Editor’s Pick: Teacherly
Atif Mahmood is the Founder of Teacherly which, over the past three years has grown his company reach from 0 to over 2000 schools. He will be speaking at Teachers Meet Tech on EdTech to help manage workload and teacher retention. We sat down with Atif this week to learn a little more about the success of Teacherly and what he has learned creating a company as a solo founder…
Why did you start Teacherly?
I look across to my friends who work in other industries for example in enterprise and there are a plethora of applications to help with connectivity and productivity and workflow. I felt there was a need for a real change in the way we develop edtech products in Education. As a former teacher and director of technology, I saw first hand the problems we faced when adopting new technologies which we envisaged becoming a cornerstone of our classrooms but instead were hardly used. I wanted to shift the focus onto the teaching workforce, build with the teachers and what jobs they do every day in mind with no noise, reduce workload, automate repetitive tasks and contribute to retaining teachers in the profession for my two daughters. Cloud computing has still a very long way to go in education in every aspect and this is our focus.
Tell us a little bit about the tech behind the product:
Built on React Framework like Facebook and hosted on AWS. Teacherly is a collaborative lesson planning and peer to peer coaching platform. Through interactive lesson templates, insightful dialogues with audio and video and enabling teachers to share best practice via bite-sized videos. We connect teachers in schools, departments and subjects across distances, turning teachers into teams. Similar to Slack, Front shared channels and shared inboxes, we enable a shared collaboration on lesson planning where teachers in schools and across schools and departments see what they need to at the same time in real-time, automating tasks that are repetitive and giving teachers the time to improve their practice through on demand bite sized videos.
What are you looking to achieve next?
We have gone from 0 schools to over 2000 in less than 3 years, with a teacher global community of over 80,000 in the UK, Europe, the Middle East and soon Asia and USA. We have secured seed funding from leading investors in the UK, USA and the Middle East who can add strategic value. I am proud that we have created 15 jobs and security for families. We want to be the leading platform for teacher connectivity, communication and collaboration globally, to do this we want to further build on our amazing team, plan out Series A, achieve our goal of £3.6M this year, more than doubling last year. We hope to build an amazing community globally of teachers who drive our mission, changing old perceived misconceptions associated with education and the teaching workforce, shifting mindsets.
What has been the biggest obstacle in creating Teacherly?
Being a single founder, with no previous startups, no exits, the initial conversations with investors was difficult. But I learnt from every conversation and a bit like customer conversations, I took their feedback and made my next conversation better, I was the MVP, I put myself out there. I took a disciplined approach, even if the feedback was negative, no interest, I appreciated their time. My lead investor during Ignite was someone who said no when I spoke to him, I kept him up to date regardless and took a disciplined approach to communicate with the investors. Also what we are doing even now is ahead of where the market is when we started, we were creating a new market, two/three years ahead and that made not just investor conversations hard but customer conversations hard. We needed to do a lot of educating.
Looking back to the day you started Teacherly, what would you have done differently?
Honestly nothing, I bootstrapped, got to 12 customers, made two sales, when through an accelerator and got some more traction and then some investment. I didn’t run before I could walk, and now that we are beginning to run, we want to break records. We believe in what we do, have done since day 1 and never doubted our execution.
What separates the UK EdTech Ecosystem from others? How do you think this has helped with the success of Teacherly?
The number of young people still wanting to train and become a teacher, I know we have a shortage of specialist subjects and I know we have missed recent targets when it comes to recruitment. But the millennial workforce is a strong community, we have a specific community called ‘teacher-in-progress’ and I can tell you they will try anything, be the first and they are willing to share. This is not the same in other countries.
However we still need to be better when it comes to the VC ecosystem, there is a lack of representation from black African and ethnic minority. I love Kindred Capital and Episode One, Damien Lane a partner in Episode 1 has helped me on my journey through every step. There is definitely a much better representation of female entrepreneurs and investors in the VC community but I have walked into a lot of offices and meetings and you just know, you don’t fit the profile. This sounds harsh, but it’s true.
Finally, why should more people be using Teacherly?
Because you plan, manage all your lessons, communication between teams in one place and you don’t need to wait for inset days, training days and after school webinars for professional development, on-demand, daily, accessible bite sized videos and podcasts through Teacherly.
You can meet Atif Mahmood at the inaugural Teachers Meet Tech event at the EdTechX Summit. Hopefully, through connecting with other entrepreneurs, peers, teachers and senior leaders, we can learn from another on building better EdTech for schools. You can connect with Atif at the event on EdTechX Connect and follow Teacherly’s story on twitter Teacherly
