1.3 million monthly active users and 30% of secondary schools in the UK: learnings from Naimish Gohil, Founder & CEO of Satchel

Emerge's network gives me the opportunity to share learnings from some of the most successful edtech entrepreneurs around the world. This month in my ongoing series of inspiring founder interviews, Naimish Gohil, founder of Satchel, shares his journey to creating a product that is used by every third secondary school in the UK, as well as his insights on what makes for a good team, what it takes to solve a real problem and how to stay driven.

Take time to reflect as you read — these are purposeful long-form interviews. Why? Because we believe “there are no shortcuts to knowledge” (Ben Horowitz) and that “sometimes taking time is actually a shortcut” (Haruki Murakami). So go on — make a coffee, sit back, indulge yourself.

Here are some highlights from the interview:

🤝 It’s about coming into work every day and working with like-minded people that are passionate about what we’re doing and will go and find a way to figure things out; with guidance, support and coaching.

💡 I decided to take the plunge because I really believed in the problem we were solving. I initially built this solution for the school that I was working at and I could see that it was starting to make an impact. People were using it and the issues around homework started to disappear.

📓 We weren’t the first company in the world to create a solution for homework, but we turned it into a product category. We believed that homework was not a feature, but that it’s a problem in its own right and that it requires to focus on every part of that process. By doing that, we ended up building a great product and a very strong brand, where today, people see us as “the homework people”.

It has gone pretty well for you Naimish. How well? It has! One in three secondary schools in the UK use our product and we have about 1,3 million monthly active users. This does not even cover what we are doing internationally either.

What is your one line elevator pitch for Satchel? Our vision is to empower school leaders and to give them the tools they need to run a world-class educational organisation.

So how did it all start? Why did you decide to become an entrepreneur? It was mostly accidental. I always wanted to work for myself and I did a few entrepreneurial things whilst at university and college. When I became an assistant headteacher I had one of two choices to make; either I would continue the training to become a headteacher or quit my job and really focus on “Show My Homework”, which was the product at the time.

I decided to take the plunge because I really believed in the problem we were solving. We’ve got several products now, but our first product was called “Show my Homework”, which really tackled the age-old problem of homework. I initially built this solution for the school that I was working at and I could see that it was starting to make an impact. People were using it and the issues around homework started to disappear. This leads me to think that teachers up and down the country could also resonate with the product and the problem we were solving.

There’s a notion of being all in and I’m very much like that. Your salary is a form of security, but it’s only when you step outside of the unknown that you can do really great things. There has to be an element of risk, where you might fail. Before raising venture capital and focusing fully on the product we had a low revenue per month, but within three months going full time, we had increased this exponentially. Hard work and perseverance ultimately help you make your own luck.

It must have been exciting. What has been the best thing about running your own company? Building a team.

There’s nothing like it, it reminds me of teaching, when you teach the kids something and they understand it and they revert it back to you, that’s a great feeling, ask any teacher.

Today there about 70 people in the business and we’ve got several people in the company that have grown with the business, who didn’t necessarily have a degree or relevant experience, but they adapted, they evolved, they’ve been hungry and they have unbelievable company spirit. It’s been so fantastic to see them grow and develop into the leaders they are today. That’s one of the things I’m most proud of.

For me, it’s about coming into work every day and working with like-minded people that are passionate about what we’re doing and will go and find a way to figure things out; with guidance, support and coaching. I still get excited about that being the CEO and founder, it’s a very privileged position and being able to assemble a team of people with like-minded values and ambitions is a lot of fun.

There are always challenges to overcome for a growing business. What has been the most difficult aspect of the entrepreneurial journey for you? Personally, I find it very hard to switch off. I’m on all the time and struggle with the work/life balance. I think that’s my downfall, I’m constantly working. It’s not necessarily doing manual work, but it’s the constant thinking, the mental stress that it’s always on your mind. I’m not sure at what point I’ll change that, but that’s definitely one thing I need to get better at.

And the second thing is that it’s like a rollercoaster but without wearing the belt. The emotions that come along with that, the fear, the thrill, is something that you have to learn to manage. The key thing that I try to do is keep moving forward. It doesn’t matter if it’s small steps, as long as you keep progressing and keep working hard (very hard), I believe that eventually, you can overcome anything.

Over time you find different challenges, different thresholds. I remember that I used to worry about how we didn’t reach £5000 that month, and now I worry that we won’t hit £300,000 this month, so it’s all relative. That worry will never go away, it’s just different challenges. But that kind of thinking keeps you from focusing on finding solutions. It’s very easy to feel sorry for yourself, and I definitely recommend avoiding that.

Can you remember back to where the idea for the company came from? I was an IT teacher in a school and then I became the Head of IT. As my remit changed from being a classroom teacher to being a member of the senior leadership team, I was in charge of implementing a learning platform across the school I was working in. It was that point in time when I saw first-hand some of the challenges of implementing technology across the school.

The platform was incredibly difficult to use for me, and I’m a geek, so how could I expect 50 teachers after school to learn how to use this complicated learning platform. That gave me the idea of what I could do.

I was also in charge of homework in the school I was working in, so I just connected the dots. I didn’t have the resources or the manpower or probably the skillset to build a learning platform, but I could really focus in on how I can solve this homework problem that I deal with on a daily basis. That’s what prompted the idea for “Show My Homework”.

Thinking over the last few years, what would you pick out as the key milestones you think happened to get to where you are today?

1. One of them was solving the problem. We weren’t the first company in the world to create a solution for homework, but we turned it into a product category. We believed that homework was not a feature, but that it’s a problem in its own right and that it requires to focus on every part of that process. By doing that, we ended up building a great product and a very strong brand, where today, people see us as “the homework people”.
2. Having total conviction about what we’re doing. Because when the chips are down, it’s not the money that’s going to incentivise you to get up or to be the last one standing, it’s going to be that deep driving belief that what you’re doing is going to make an impact on the world.
3. Being able to identify who our stakeholder is and whom we’re solving this problem for. Schools are very complicated organisations, there are many variables at play and many stakeholders to consider. You have to be crystal clear about whom you are solving this problem for. That was very important for us to figure out because that enabled us to build a predictable revenue model via marketing and a great product, and off the back of that, raise venture capital.

Getting to "market-product fit" is essential for the success of any business. How do you think you knew you had achieved this? What were you measuring to know you had 'got there'? Given that I was essentially the first customer, I could see the before and after. Even within my school, the “before” was having two or three people using this platform. Since we started to use “Show My Homework”, everyone across the school would use it. Then when I’d go to the parents evening, suddenly parents were much more informed about what the homework was, whereas before they used to challenge the teachers, saying that they never set any homework. I experienced a whole number of these subtle signals, being the end user myself. Those were the things that gave me confidence within my own school.

When we started to reach out to other schools, with similar demographics, size and geographic locations, we saw that the problem we were solving for my school, was also being solved for other schools.

Eventually, we started to see that we help school leaders remove this problem which they often had to deal with for staff, students and parents. The fact that our solution solved the problem of homework gave me a lot of confidence, that’s when we started to see product-market fit.

Making an impact is really important in Education. How do you measure yours? In the early days, it was quite anecdotal, like conversations with teachers and sharing reports with the leadership team. Over time, we really focused on different kinds of case studies. Some schools were really focused on parental engagement with homework, some wanted to ensure that they could have a consistent homework policy, some schools wanted to measure the quality of homework. The fact that we had schools that were excited to talk to us about the problems we were solving gave us a lot of confidence.

You can also see it from the usage. If you look for “Show my Homework” on the App Store, we’re always in the top ten, all throughout the academic year, so it’s not seasonal.

The fact that we have 70,000-80,000 teachers set homework every single week using our product is really exciting. We also have parents that log in six days a week. Those things are important because I’ve found is that software in schools does not get used unless it’s solving a problem.

We’ve also been fortunate that we’ve won a number of awards, industry awards from customer success, customer service, to impact in the classroom, so that’s been really beneficial as well.

You have done well against a background where everyone says that selling in the edtech market is really hard — how did you do it? Edtech has got a couple of different facets. Our DNA is really B2B, selling to schools. We built the majority of our customer base by sheer hard work. It has taken time because there was no such thing as central procurement, so we had to sell school to school. By any stretch of imagination, it’s very challenging. Without sounding like a broken record, you have to start with a problem and whom you are solving that problem for. Then you can think about how you can find more of these people.

The key thing is not to give up at any point in that process. If you send someone one email and then decide that the sales process didn’t work, it doesn’t mean that it didn’t work, it means you didn’t see it through the different stages. You have to be very disciplined in building a sales process. It’s also important to recognise that are going to be some people that are just shopping, some people that are just learning about the technology, there are going to be some people that are maybe comparing and some people that are ready to buy. It’s very important that you think about who your buckets are in your sales process.

It’s important also not to change the process every five minutes like you can with a B2C product. You have to give it a certain amount of time to test your approach, but if you do it in really short intervals, you’re not going to test anything. Because there are lots of variables at play, you have to be consistent about focusing on a certain kind of customer, a certain kind of marketing material and a certain kind of sales pitch.

For example, you can decide to focus on all of the headteachers, in London, start in East London, and focus on sending them six messages over the next six weeks, with the aim of not getting a sale, but getting to do a demonstration with the right person who’s in charge of the school.

I think a lot of people make the mistake that they try and close deals to quickly. You can’t close deals straight away and you can’t force people to move faster. If you want to close a certain amount of deals in a month, the key thing is that you have to build a pipeline. If you want to close £1m worth of deals in the month of March, you’re going to have to have at least £4m worth of deals in the pipeline. It takes time to build the pipeline, this means that you have to plan for 3-4 months of ramp-up time for a new salesperson you hire.

Part of your journey involved raising investment — what did you learn from that? It always takes longer than you think.

You really have to do your research on the kind of investor that will best fit what you’re looking for. If you’re looking for £500,000, there’s no point in going to Balderton or Atomico. The more you can articulate that and the more conviction you have in that story, the more confidence you will give to potential investors. For example, “I want to raise £500,000, to hire 4 sales people, to attend 5 events, and we’re hoping to generate 100 leads, to qualify at least 25 of them and close 10 of them by June 1st. That would amount to £50,000 in monthly recurring revenue”.

You need to be crystal clear on what you will do with the investment and how it will grow the business. Once you’ve done that, you should consider whom you can potentially reach out to for that amount of money; like investors, angels, seed stage venture funds, not-for-profit, grants, crowdfunding, etc. There’s capital available in so many different avenues today.

Then it’s important to give yourself ample time. So if you think it’s going to take 3 months, give yourself 6 months, if you think it’s going to take 6 months, give yourself 12 months. Likewise, if you think you’ll need £100,000, you really need £200,000.

If you had to pass on 3 golden rules for aspiring or current entrepreneurs, what would they be?

1. Find a problem that you’re passionate about solving - It’s really important that you’re solving a problem, but also that you’re passionate about solving that problem.
2. Always challenge the status quo - Don’t accept anything as standard, challenge everything. Often in the early days, people would tell us that this was just a feature business, or that their learning platform already included homework. But we believed that we were solving a problem teachers could resonate with. It takes away the anxiety for parents and students and ultimately, it helps us ensure that the time the students are spending on homework is worthwhile.
3. Be mission-driven - Don’t do it for the money, especially in education. The reality is that no one goes into the profession of teaching to make money. People want to make a difference. Yes, we’re a business with shareholders, we’re a private limited business, we want to be profitable, those things are important. That’s not the sole reason I get up in the morning. It’s about providing a great product, a great service, which ultimately allows us to build a business that is very meaningful in education. If we can do that, the net result of that is being a very sustainable profitable business that will provide returns to all shareholders.

As regards learning from others, is there one course or book you think everyone should take/do that has helped you? One of my favourite books is called “Under the Hood” by Stan Slap.

It’s all about culture, strategies and lessons learned on how to build a culture that creates high performing teams. Culture is a living, breathing thing. It’s not table tennis, it’s not fruit machines in the workplace. Culture is critical when it comes to scaling the team and ensuring the DNA of the company gets cascaded through management, team leaders and a new employee.

The book shares lots of really good examples of how to think about the flow of communication from the top down. I thought that was really valuable because when there’s ten of you, it’s really easy to tell everyone “this is what we’re doing, this is why we’re doing it” and you can look at people and see whether everyone’s on the same page. However, when you start having an executive team, a management team, team leaders and have so much information flowing, it’s very important that there’s a consistent stream of communication from the top off the company, all the way down to new members of staff that are joining the team.

If you are not consciously aware of this then the culture will manifest itself and it may not be what you have envisioned.

In terms of the key components that founders need to succeed, Emerge focus on the right Network, core Expertise and access to Capital. Which parts were critical to you early on?

It’s definitely lessons learned. I learn the majority of new things from other entrepreneurs, that’s almost priceless. If you can pick the brains of people who are a little bit ahead of you on their journey, they can help pave the way for you to avoid making obvious mistakes, just from sharing a five-minute conversation.

There’s so much value in that.

I’m not what you’d call a business person, I’m really a teacher. There’s a number of areas where I’m not the most commercially savvy. Being able to surround yourself with people that you can trust, that can give you honest, practical advice, whether that’s shareholders, investors, other entrepreneurs, is really valuable.

I wish that in the early days I had the network that I have today. I ended up making some grave mistakes that either cost me a lot of money or a lot of stress. Whenever there’s something I’m worried about, I tend to pick up the phone and call different people asking for their input. They won’t necessarily give me the answer, but having another perspective helps me refine my thought process and make better decisions. That’s the power of having a network and a community.

So Naimish, what’s the next big goal for you? We’re really excited, we’re still continuing to grow in the UK, but we’re growing outside of the UK too. There are some really interesting opportunities that we have in front of us. We’re continuing to develop our product suite. We’re investing significant amounts of money in R&D and we’re investing in growing outside of the UK. We’ve got a very clear path of where we want to be in 18 months time.

This interview was kindly given by Naimish Gohil, Founder & CEO of Satchel to Nic Newman, Partner at Emerge Education.

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Thank-you for reading… I would hugely appreciate some likes 👍 and shares 🙌 so that others can find it!

Nic

Nic Newman

Read writing from NAXN — nic newman on Medium. I write about growth. From the startups we invest in at Emerge to the companies where I am a NED, from early years schooling for my kids to my own personal development. It all comes back to one central idea — how to GROW. Life really is all about growth.

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