From Flintobox to Flintoclass — How we created the Perfect Preschool Disruption

It was the year 2013 when we created our flagship product Flintobox with the specific objective of engaging children meaningfully at home. We roped in a bunch of designers and child experts and built what soon became the country’s favourite subscription activity box for children. Over the years, Flintobox turned into a household name as more and more parents found the need for screen-free engagement and fun learning for their children.

Fast-forward to 2016. We realised that it wasn’t just moms, dads, aunts and uncles who were our primary customers, but educators and independent preschool owners who found value in Flintobox!

Hold on.

Preschool owners?

How could an activity box, designed for after-school engagement help a preschool that already had fixed schedules, a curriculum, expert educators to teach, etc?

At one point, the numbers were too big to ignore, and I decided to personally reach out to understand how and why Flintobox was being used in a preschool.

What I heard, took me completely by surprise.

While some preschools used Flinto activities for hourly engagement, others had a dedicated Flinto Day every week. In fact, “Flinto” Day was a selling point in several preschools as it was already a trusted brand by parents.

Moreover, since Flintobox was a complete engagement kit, there was no need to monitor the teachers, providing ample time for owners to instead focus on operational aspects.

Further discussion with the owners highlighted 3 underlying issues across the independent preschools:

1. Absence of structured learning: Unlike K12 schools, the preschool industry lacks structured content for learning to take place. Most lesson plans are taken off the internet from non-Indian preschools, making it out of context. Moreover, educators are not equipped to distinguish between relevant and non-contextual content.
2. Lack of qualified teachers: With very few institutions that train and certify early educators, and the occupation treated as more of a ‘transitionary’ one between careers, most preschools and playschools lack efficient and dedicated teachers to deliver the program.
3. Poor infrastructure: The lack of space/engaging toys, along with poor student-teacher ratio, makes it difficult to manage all the children effectively, due to which, the need for independent engagement gained prominence.

Clearly, the preschool industry needed a breakthrough.

Now let me bring to light some interesting figures — the preschool market in India alone caters to 4M kids, with 90% belonging to the unorganised, independent sector. Growing at 20–25% CAGR, it is a highly demand-driven industry constrained by high-quality supply.

In fact… being largely addressable, fast-growing and highly fragmented, it was the perfect chance to build a sustainable business model.

The preschool market checked all the boxes to create the perfect disruption.

So we doubled down on the opportunity to make the right entry into the market.

Enter Flintoclass.

A preschool-in-a-box model to power independent/unbranded preschools to deliver high-quality early learning programs.

We created a comprehensive product that includes everything for structured learning to take place — a research-based early learning curriculum, daily lesson plans, pre-packaged materials for every child — every day, online teacher training, assessment & a parent communication app.

In fact, when we started out, we went under the radar and called it ‘Quest’ to understand how edupreneurs perceived the product. Let me take you on a trip down memory lane with our very first newspaper ad:

Quest then became ‘Doodleton’ before the final nomenclature of Flintoclass!

Here’s our very first explainer video from 2017. Shot in our tiny apartment office, Mirnalini, one of our early program developers, does a walkthrough of the product!

An interesting thing to note is at 6:40 of the video, Mirnalini does a Nostradamus by stating that our objective was to empower edupreneurs to run preschools from “your living room, classroom or even under a tree”. (Who knew back then that 3 years later, the Living Room would actually become the new classroom for kids!!)

In just a couple of years, Flintoclass became a massive hit for independent preschool owners and aspiring edupreneurs. Here’s a video with the feedback we received from parents and educators from our partner preschools :)

As of 2019, Flintoclass successfully inspired 1M preschool children across the globe.