Applying the Strategic Frameworks in building Skilio

5 months into the building Skilio as a Co-Founder, I thought this would be a timely checkpoint to document my learnings as an entrepreneur. I am privileged to be able to attend a module on Entrepreneurial Strategy (BSN3703) in National University of Singapore Business School, and I thought it would be good to apply the Strategy Frameworks to the work I have been doing in Skilio thus far.

Skilio Founding Team

Logic - our Business model

There was never a time when we settled and could agree on a viable business model that could drive growth in the long-term. We planned on using a tier-based subscription model to sell our platform to schools based on the number of users. However, what we realised was that decision-makers to adopt our platforms (educators) are not the users (students) themselves, which makes activation a hassle.

In addition, we wanted this platform to be used by students from Secondary School all the way to their Tertiary Institutions. That is to say, that our business model may not work out since our platform might not be adopted by all institutions a user enrols in (ie. His Secondary School uses Skilio but not his Polytechnic). Ensuring longevity of our customers, users and idea across different institutions has been something we have been wrecking our brains to THINK about.

Recently, we have come across an article, detailing how Kahoot! has managed to disrupt the EdTech space. We were surprised to find out that Kahoot! released their product for free to the market, resulting in high adoption rates and an exponential growth of their quiz library. Similar to Kahoot! our platform requires for a large user base in order for our idea to bring greater value for more users. Only after raising seed money from investors, then they decided to transit to a freemium model, where customers could enjoy corporate training plans and Kahoot! Plus at a premium. Perhaps, this can be a business model my team can think about moving forward.

Action - our Operations

As the Chief Operations Officer of Skilio, I have come to realise the importance of DOING - iteratively building Skilio's muscles to be able to deliver what we promise, and live up to the expectations of our customers.

Business building is definitely easier said than done. Having a team of full-time University undergraduates makes it even more crucial to communicate effectively within a team, especially since we come from different Universities (one from the East and the other from the West). We definitely do not get to meet physically every week, so I believe in the importance of routinising our work - having weekly online meetings every Monday night.

Thus far we have been meeting online every week, and we will update each other on the progress we have made in the past week. Everyone puts in their 200%, and seeing the team being so highly motivated drives each other to do the same. At the end of the weekly meeting, we will set specific goals for the coming week, and ensure we deliver on time in the coming week.

As small as this effort might be, each hourly check in weekly pushes our team to work towards our larger milestones by breaking these goals down into smaller, more palatable ACTIONS. With every step we take, we work towards creating a platform which we envisioned it to be from the very start

Magic - our People

Building a culture within a business is paramount because investors do not invest in the business idea, they invest in the team. Skilio started off with a pioneering team of 9 people. On hindsight, it was a wise choice to cut down our founding team to just 3 of us - because what we realised was that in order to build a fully invested, emotionally invested team, too large a team is not ideal.

Reflecting on how Careem had faced operationalisation issues and dilution of its desired culture, especially when the founders were not able to be directly involved, places us at greater need to build a strong cultural foundation within our founding team first, before we can think of expanding. We always start off our weekly meetings by sharing with each other how we are FEELING, and constantly work on refining and reminding ourselves of our culture deck to ensure that we practice what we preach. As thought leaders in the space, we strive to create a culture which can drive business growth, allowing for this culture to transcend even when our business grows.

Demand - our Commercial Value

As much as our team was into the EdTech landscape, we started off not being rather unsure on what our product could possibly be. We started off wanting to build a Learning Management System (LMS) for schools in Singapore, but what we realised was that the Ministry of Education recently revamped their online learning systems just recently, so we felt that schools will adopt another new platform once again. Thereafter, we decided to pivot to a soft skill development platform with the increasing emphasis on soft skills for hiring today.

Figuring out the demand for our platform has been and still is a work in progress. On first sight, this platform come across as a personal development network for individual students. However, we realised that HR companies can use soft skill insights to hire, train and develop their people. In addition, training companies and education institutions would value the insights as a form of impact assessment on how their intervention programmes can be better tailored to suit the developmental needs of their people. The process of defining our market size, refining our target population has allowed us to see beyond the short-term demand of our idea, and explore what is the long term potential that this idea can bring.

Supply - our WOW

Ensuring effectiveness and efficiency in our business productions is especially crucial since we are the first soft skill development and tracking tool out there. In order to capture market share, we are aware that we have to act fast.

As a largely tech reliant platform relying on Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing to deliver our product, we recognise the importance of documenting the details of how we are creating this platform. We hope that these documentation can serve as detailed steps to create our desired outcomes again-and-again with the increasing pool of clients. We acknowledge that currently we are a small team with specialised functions. However, we see the need to start planning early on how we can make these processes repeatable and hence scalable in the long-term.

Long-term value - our impact

Our team hopes to build a platform which can follow through a student's journey from Secondary School all the way to work. As an early stage start-up, we are still thinking about how we can make our platform scalable across different educational levels.

As much as we would like to enhance our scope complexity to extending our platform to corporate platforms at work, our team has agreed that scale synergies across students are still important to build up our database to keep our system running. Definitely, we are aware of not being overly agnostic by focusing on a single vertical market (evident from Eventbrite), which is why our team is currently focusing on being open-minded and observing how users from different education institutions (Secondary School, Tertiary Institutions) are engaging and interacting with our platform differently.

Conclusion

In all, the Entrepreneurial Strategy Framework has provided me with a structured way of critically thinking about my business progress so far. Definitely, this has to be tied in with the ecosystem considerations of our business and the customers we are serving. It definitely will not be a walk in the park, but it will be chance for immense growth.