Built in staffrooms and classrooms, not just an office

Attendance was a ruled column filled in with a pen. Fees were carbon-copy receipts in a numbered book. Marks travelled from an answer sheet to a teacher's diary to a tabulation register to a report card, copied by hand each time, with a fresh chance to go wrong at every step.

It worked, in the sense that schools ran. But a parent only learned their child had missed three days when the report card arrived. A principal only knew the fee position after someone spent a week adding it up. A teacher who wanted last year's question paper had to find a colleague who had kept one.

That is the world this company was built out of — not a market study, but a set of daily frustrations we had watched from inside classrooms and staffrooms.

A school could not see its own information quickly enough to act on it. A student outside a metro could not find decent notes in the language they actually study in. A good tutor two streets away was invisible to the family who needed one.

Software for schools already existed, of course. It was priced for large private schools in big cities, written for English-medium offices, and built on the assumption of a steady broadband line and a computer on every desk. Put it in front of a state-board school in a district town and it failed on all four counts at once.

So the brief we gave ourselves was narrow and awkward: one platform that a school office, a class teacher, a parent with a basic Android phone and a student on a shared connection could all use — in Hindi or English, on the network they actually have, at a price a school can defend to its trustees.

Early on we built admission and fee screens with a field for everything, because more configurable felt safer. Clerks who had managed fine with a register now faced forms four screens long, and they did what anyone would do — they kept using the register and filled the software in later, badly.

The objections we heard were rarely about features. "Our teachers won't use it." "We tried this before and stopped after two months." "The internet goes at eleven every morning." One school told us plainly that the last system they bought was never opened after the training day.

Those conversations cost us months and taught us the rule we still work to: if a teacher needs training to mark attendance, the fault is ours, not theirs.

We cut attendance down to a class list and one tap per absent student, made every page load on a weak connection, and sent the parent a message the same morning instead of a summary at the end of term. None of it was clever engineering. It was simply the version teachers would actually use every day.

The message to parents was the change schools noticed first. Absences dropped because families found out while the day was still on. Fee follow-ups stopped being a phone-call marathon. Principals began describing us to other principals, and schools started arriving through word of mouth instead of a sales call — the first sign that the product was doing the selling.

The team splits into three parts. Business heads work out of the regions they serve — Gorakhpur, Agra and Kanpur — so onboarding a school means sitting in its office, not scheduling a video call. Technology builds and runs the platform. Quality tests every release on the modest Android phones and patchy networks our users actually have, before a school ever sees it.

What we look for is the same in all three: patience with people who did not ask for new software, and enough respect for a school's existing routine to fit around it. Anyone who has taught or worked in a school office starts with an advantage here, because they already know which parts of the day cannot be interrupted.

The next stretch is more of Uttar Pradesh and the states around it, board by board and district by district, rather than a thin presence everywhere. Alongside it: study material and papers in more regional languages, and a version of the daily screens — attendance, marks, fee entry — that keeps working when the connection drops and syncs once it returns.

The school we most want to serve better is the one with three hundred students, one computer in the office and no IT staff at all. And the things we have decided to stay out of: we do not sell student or parent data, we do not show advertising to children, and we do not charge separately for the modules a school cannot run without.