#5 Founder’s Showcase: Celadon (Sophie and Christian Silver)
This week’s showcase, Celadon, solves an acute problem for numerous families — making maths fun and engaging.
What is the problem you’re solving, and how are you solving it?
Maths is too hard for too many kids. This is hard for parents too. Maths attainment is a massive problem in NZ particularly (here’s a 50-page report on it if you’re interested), but maths anxiety is a massive problem globally.
You know that feeling when your brain goes blank and you can’t seem to get it to function? That’s likely your working memory going on holiday for a minute and anxiety is very good at giving your working memory a little break. Maths anxiety is this phenomenon particularly triggered when someone sees a maths problem or even hears that they might need to do maths. This feeling is on the rise and we’re trying to help.
For children ages 6–11, Celadon is an app to practice maths. We use AI, psychological principles and gamification to make learning maths actually fun and effective.
There’s a little love triangle going on when it comes to education: teachers, students and parents. We’ve seen that parents can feel a bit like a third wheel and this is the other problem we’re trying to address. Parents are anxious too! They’re anxious because they don’t know how their kids are doing and if they do and they don’t know how to help.
For parents, Celadon is the go-to app to see how their child is developing in maths, understand any gaps, and get ideas on how they can help.
What do you love most about being a founder in NZ?
Well, we’re currently working out of a family bach down in the Bay of Plenty right next to the beach… we can’t really complain!
The startup ecosystem really feels like it’s just kicking off here, and it’s really amazing to be at the start of the journey because it feels really welcoming as a result of that.
One thing we do love about the Kiwi mentality is the willingness to help anyone out. Generally, Kiwis are super happy to lend an ear and give their 2 cents.
Why are you working on Celadon? What was the trigger point that made you start working on this?
Sophie was a nanny while studying in London and there was an ongoing trend, with the kids she nannied, of a growing (passionate) hatred of maths. Sophie was also taking psychology papers as part of her degree which were pretty eye-opening as to how unnecessarily difficult we make learning sometimes.
One night after coming back home from nannying, we started brainstorming ideas of how to help (fixing the education system has been a passion of ours since we were at school). We were really concerned with how strongly these kids suddenly hated maths, but we wanted to start with something simple. We threw together a little times tables practice app and, well, now we’re here!
What is the current state of Celadon? What does the product look like and what is your team focused on right now?
Celadon is a team of two: Sophie and Christian. We’ve been full-time since May 2021 where we left our jobs in London to move back home to New Zealand. Christian was working as a software engineer, and Sophie was working as a project manager in fintech.
Our product is developing quickly. We have a beta that we’re testing with a private cohort of individual students and whole classrooms with parents and teachers in tow. In the app, kids look after endangered animals on their own isl and reserve by practicing maths. Under the hood is a whole host of psychological principles and AI magic that means the maths that they do practice is as effective as possible.
We’re working towards an early 2022 public launch, and our private beta is sending all the signals that this is the right thing to do. What we’re doing before then is getting our product in tip-top shape, and researching the best channels to reach our prospective users.
What makes Celadon unique?
Taking it back to the proverbial love triangle: our competitors focus on schools/teachers and children. Parents are left out of the equation, which leads to uncertainty and fear about their children’s future. This is especially painful in maths because it’s much less common to incorporate it into the household. Children are almost always read to from a very young age – the same isn’t true for maths.
We’re putting the data back into the hands of parents, which is why we feel so strongly about this being a consumer product. One half of our product is an app dedicated to allowing parents to see what their child is doing, where they’re at, and what parents can do to help.
Furthermore, most of our competitors focus on a different kind of child to us: those who are doing well in maths. We are focusing on those children who dislike maths. Our product will help them develop positive feelings about maths and consequently, be the product they then associate with all of those positive feelings.
How are your customers doing? What is the traction like?
From our beta, we’ve found that if a child uses it more than once, they’ll use it for days on end. Sometimes up to an hour each day! These are in households that typically restrict screen usage, too.
A sort of no-code solution we’ve been offering is low-cost maths tutoring. This allows us to reach, and understand customers that can’t afford tutoring (which is a high-cost solution to the problem we’re solving). We’ve seen first-hand how kids’ perceptions of maths can be changed in a single hour, and how excited parents get about that. Our job now is to product-ify the excitement, as tutoring at low prices doesn’t scale.
What is another start-up in New Zealand that gets you excited?
We both literally made our own versions of it when studying at uni thanks to Sophie studying psychology and learning all about how memory works… we certainly didn’t have the time to work any longer than we had to. The products we tried at the time left a lot to be desired. Zorbi is literally exactly what we needed.
Who do you look up to for advice/inspiration? What’s your favourite piece of advice from them?
We have eight nieces and nephews who inspire us every day, both with Celadon and in life beyond.
One of the best pieces of advice we’ve had is from our five-year-old nephew: when you’re being chased by a barracuda, you can hide in mangroves to escape. Doesn’t help much in startup land but it’s good advice nonetheless.
What would you say to someone interested in supporting or learning more about Celadon?
Reach out, we don’t bite! Whether you’ve got kids yourself or want to learn more about what we’re doing, send us an email: hello@celadon.ai
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