Empower Educational Ecosystem

• The school management systems available now are built on a decade old technology and they are very expensive.

• Existing software systems are built for the teachers and students in developed countries or for the schools and teachers which admits the higher income group families in developing countries. The students from the lower income groups are ignored. Especially the schools and the teachers in the rural areas never get a chance to have their school operations digitized.

• With the currently available school management products, teachers and administrators had to undergo lengthy, painstaking training to understand, configure and use for their daily school operations. 

• The softwares in the current market advocates teachers and school administrators to use their computers for majority of their operations and not mobile devices. The problem is, majority of the schools in developing countries which caters to the average or low income group students don’t even have computers in their schools.

• We designed our products with latest cutting-edge technology which provides exceptional User Experience. We are equipped to bring technology driven products to students, teachers and parents around the globe at an affordable price.

• With our modularized deployed multi-tenant SaaS model, we would be able to deliver to the schools in developing countries with students from middle income and lower income groups.

• We provide pre-configured applications ready to use which doesn’t need too much setup. With products with high user experience learning process for the teachers or staff, the schools from rural  under developed area need lesser setup requirement, so that  and can use our products to digitize their operations.

• The products we design are highly engaging which will help the students to improve their performance. The attendance module motivates students to increase the attendance and library module encourage them to improve their reading habits.

• Our products are built  mobile device focused and we have designed our products in a way the majority of the school’s daily operations can be done from their mobile devices alone. We are working to ensure that we can cater to the mobile devices which are using 2G and 3G technology in developing countries so that the ignored schools get a chance to digitize their operations.

WHAT IS OUR PRODUCT - Our product is a mobile focused School Management Software (modularized SaaS application). We are initially launching with 2 modules but the final product will have multiple modules to cover all the operations of a school.

WHAT DOES IT DO - Our first two modules of application will be used in schools by teachers or librarians for their regular daily operations of school and library even by the schools which doesn’t have computers in their school.

ATTENDANCE MODULE - With our attendance module, taking attendance would be like giving high-five (Example link to the viral video  compared to the attendance management training video which takes more than 2 hours for the attendance module provided by leader in School software provider in US). In short, we give the best UI experience to the teachers and students and parents. The attendance module keep the parents updated instantly on their children’s presence in the school. The recent reports are there is an increase in absenteeism in schools especially after the pandemic. Our goal is to reduce the truancy in schools.

LIBRARY MODULE - check-in and check-out of books, re-selfing of books, all can be done with the mobile devices by the library staff.  Students or parents can request hold of a book and track the due dates. Students will know the new arrivals and get a list of recommended books depending on their interests and history of borrowing. All with just their mobile devices. The experience is similar to the attendance module and the process is simple and neat, while the software does the work behind for them and most of the tasks which the staff do are automated.

TEACHERS - are the working force with stretched out and tiring hours. By the end of the day they return home exhausted. Our products will remove some of their pain points in operational tasks.  At the same time, remove the human errors.  ALL FROM THEIR MOBILE DEVICE.

SCHOOL ADMINISTRATORS - Our products will give a high level metrics of students truancy history, late arrivals to school to the principal or head master. They can also drill down to the student level month, yearly trends. It will enable the school administrators to track and confirm that the teachers are taking attendance on time.

LIBRARY STAFF - The library module will help the schools in reducing the number of lost books. Especially for the schools which doesn’t have expensive desktop software and hardware to manage their library operations or schools which keep them manually. The chief librarian at any point in time can have the metrics in their mobile device. As the schools can use the mobile devices to manage the check-in and check-out of books. The responsible senior students can act as library staff and check-in and check-out the books standing at the library entrance.

STUDENTS - The students (above age 13) or the parents can check their children’s attendance records (monthly, yearly) including number of days they are absent or late to class and make sure they comply with minimum attendance requirements of the school. The same way they can track the books they borrowed and due dates and the borrowed history. The parents can put a hold on a book which they wanted to borrow from home anytime. Here are some screenshots of prototypes of library module. Our mobile apps are highly engaging and encourage the students to improve their reading habits or reduce overall truancy.

PARENTS - Our attendance module is a boon to the parents who’s children travel long distances through dangerous routes. Our application will work as long as the parents own a mobile phone. They get an alert instantly when their children reach school and teacher takes attendance.  If their children are late to school, also they get notified. The world is dangerous place, whether the children travel through the dangerous mountains or take the busy subways in a metropolis. ATTENDANCE module will give a  peace of mind when the parents know that their children reached school safe on time.

DEMOGRAPHY - We carefully design our products in such a way that they are useful to the schools which are in big metropolis like New York, Tokyo or London and at the same time they are useful to the students and teachers who live in remotest corners of the globe like small village in Nepal or Bolivia . The ATTENDANCE module of our product will be a life saver for the community at the same time, it will decrease dropouts and increase the student/parent/teacher participation for a safer world.

RAJ RAJADURAI, founder, is expert in building reliable, robust, secured SaaS ERP stack with more than 14 years of hands on experience in cutting edge technology while working in silicon valley. He is also a seasoned application architect. 

He worked in top BIG 5s and also in startups. He has the experience in working at university like Stanford managing the ERP solutions for them. 

He has the experience in working for GE, one of the largest corporation responsible to built, deploy and manage corporate HR and PAYROLL ERP application serving more than 65000 users with near zero downtime.

We also have a group of developers in India with more than 7 years of developing applications which can serve the users with mobile devices.

We are planning to hire part time and full time employees work with customers and discuss with them the issues they face with the product we deliver and how they would like them to be resolved. They also will research the current trends in school systems and the usage and adopt our products accordingly.

We have interviewed numerous teachers and school principals in India and US as part of designing our product to observe the issues they face in using the application or lack of a good application to take care of their daily operations.

MOBILE DEVICE FOCUSED -. Teachers are on their feet most of the time and students in some countries don't even have computers. We understand that. That's why, with our application by using just mobile devices, most of the tasks of teachers and students or parents can be accomplished. As our applications are totally SaaS based, all they need is a mobile phone to manage their attendance and library operations digitally and available anytime. 2G or 3G compatible should be sufficient in third world countries to use our mobile application.  According to GSMA reports, as of 2021, there are 50% of the mobile devices are with 2G and 3G technology in CIS countries and  58% in Middle Eastern and North African countries. In South Saharan Africa more than 83% of mobile devices are with 2G and 3G. Our product is designed to work with such schools where most of the parents and teachers own which are with 2G and 3G technology. For the schools who can’t afford to issue ID cards to the students, we will be using facial recognition biometric technology in our attendance module wherever possible.

HIGHLY ENGAGING - The tools we design are highly engaging which will help the student and teaching community improve their performance. The attendance module motivates the student and parents to increase the attendance rate and library module encourage the students to improve their reading habits by providing suggested books depending on their past borrowing history or search history.

FULLY CUSTOMIZED SOLUTIONS - Unlike other products in the market, our customers don't have to struggle to onboard or spend hours in setting up their applications. We provide pre-configured applications ready to use. This makes the shortest onboarding time. This enables the teachers and school administrators understand the accountability of the school stakeholders easing expectation, seamless operations.

COMPETITIVE PRICING -  School management ERP in the market are very expensive and it is impossible for average and low budgeted schools in developing countries to purchase and use. We, at ELAPIZ Inc. are developing something to remove all pain points. With the modularized SaaS module we could deliver at a lower price which enables average schools to afford to digitize their operations. Our motto is teachers and students should focus on curriculum, not spend time on setting up and learning to use the  application.

MOBILE DEVICE FOCUSED -. Teachers are on their feet most of the time and students in some countries don't even have computers. We understand that. That's why, with our application by using just mobile devices, most of the tasks of teachers and students or parents can be accomplished. As our applications are totally SaaS based, all they need is a mobile phone to manage their attendance and library operations digitally and available anytime. 2G or 3G compatible should be sufficient in third world countries to use our mobile application.  According to GSMA reports, as of 2021, there are 50% of the mobile devices are with 2G and 3G technology in CIS countries and  58% in Middle Eastern and North African countries. In South Saharan Africa more than 83% of mobile devices are with 2G and 3G. Our product is designed to work with such schools where most of the parents and teachers own which are with 2G and 3G technology. For the schools who can’t afford to issue ID cards to the students, we will be using facial recognition biometric technology in our attendance module wherever possible.

HIGHLY ENGAGING - The tools we design are highly engaging which will help the student and teaching community improve their performance. The attendance module motivates the student and parents to increase the attendance rate and library module encourage the students to improve their reading habits by providing suggested books depending on their past borrowing history or search history.

FULLY CUSTOMIZED SOLUTIONS - Unlike other products in the market, our customers don't have to struggle to onboard or spend hours in setting up their applications. We provide pre-configured applications ready to use. This makes the shortest onboarding time. This enables the teachers and school administrators understand the accountability of the school stakeholders easing expectation, seamless operations.

COMPETITIVE PRICING -  School management ERP in the market are very expensive and it is impossible for average and low budgeted schools in developing countries to purchase and use. We, at ELAPIZ Inc. are developing something to remove all pain points. With the modularized SaaS module we could deliver at a lower price which enables average schools to afford to digitize their operations. Our motto is teachers and students should focus on curriculum, not spend time on setting up and learning to use the  application.

2022 - GOAL - By the end of MAY 2022, we will release MVP both library and attendance modules to the Indian market with the schools which are having 400 to 2000 students and 2000 to 4000 library books. At the same time we will introduce the library module to the elementary school teacher’s in US to manage their private class libraries as beta users at a discounted rate for the first year.

FIVE YEAR PLAN - In five years we expect to introduce our products in east asian countries like Bangladesh, Malaysia, Singapore, Sri Lanka, Philippines and Vietnam. We are also doing marketing research to introduce our products in north African countries including middle eastern countries and some of the south American countries. We would introduce our library module to US school districts which are not cash rich at a discounted price for the first two years so that the school districts which are struggling to avoid to close their schools by helping them in their IT budget with our products.

After establishing our stable product in US school districts, we will introduce to other school districts.

We would start the development of localizing the product to be used in the local language in the sixth year. We will be introducing two more modules in addition to ATTENDANCE and LIBRARY modules from 6th year.

• We have not started achieving impact goals yet as we are at the DEVELOPMENT stage. But, I can share the details on how we are planning to measure the progress. 

• Our first and foremost goal is to release the MVP (targeted for May 2022) and in the first few months after releasing the MVP would be to make the product stable and fix all the bugs and also we will carefully listen to the beta users and their concerns in difficulties in using the product and fix them.

• By the end of 2022, we should have very stable and scalable product which are ready to release to other countries with higher scale and improved price. We should see in increase in the number of schools in faster phase in the second half of 2023.

• Number of schools our products and the total students and teachers who are severed is a good measure of our growth. By the end of one year from the release of MVP, we estimate to server 100,000 students and teachers.

I expect our products make impact on the problem in multiple ways. 

• The schools which are not able to digitize the school operations are given a chance with the affordable price. 
• For the schools which are already digitized their operations, we pave path to alleviate the operational difficulties in managing their software with our innovative and user friendly design.
• Improvement in students’ participation and engagement after introducing our products to the schools. 
• Motivate parents to improve their children presence in school
• Provide peace of mind and sense of security to the parents and school administrators.

We are developing our software as modularized SaaS product, which can be delivered to the schools depending on what they can afford. The CORE technologies we use for our product:

FRONTEND: Android and iOS Apps, Browser for desktop

ABSTRACTION LAYER: Angular, Ionic

API Framework: FastAPI

DATABASE: PostgreSQL, MongoDB

CI/CD: Concourse

Repository & Version control: GitHub & Bitbucket

Cloud Providers: AWS & Azure

NOTIFICATION: SMS / USSD / IVR / WhatsApp / Email

SERVER ARCHITECTURE: Containerized Docker Images

ORCHESTRATION: Kubernetes

WORKFLOW AUTOMATION: N8N

OBSERVABILITY: Grafana, ElasticSearch

Currently it’s a small team represented by Indian and American representation. We are planning to include people from diverse ethnicity from different countries as we grow.

We will be providing our products to as many countries as possible to reach the remotest parts of the globe. We will be hiring local talents for support and sales and marketing teams to cutdown on our maintenance and marketing costs in each country.

We will deliver our products to the population where the schools are located who can’t afford to get the enterprise applications to digitize and automate the operations of their school.

KEY RESOURCES - seasoned technologist in building cutting edge technology products. Excellent group of developers to get the frontend mobile application built.

PARTNERS & KEY STAKEHOLDERS - We have reached out the teacher communities in US and India and listen to them about the pain points in their current professional life as teaches and school administrators. We have designed our products to address those issued observer by teachers and administrators.

COST STRUCTURE - In the initial two years, most of our expenditure are for software development and salary to the support, marketing and sales teams in various countries. As we have our stable and scalable product, the cost of software development will reduce from second year onwards. We are also fan of organic marketing with our high quality best user experience product, the cost on marketing and sales would get reduced. We made sure our design and architecture is carefully designed so that it is prepared for scalability for the next 10 years.

SEGMENTS - we will market our products to two market segments.

1. School districts in US and international schools in other countries with large student population, which are well funded can afford to subscribe to expensive Student Management Systems. We will provide our products with premium support at premium price.
2. The second market segment is schools in developing world which serves to the middle and lower income population and some school districts in US, which are struggling to keep the schools under the district running. We will provide them with the discounted price with a smaller margin. We would generate revenue by providing to larger number of schools in the developing world as we could hire local talents for support and sales at a lower cost.

We will adopt robin hood business model to generate majority of our revenue while service the schools in developed and at the same time serving schools in developing countries at the discounted price.

SURPLUS - First year will not be profitable. The next 4 years, the company will reinvest the profit towards improvements in the product and expanding infrastructure after paying the staff salary and bonus. From 5th year, certain percentage of it’s profit will be ear-marked for philanthropic contribution to schools and students after providing dividends to the investors and lenders.

VALUE PROPOSITION - the number of schools which are introduced first time to the technology for day to day operations, will benefit the teachers and students by using our products will show the impact we made in the society.  The customer values are visible when the teachers operational tasks are removed or simplified and they have more time to spend on curriculum. The parents can track growth of their children more effectively. With our products we provide seamless communication between parents and the school.

• The product development is fully funded by the founder with the bootstrapped funds until the MVP is delivered to our first customers and also for initial few marketing expenses.
• While the MVP is being developed, we are applying for SOLVE MIT challenge.
• Once the MVP is released we will approach the angel investors to cover expenses for any year.
• We also have been confirmed of a bank loan and line of credit which we will use only if needed.
• We expect to see the revenue coming in to take care of the marketing and sales expenses from the middle of 2023.
• In the beginning of second year we are planning to go for first round of funding from VCs.
• In the next 4 years we are expecting to serve 2 million students and teachers and managing 3 million library resources and serve minimum of two school districts in US.

• In summary, we would be financially sustainable with the revenue from the premium customers and from large number of small and medium schools around the globe.

Currently we are in the developing stage. Hence, we are unable to share any examples at this point.