Playydate — A Shopify For Educators

Scaling One-Teacher-Educators to Internet Levels

Design Challenge

There is a large proliferation of non-academic coaching market called activity classes. While mainstream edu-tech focus on organised education market, get the unorganized activity classes on a platform by making a much interrupted and very busy teacher’s life easy and organised.

Build the product such that these educators get larger audience, alternative revenue streams , gain recognition and reach out to ever widening global audience. Build tools to help them do this in DIY mode.

Type of Client: StartUp

Industry : EduTech

Insight

Enabling One Person To Scale To Internet Is To Be A Shopify

As we iterated the design challenge of organising the unorganised, corporatising the individual, it became clear it was about empowering individuals by letting them focus on their core skill and service while the entire scaling and selling mechanism is abstracted into a DIY platform.

It was not about aggregating to disenfranchise. It was about liberating them to do their work. What blogging softwares did to individual publishers, what Shopify did to individual sellers. What Playydate will do for individual teachers.

Strategy:

Clearing Key Pains And Giving Visibility

Research pointed to three key areas — A class needs to be created in myriads of combinations of batches, age groups, fees collections mechanisms and other related issues. And a teacher needs visibility beyond their immediate circles. And, the classic problem of platforms — both teachers and students need to arrive at once.

Our client tackled the last problem first by building a vibrant and engaged community on Facebook, often times with extreme attention to individual teachers or mothers. Once the community was built , it was a matter of migrating them on to the platform.

The platform offered long term listing, which was often lost in ephemeral Facebook timelines. The listing provided every combination of classes, batches, locations, payment mechanisms one could ask for. The dashboards gave teachers a single source of truth and a method of organising.

As Playydate emerged as a unique platform , it got Google love, and most of it rubbed on the class profiles that teachers had listed. It was a Win-Win.

What we did:

• UX/UI design
• Development
• Engineering & Maintenance

Project Details

• NodeJS
• React + Redux
• MongoDB
• AWS Api Gateway/Lambda
• Google Integrations

Approach

As our client delivered a vibrant and activity community, our approach was to seamlessly help teachers migrate onto the listing platform. Upon success of listings back into the FB feeds, the teachers were naturally interested into using the product dashboard.

Then began a highly iterative process of interactions between teachers, our clients and our UX team to build out every combination of classes one could ask for. This was critical to ensure each teacher counted.

Each teacher brought dozens of student users who in turn introduced Playydate to other teachers and so the virtuous circle was created.

This approach to creation of Playydate platform continues till date where on one hand we continue to build a visioned product roadmap , while on the other , support little iterative development that ensure every teacher can onboard their class to their satisfaction.

Outcome

A unique bootstrapped highly engaged online education community

Today Playydate is a year and half old platform with thousands of hours of online education by a community of more than one thousand teachers across more than forty categories. The platform has give teachers dashboards, online registrations, automatic payouts , listing or current and ex-students and a history of all batches and transactions that frees from to do more.

The platform allows teachers to offer their own discount coupons to marketeers, track outcomes and soon moving to helping them creating Google and Facebook Ads with few clicks and increase their reach exponentially, and track outcomes. It will soon allow them to offer services to global audience and boost their earnings in USD.