Building Flintoclass: India’s Only Early-Ed Company Designed For A Global Market
In 2017, we launched Flintoclass Preschools in India (read the transition from Flintobox > Flintoclass here)
The program was gaining momentum among independent, non-branded preschools and our growth was increasingly significant.
Being a comprehensive preschool solution, edupreneurs found Flintoclass to be a viable and robust business model to build their dream preschool.
The Conference That Paved The Way
At this point, we received a golden ticket — we were selected as part of the 10 leading startups in SE Asia for KIES2018, a symposium on innovative education trends powered by Kaizen and INSEAD. We were thrilled at the opportunity of interacting with the top leaders in the ed-tech space.
Moreover, being in the middle of fund-raising, my co-founder Shreenidhi and I also saw this as an opportunity to connect with investors from Singapore!
On Day One of the conference, we were introduced to Vincent Teoh — the director of Zoo-phonics Playschool, Singapore.
When we got talking about our newly-launched Flintoclass system, he grew intrigued and asked to see the product. Seeing that this was the perfect chance to gain a global perspective, I rushed back to my hotel room to get the Flintoclass kit that had the pre-packaged, day-wise lesson plans and learning materials.
Now, let me give you a little backstory about our product. Flintoclass was solely designed and built for the Indian preschool market. In fact, the primary purpose of the program was to bridge the gaps in:
- Content and curriculum development
- Educator qualification
- Infrastructure
We were under the impression that these “gaps” did not exist in the international market. At least, not to the extent that we soon got to know about.
Moreover, we also wanted to bring in international standards of early education to our country, due to which, the entire program was developed in accordance with the global standards of NAEYC.
The Global Perspective
As soon as Vincent saw the product, he was amazed! He loved the structure of the program and genuinely wished to incorporate Flintoclass in his preschool chain.
This took us by surprise because the use cases we designed Flintoclass for, never existed in the international market!
The reason Vincent wanted to use Flintoclass were:
- He believed that his teachers were losing a lot of time every single day in just planning the lessons, while they could instead spend more time focusing on child care
- He found the content and materials to be of high quality, befitting the standards of his preschool chain
- The educators being expensive, Flintoclass could maximise their time better, making them focus on other operational aspects.
Opening the doors
Suddenly, there was a new use case in front of us for Flintoclass! And a pretty global one at that :)
The very next day, we skipped the conference and we were on the streets of Singapore, knocking on the doors of preschools. We were fortunate to get four to five appointments within the next two days where we met the decision-makers and educational leaders. When we demonstrated Flintoclass, we got feedback that was highly consistent with what Vincent had provided.
This paved the way for our international dream. In the next 4 weeks, we made 2 short trips to Malaysia and Qatar to meet preschool owners and understand if these problem statements held true in their countries as well.
Turns out it did!
We slowly grew from an after-school activity box > preschool program in one city > a preschool program used across 8 countries.
The interactions with the education leaders made us understand the nuances of global preschool education and helped to further upgrade our product to become a truly international product two years later.
As of December 2019, Flintoclass was used by over 40 preschools across the Middle East and Southeast Asian countries including the likes of the Australian International School in Laos.
Watch the video below for feedback from edupreneurs across the world.
