Making an Impact Through Education
A Case Study by Jakt
Meet Clark, a virtual assistant for tutors.
Through a chatbot-enabled mobile app, Clark automates payments, scheduling, student progress reports and more all with the send of a text.
We partnered with Clark because we believe in the founding team’s ability to shift the education landscape for the better. By taking the administrative burden off the next generation of educators, Clark is turning every “educator into an entrepreneur.”
Clark came to Jakt looking to bring their product to life. As a newly founded company, the founders hired Jakt to help their already great team get their education app to market quickly, hit key business goals and ultimately, secure their next round of funding.
Innovating Solutions
Clark faced a unique problem: create a product that was intuitive for students and accomplished multiple goals for tutors while remaining completely understandable and non-invasive to their normal routine. Prior to partnering with Jakt, Clark made the decision to approach this problem with a chatbot solution in mind.
Our first challenge was to create an entirely customized chatbot that effectively handled students and tutors — two very different personas — alike. While standard libraries exist to mimic popular messenger apps, creating our own custom app required a good deal of creative problem solving.
Combining our cumulative coding experience, we were able to build around an existing Apple messenger clone to create a chat experience that was totally intuitive and 100% unique to Clark. This is the chatbot you’ll find when you open the app today.
Partnering Beyond Development
Working toward our solution required more than excellent development. We embraced design issues and UX sticking points as an opportunity to work through tough problems to create elegant solutions. A big part of this included helping Clark reevaluate any area of their app that required extensive coding time. By taking a technology agnostic approach, we effectively leveraged our knowledge to cut as much as 90% of proposed dev time without sacrificing functionality.
From API verification to backend development strategy, Jakt and Clark worked hand-in-hand to run new features through a gauntlet of tests to determine success at an early stage.
Impact Through Technology
Excellent development and product strategy are laudable. But for Clark, impact on education was our biggest thrill. Clark connects students who need help from tutors who have the capacity to do so, and tutors who could use some help of their own when it comes to managing their business.
With Human Ventures and recent funding secured from top investors (not to mention an appearance on Apple’s Planet of the Apps and a spot as a featured app on the iTunes App Store), Clark is taking a big swing at the $100B+ private-education market. We’re honored to call Clark a Jakt partner, and can’t wait to see the impact they make for the next generation for student and educators alike.
Looking to see how Jakt can bring innovation to life for you? Let’s chat.
Originally published at thoughts.byjakt.com on August 10, 2017.
