Built during the pandemic: Here's how this startup grew to become Canada's homeschooling solution

While social distancing restrictions and COVID-19 shifts due to health demands benefited most large enterprises, it snuffed out a substantial number of small businesses and entrepreneurial ventures. The economic impact of coronavirus on small businesses has been significant since 2020, leading to financial fragility and, in many cases, a shutdown. 

In Canada, smaller businesses reported a revenue decrease of 40% or more and up to 6% of companies actively considered bankruptcy. According to a study by CIBC, 81% of Canadian small business owners confirmed a negative impact due to COVID-19. Despite these statistics, I discovered a problem that needed to be solved and started Schoolio Learning Inc, an entrepreneurial venture to solve a larger ongoing problem that I recognized because of the pandemic.

In-home learning saw a massive spike since the beginning of the pandemic. 

Post COVID-19, the world was forced to adapt to the new requirements for survival. One main issue was school closures to minimize transmission of the disease. School closures led to challenges in the new home-learning environment, with lack of engagement for students in virtual school setups, and parents looking for solutions to help their children keep up with the curriculum. Although homeschooling has been common for centuries, the available resources for parents looking to homeschool or supplement their students’ learning was not easily accessible, not Canadian, and heavily religious based. Schoolio identified these issues as grave, and the disruption in learning for school-going children could lead to considerable foundational deficiencies. The premise behind starting the company was to provide secular complete Canadian curriculum homeschooling solutions. 

Much of the past year’s media discussion focused on the pandemic affecting in-person education and teaching methods, with less attention allotted to homeschooling and how parents are taking charge in providing hands-on and flexible homeschooling education for their kids. Since the beginning of the pandemic, up to 63% of US parents have become favourable to homeschooling because it allows their children to progress at their own pace on various aspects like academic learning, emotional development, and social development. More parents have opted for homeschooling as an added layer of education or an alternative to their child’s current learning methods. 

Parents are now open to homeschooling more than ever.  

According to a customer poll conducted by Schoolio, 43% of parents who were not homeschooling before the pandemic indicated that they are now “very likely” to consider homeschooling. Parents have shown interest in investing in their kids’ holistic education by adopting a curriculum that engages kids. These teaching practices include wellness, financial literacy, coding, and much more than the core math, sciences, and language subjects.

Parents wishing for a change in their children’s foundational growth can now focus on schooling methods that provide a more hands-on approach. A well-researched and thoughtfully created homeschooling curriculum can be used independently or as an additive layer for learning to benefit children the most. Apart from the knowledge required for further institutionalized education, such curricula focus on subjects likely to offer children worldly wisdom and tools to cope with the changing economies. Furthermore, topics like financial literacy and emotional intelligence incorporated in schooling at an early age can lead to the more holistic development of a child. As a parent, I know I would want my child to learn about mental wellbeing, emotional intelligence and other topics that help prepare them for their futures. 

It is equally important to include physical activities during a child’s developmental stage. Apart from promoting sports as an extracurricular activity, parents should also allow time for leisurely physical exercises that aren’t inherently competitive and teach natural sportsmanship and teamwork. 

“Building a business in the pandemic had its challenges.”

While building our own startups, we face many, many challenges. An additional hurdle of building a business during the pandemic brought on unprecedented variables such as the economic downturn, remote work trends, shelter-in-place protocols, businesses shutting down, etc. 

The two most important ones I faced while building Schoolio are a) validation of the idea and b) understanding the processes to market my product. Firstly, validation of ideas is essential so that you can build the most impactful, minimal product possible to take to market, considering all the factors that affect change and decision making. However, one key hurdle I faced with starting a homeschooling solution is that there's not enough information, processes or tools to help go to market very quickly. Education is a sensitive topic, we had to make sure we were listening to the right inputs, feedback, and validation to make the right decisions. As a parent myself, I wanted to build a business that would help my daughter seek the best quality education possible and I built the homeschooling kits with the help of a team of education experts and parents. Businesses are a representation of the change you want to bring to the world, that’s why it is vital to have deep purpose, driven by life experiences. 

Second, many startups are keen on pushing the most important minimal product you can take to market. In the emerging startup world, much emphasis is put on “minimal product to market,” but not enough on the process. The challenge is to learn and seek guidance on how to get past that hump between validation and sales, or ideation in sales, where you have to validate, you have to market test. You have to see some traction before you can go to market with a full-blown product. 

Schoolio is the only company with Canadian curriculum written with the expectation of each province in mind. The end goal for Schoolio is to empower parents to take charge of their children’s educational needs and offer students a chance at a well-rounded education. Looking at the growing revenue and demand for additive curriculum purchases, Schoolio is now launching in the United States in 2021. With a potential market size of over 4 Million homeschooling families in the US, Schoolio is designing homeschool curriculum kits for language, math, sciences, and social studies subjects.