After a successful collaboration in spring, we are thrilled to announce that Setapp’s experts will once again mentor xEdu startups for their Fall 2019 cohort! 

If you haven’t heard about xEdu yet – they are Europe’s leading business accelerator for #Edtech startups creating transformative learning solutions with pedagogical impact.

The startups can once again look forward to consultation in software development, user experience and customer development. We are excited to announce our three mentors for the fall ‘19 cohort: 

Cezary Mudyna

Cezary, our Chief Technology Officer, has more than a 15-year track record in e-education and publishing, running large software engineering teams at enterprise level. He will mentor xEdu startups on tech leadership and organisation.

Rafał Staromłyński

Rafał has been associated with the graphic design industry for 12 years. He has been professionally involved with User Experience design for 5 years, previously designing web application interfaces, graphics and brand identities. He looks for solutions that simultaneously help achieve the organization’s goals and respond to the user needs. At Setapp, he heads the Product Design department, creating digital products based on UCD (user-centred design) methodology. 

Łukasz Jaruzal

Łukasz is the founder and CEO of the Edtech startup Wisdy. Not only does he have expertise in Customer Development and product lifecycle management but he also has tons of experience in Agile software development.
Łukasz can also provide Scrum training – a basic training aimed to introduce Product Owners, Product Managers, stakeholders or other team members to scrum. At Setapp, we work in real scrum – check our article to learn more about scrum.

Mentoring Spring ’19

What are some of the most common pain points for startups?

We’ve already helped a lot of Edtech startups to overcome their digital problems, which has given us a lot of insightful knowledge about the most common problems they face. And, even though, every startup is unique and has its own set of challenges and opportunities, we can highlight several pain points that are extremely common among startup community:

1. Lack of quality feedback

Some startups don’t invest enough time to gather quality feedback from their target market. Startups that don’t listen to their audience are doomed to fail.

2. Lack of business knowledge and experience

The difference between running a startup and a mature company is huge. While a lot of startups have great ideas and are full of energy, they lack business knowledge and experience to succeed. 

3. Focusing on building a product and not on building the right product

It’s not actually that difficult to develop an app. The challenge is to create an app that sells! Finding the right business model and revenue plan is a huge problem for a lot of the startups we spoke with.

4. Not enough testing

Startups were scared to define a number of hypotheses about their product/business/marketing etc and then testing it. Their main job is to find a product-market fit. However, a lot of them are not aware of it.

5. Lack of knowledge in terms of agile

Many startups lack the knowledge and experience to work in an agile environment. Their product development process is all over the place and a clear product roadmap has not been defined. Enthusiasm and energy are great, but they won’t cover for clarity and experience.

6. Bad User Experience 

Some startups don’t put much emphasis on the User Experience of their app. Learners’ goals and how easy the technology is for the teachers to implement are two critical factors for an Edtech product to succeed. The UX of some apps we’ve analysed had many flaws related to engagement and the user journey. 

Setapp offered strong mentoring support to Betwyll during the acceleration program we made in Helsinki with xEdu. They not only offered useful suggestions on how to reshape our app and its user experience, but they also offered us a wide variety of services to foster our grip on the edtech market. Setapp is one of those partners which can really make the difference for developing your business.

Edoardo Montenegro, Betwyll

Conclusion

We at Setapp are super excited for the Fall ’10 cohort and would like to wish the startups all the very best. Our mentors Łukasz, Rafał and Cezary can’t wait to start working with you all!