Start-up Society #92: 1Question

Keeping the American Dream Alive

Welcome to the 92nd edition of Start-up Society! This blog highlights some of the most exciting start-ups in the country striving to keep the American Dream alive.

Make sure you check out the previous issue, if you have not already, here!

This article includes our latest installment of Meet the Entrepreneur featuring Issac Elnekave, Founder & CEO of 1Question.

For the full conversation, tap into the podcast here!

What is 1Question?

1Question looks to solve the number one problem that parents face today — which is their kids’ unproductive screen time. Kids are constantly on their devices, which is a double-edged sword. As a parent, you want your kids, especially the young kids, to be doing something productive on their devices; but when you take their devices away, you become their primary entertainer. So, 1Question looks to make your kids’ screen time productive; and the way we do that is by having kids earn screen time through engaging with curriculum-aligned content. So the more your child learns, the more screen time they earn. You can almost think of it as a currency. Your child earns screen time, which they can then deploy across any number of apps or app categories that you want them to. Once they’re done with their screen time, they will need to go back onto 1Question, engage with more educational content, and earn more screen time. So, we’re making that screen time productive.

What is the geographic focus of 1Question?

The beauty behind being an app-based business is that we are born global. So, you need to try and capture as much of your addressable market as possible, and as quickly as possible. With the business being founded in Australia, it made sense to get the product out there, get feedback, make sure that we iterate, and then when we’re ready, look to expand. We launched in the U.S. a few weeks ago, and we will be launching in the United Kingdom. Then, we will be launching in Canada, New Zealand, South Africa, and another additional 10 English-speaking countries by end of May.

What part of your experiences led you to found 1Question?

I grew up in Los Angeles, California. I’ve been an entrepreneur my entire life. My superpower is finding people who are a lot smarter than I am. I love building businesses and building teams; it’s probably what I enjoy doing most. In Australia, I’ve had quite a few different ventures. I built Australia’s largest bagel bakery and retail chain. We sold it to a large bakery conglomerate. I built Australia’s largest online skincare routine retailer, and we sold it to Drugstore.com here in the US. I’ve been involved in deep tech ventures as well, building privacy-preserving technology, which is something that I am very passionate about. However, 1Question is the complete polar opposite. The origin story for 1Question is one that I think a lot of parents would identify with. I’ve got three daughters. And during the early stages of the pandemic, my daughters were mostly in their rooms due to the lockdown policies. One day, we were all in the living room, and my daughters were all just on their phones. And my wife came to me and said, I want one of our daughters to answer a times table question before she can get on TikTok. And I thought that was absolutely brilliant. And then an hour later, I realized there was no app to enforce that. So, I decided to go ahead and build one.

Where did your passion for serial entrepreneurship come from?

My family immigrated to the U.S. and being the child of immigrant parents, education was extremely important. My family put all their money toward our education. Since there wasn’t any money at home, I started working and I realized that if I work I can earn and help my family. That is where entrepreneurship was instilled in me. I started delivering newspapers and then I opened a lemonade stand. I realized I could make more money running my own venture than working for someone else.

What is your Go-To-Market plan for 1Question?

Go-To-Market (GTM) strategy is one of the most, if not the most, important parts of any business. The product can also be iterated on as long as there is product-market fit. But in order to get to product-market fit, there needs to be a GTM strategy. Right now we are taking a shotgun-style approach driven by analytics from our beta solution. We want to get the basic product out there and collect a ton of feedback. The first iteration of 1Question was ugly as hell but we had 50 families using it within just a couple of weeks of launching it. My daughter, Alyssa, was able to learn her times table from it. We then decided to target parents of kids around 8–10 years old and just ask the question, “Are your kids spending too much time online?” The first step is to get parents to nod their heads. We also leverage performance marketing which can be a beautiful thing. However, I still spend a lot of time trying to determine a clever GTM strategy. Awareness is important since we are a product-led business. We’re also implementing a one-to-one-to-many performance marketing strategy where we’re working with teachers and tutoring companies so they can create custom questions for their students. So, how can we gamify screen time based on learning and homework?

Any inspiration from Tide, your blockchain project, that influenced your approach to 1Question?

Absolutely. I spent 5 years in the blockchain world. With the decentralized approach, it only works when all the actors’ incentives are aligned. If every actor’s incentives are not aligned, it is going to fail. When we looked at 1Question, even though we are not crypto-based, we spent a lot of time on the gamification side of things to ensure we have alignment across all the various stakeholders. We decided we are not going to be a content-first business since it is not defensible, content is a commodity. We built 1Question as a two-sided marketplace. On the demand side are parents and on the supply side are the subject matter experts (teachers, tutors, scientists, tour guides, etc). The supply side creates content in the form of a course/class. In this case, a class is a one-minute TikTok video with questions attached to it and the student earns screen time by answering the questions before watching the video. We have aligned everyone’s interests. We can share the revenue between us and the content creators.

What is your competitive moat?

In the short term, the answer is content. In the medium term, the answer is credibility. It also ties into our GTM strategy. If we can get introduced to a parent from the school, then it’s game over.

What is your message to parents?

This is an important project. Screens are not going away, and screen time is not going away. The algorithms of big tech are only going to get better. We must figure out ways to make our kid’s screen time productive. Try 1Question.

We are in our beta stage and we want as much feedback as possible. You can get 1Question on the app store (iOS and Android). The installation is a breeze and a set and forget.

Thank you for reading this article! Feel free to leave a comment, clap, and follow.

Authored by Arteen Zahiri, Rumeer Keshwani, Elham Chowdhury, & Julian Ramcharan