SchoolGennie’s ambition was to help Indian schools, and India’s educational sector at large, to focus on and improve child development by providing management solutions that saved time, reduced overall costs and help make better administrative decisions. SchoolGennie introduced an ERP (electronic records portal) platform for schools which included services such as the Competitive Edge Software and Cloud Software Service.
The startup took off in 2013 but had to shut down it within a year. One of SchoolGennie co-founders detailed in a post the factors that caused the death of the company.
The first and most fatal of them was probably not having any experience in the educational sector and not testing their product for market fit. They've also tried to delay the release of the product to ‘perfect it' instead of testing the waters with an MVP, thus increasing production costs and losing time. Spending money on unnecessary office furniture instead of spending it on hiring experienced developers was also on their miss list. When they realized that schools and teachers weren't interested in their product they tried to copy their competitors with little success as they had no expertise in the services they were trying to add, to begin with. Within a few months, the team started losing sight of their initial vision and paid too much heed to outside influences. This caused a divide between the two founders which caused delayed decisions and uncertainty. Again, most of these problems could have been avoided had they had a mentor, which admittedly, they didn't search eagerly enough for.
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