crore of funding from SIDBI under the start-up Mitra scheme. SIDBI roped in NASSCOM to evaluate their product and assess the app’s technology. Eventually, NASSCOM’s three member team approved the technology and the company will receive the funds in multiple instalments.
Prior to the SIDBI funding, they had raised US $100,000 in 2015 from an ed-tech focused angel investor firm Newbie Promoter.
Currently, 300 schools are using the app. “In the next year, we hope to double this number,” says Mundra on a concluding note. The app has been piloted in Malaysia in the last couple of months.
Snapshot: Myly
Year of Incorporation: 2015
Founders: Madhup Bansal and Gaurav Mundra
City: Jaipur
Funding: SIDBI, Newbie Promoter Private ltd.
Profile: A school management app that connects parents and teachers
