Every one of us is acquainted with online educational tools for students. Terascore was an online educational tool for teachers. Read more to know how their idea made teachers’ life easy and how a brilliant idea was not so brilliant for the founders.
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Index:
Founder Details
Adam Helybely, Balazs Moldovamvi, Viktor Takacs, and Zsolt Multer together founded Terascore. The headquarters were based in the San Francisco Bay Area, Silicon Valley. They started this company after selling their health education-focused startup to a multinational healthcare provider. They developed an online platform that enabled teachers to create, conduct and manage tests.
Competitor Analysis
Quipper, Renaissance, Socrative, MasteryConnect, Certica Solutions were the major competitors. There were hundreds of edutech startup companies who were providing the same services.
MasteryConnect
Mastery Connect was able to get the attention of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg to get investment. It was software that enabled teachers to measure and plan individual student progress. They had a different approach from others by focusing on formative assessments. Instead of relying on test scores completely, the assessment also involved qualitative feedback. This helped the students learn more effectively.
Quipper
Quipper is an educational tech company, all in one kind of software. Services involve tutoring, e-learning, coaching, and assessment for the students. They supplement services for teachers, students, school administrators, and even stakeholders. They hold the vision of being “Distributors of Wisdom”.
Socrative
It is a cloud-based student response software. Here teachers can create quizzes and tests on teachers’ app and students answer through the student’s app. Teachers can assess in real-time whether students are able to grasp or facing difficulty in understanding the topic.
Funding and Investor Details
They received funding from one of the most prominent investors, Y Combinator. They have undergone only one round of seed funding and raised a total of $120K.
Business Model
Terascore aimed to move the system of test-taking online and making it efficient for teachers. They aimed to shorten the process of manually making the test, appearing, and then evaluating the same. It takes too much time and effort and to simplify they built a browser-based test authoring tool.
Students and teachers have long entered the network of mobile phones, using Facebook and every other networking apps. How long will we be using papers and hole punched files to maintain those offline assessment records?
Terascore covered 3 pronged approaches advantageous for teachers:
- Authoring: Helps in integrating images, links, videos, and even mathematical equations. This changed the view of test-taking by making it more fun and relevant.
- Delivery: Teachers can time the test and most importantly lock down the browser to avoid any cheating.
- Test results: It automatically grades, report, and assess info after submitting.
This instant analytics model helped teachers to down into question quality and difficulty with facilities of question banks for easy storage and reuse.
The whole process of test making and taking is uncomplicated and trouble-free for teachers. Moreover, students can easily refer to their assessment whenever required. It was a great model for both teachers and students.
Revenue Model
Terascore was used in five schools and created 500 tests per week. Though their startup idea was not adopted by many schools. The app was completely free but it had added premium services that had some charges. Founders offered a freemium pricing model with added premium features at $7 to $9 per month. They were unable to make larger margins facing competition from other similar companies.
Failure Analysis:
- Idea was not unique:
The major problem the idea held was that it was not a must-have but a nice-to-have software. Most teachers still prefer manually taking the test, and want one-on-one interactions with students.
- Market is not ready for the product:
Moreover, most schools still did not have the luxury and infrastructure to shift to the system online.
- Revenue Challenge:
They didn’t have a reliable revenue model. As the services were free, they could not generate profits by daily increasing expenses. People didn’t find the need to subscribe to premium services.
- Competition:
Edtech startups already had huge competition. There were a large number of companies providing the same services also at free of cost. This is the reason why many end up being failures as there is no positive cash flow.
- Lack of Marketing:
The company should have built a network with various schools to get a head start. Investing in marketing is necessary for people to become aware of the services, how useful is your product to them.
- Not a cheat-proof product:
Though the software had measures to prevent cheating from the same device. But it was really easy for students to cheat from other sources. This was a major drawback which did not allow teachers to switch to an online system.
Possible Fixes
The growth curve of ed-tech startups is really slow, there is not hyper-growth. It takes years for renowned education startups to get the model right which can generate profits and bring in customers as well. Patience is the only means to keep going. People can always look for cheaper alternatives over quality content. It takes a lot of effort for users to pay for the quality content which is built over time. Teachers do not need more features, all they look for is a simple, convenient, and transparent portal to easily work on. Once things get complicated they lose interest in adopting it.
Also, the company should have thoroughly analyzed the competitor and market they are entering in. If you are not adding value to the currently existing system, no one requires you.
Connecting with educational institutes would have been a lot better to know how classroom technology changes the outcomes, how students actually learn and know what they expect. Taking continuous feedback on what they could do better provides an upper hand to evolve according to need.
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What is Terascore?
Terascore was an online educational tool for the teachers. Read more to know how their idea made teachers’ life easy and how a brilliant idea was not so brilliant for the founders.
Who founded Terascore?
Adam Helybely, Balazs Moldovamvi, Viktor Takacs, and Zsolt Multer together founded Terascore. The headquarters were based in the San Francisco Bay Area, Silicon Valley. They started this company after selling their health education-focused startup to a multinational healthcare provider.