Unearthing #3: Pandai with founder Khairul Anwar
Edutech startups have accelerated the process for a much needed change as to how we approach education to cater for our future generation, and there's no stopping them now
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We’re on feature number 3 of our Unearthing series and this week, we sat down for a (virtual) chat with Khairul Anwar, founder of edutech startup Pandai. With the simple mission to help school students learn, Pandai has gone through a meteoric rise by offering continuous personalised quality educational content and being in the right place at the right time. Read on to enter the mind of this mindful entrepreneur.
Looks like you've got a couple of businesses under your belt including software house Aidan Technologies, education consultancy ArdentEdu and enterprise softwares FlowyTeam.com and Borang.co. Now that's quite a feat! Tell us about your entrepreneurial journey.
In 2005, after I graduated from Purdue University, USA, I worked at Motorola as an R&D engineer. Even though I had my day job, I did several side hustles to earn additional income.
In 2007, I then met my schoolmates who turned out to be budding entrepreneurs as well: Suhaimi (graduated from MIT, USA) was at Khazanah; Akmal (graduated from RPI, USA) was at Intel; Iznan graduated from Germany.
We then decided to quit our jobs at the same time in October 2007, to start a proper business together. We were naive (stupid) back then and we registered four private limited companies at the same time! We bootstrapped the companies and grew organically. Now the companies are still running, with almost 100 employees under the whole group.
With the same partners, I have started several businesses since, most of them in technology or education.
About Pandai
What was the spark behind founding Pandai?
My co-founders and I have always been passionate about tech and education.
Since 2007, we have been running ArdentEdu, which is an education company with not much technology, and Aidan Technologies, which is a tech company not related to education.
For more than a decade, we get to see first hand the impacts that our educational programs and modules have had to students. So, when we did a brainstorm in 2019 about where to bring our business next, it was a no-brainer to merge our two passions together and go into edutech!
We conceived the idea of Pandai by the process of elimination — by listing down the kind of edutech business that we did not want to do. In the end, what was left was the kernel of an idea that would become what Pandai is today.
Since your app is aimed to serve students, I can infer that gamification plays a key role in the development. How have you gamified the user experience such that it increases app stickiness and overall engagement?
Gamification has always been right at the top of our agenda when building Pandai. When we first launched in January 2020, our gamification was simple, daily tasks that students can complete, and get some sort of award based on their performance, continuous streak, and so on.
At the end of 2020, the team decided to go all in with gamification. The national syllabus, which Pandai bases its content on, is mapped to “levels” like in a game. To complete certain tasks for a particular chapter and topic is to climb one level up, and the levels are perfectly aligned with the curriculum, beginning with Chapter 1 Topic 1, Chapter 1 Topic 2 and so on.
We also reward students with items that students are very familiar with from mobile gaming — lives, experience points, in-game currencies — that they can use to unlock other parts of Pandai. In the future, we also plan to reward active users with actual rewards, like coupons that they can redeem or a physical gift.
What's your current engagement rate for the app?
We prefer not to disclose our current engagement rate. But our Pandai app is highly rated on both Google Play Store and Apple App Store, by the users.
Teaching in an online environment brings about a vast number of skills that teachers did not necessarily possess when the pandemic hit. How has Pandai been providing training support to teachers so that they're able to manoeuvre through online learning?
At the moment, Pandai is focused on students’ assessments. We have just released new modules called Pandai Guru (for teachers) and Pandai Parent (for parents) to further complete our product ecosystem.
To support teachers, by this year, we are planning to roll out a new feature called CINTA (short for “Continuous Improvement in Teaching” App), which is an app for teachers to get continuous professional development in the form of micro-lessons that they can engage with daily for a short duration (about 5 minutes).
The content of CINTA will be developed jointly by the Pandai team and pedagogical experts from top education faculties in the country. Among the content in CINTA are best practices in pedagogy, interesting activities to introduce in classrooms, and various professional skills that teachers should have. Basically, how to be a super-teacher, even during the MCO!
As part of Pandai's offering, it includes preparation materials for various international programmes including Kangaroo Math (France), Beaver Computational Thinking (Lithuania), Kancil Science and Kijang Economics which has gone on to receive over 75,000 participating students from all over Malaysia. Why do you think these programmes are so popular among students? What added advantage does it provide to the education experience of a student?
Students are attracted to these competitions for three reasons. First, it is fun to compete with others. Second, these competitions are internationally recognised, and students can get a glimpse of how academic assessments are done in other countries. For example, the Kangaroo Math contest attracts 6 million students annually, and they all will do the same paper on the same day. That creates a sense of solidarity and community. Third, and this is the obvious reason, to get certification. They have worked hard at something, and getting a reward for your performance is highly satisfying.
We take the view that all these reasons are valid, and that all these reasons are enriching a student’s educational experience. Students may take part in a contest because it is fun, because it gives them exposure, and because they gain some form of validation from it.
With your time spent mostly on building your capacity in technology, business development and leadership, where do you seek guidance from in regards to these areas? How have you exposed yourself to those networks?
Fortunately, we have two factors that work in our favour. One, we have had a lot of experience across both tech and education industries, so we can tap into our existing network of friends and mentors that we have cultivated in those industries for over a decade. Two, our founders are specialised in their roles.
For example, as the CEO, my role is to network within the business community, in particular among players in the startup ecosystem. So I have a well-defined role, to get to know VCs, people from entrepreneurship agencies, and assorted business mentors who can help us grow.
One of the co-founders, Suhaimi, who has 13 years of experience in the education industry, works his magic dealing with education experts and luminaries, while the other co-founder, Akmal, who is the technical wizard at Pandai, has his own retinue of like-minded techies whose expertise he can tap into at any time.
It looks like you guys were just in the right place in the right time. Having said that, what have some of the challenges been in developing your offering, growing your user base and most importantly, providing value to your users?
We cannot emphasise this enough; we are lucky to be where we are. Of course, luck favours the prepared, but many well-prepared people have not experienced that stroke of luck.
All that being said, the challenges are many — and we keep adding more and more challenges on our plate as we grow — but the main ones pertain to our product and business.
We have to make our product desirable to a wide swath of the student population in Malaysia. This is a delicate balancing act between having the right content, having the right features, and creating the right user experience. It is the problem that keeps us awake at night.
On the business side, the challenge is to reach a large segment of the market, while maintaining a low cost of customer acquisition. In this regard, we are no different from any other business, even brick and mortar ones. How do we market and sell effectively? We have been tinkering with various channels for some time, and we are beginning to get the hang of it.
I understand that Pandai is currently fully self funded at the moment. How did you bootstrap your startup?
Yes, at the moment Pandai is fully self funded using profits from our existing businesses. In our first year, we were approached by many local and international investors, but we decided not to accept any investments then because we felt it was too early.
In hindsight, by bootstrapping our startup, it forced us to focus on two things: completing the product as soon as possible, and getting paid from actual customers. Since then, we have won several government grants from Teraju, MOSTI, and Cradle, that allowed us to delay our first equity round.
Will you be looking into fundraising activities? If so, when and what will you use the additional funding for?
We plan to raise our first investment by this year. The funds will be used primarily on technology development, content development, and user acquisition.
So let's talk growth trajectory. How many users are you looking to onboard by December 2021 and what are your projected revenues?
This is our second year, and we are on track to hit a seven-figure revenue.
About Branding and Marketing
How have you approaching branding for Pandai?
During our first year, branding was not really a priority for us. Yes, from the beginning we already had our basic brand elements and consistent theme, but we have never had a proper branding strategy before we met Bawatana.
With the help of Bawatana, we have since developed our brand model canvas, a visual framework that helps us to project the right message and image with regards to Pandai. We want Pandai to be seen as a disruptive startup that transforms learning space through technology, to cater towards 21st century learners.
Based on our recent article as to whether or not startups should advertise, you mentioned that you spent zero dollars on marketing and instead focused on product-market fit. What were some of your key discoveries that led to making decisions on product improvements?
The first ever version of Pandai offered only daily quizzes and nothing else. However, we quickly learned early on that most students do not actually study every day!
Based on this key insight, we decided to replace our daily quiz with a new gamified quiz feature that allows students to study at their own pace. Instead of interacting every day, they can do the quizzes at any time, track their progress, and pick up where they left off.
By launching early and being flexible with our product offerings, we were able to build a ‘sticky’ app that our users love.
Word of mouth looks to have worked in your favour. How did you get it started in the first place?
It always starts with friends and families! And if someone influential then gets hold of the news, it just gets bigger and bigger.
We can never control the spread, only the message.
For example, when MCO started in March 2020, we started a Whatsapp campaign for Pandai using two simple messages, one meant for parents and one meant for students. So successful and viral the messages became that the Pandai website crashed several times. More than 2 million unique visitors came to Pandai in a period of just 5 days, all via the links given in the two well-crafted Whatsapp messages.
At the start of Pandai in January 2020, you acquired 386 registered users and by the end of December 2020, you were sitting at 104,000 registered which is a whopping 26,843% growth without spending on marketing. How did you grow your user base so quickly?
The growth in our first year was down to our organic and free marketing effort, word-of-mouth, and the freemium model that we offered to capitalise on the Covid-19 situation.
Of course, we received generous help from people around us. For example, a colleague at an influential government agency helped to mention Pandai on their social media; this easily brought thousands of new users. We've got similar help elsewhere, and we are grateful to all of them.
We also cross-marketed Pandai with the offerings of our existing education business ArdentEdu, effectively converting a % of the 75,000 annual customers of ArdentEdu into Pandai users.
From your first year of scrappy marketing, what have you found to work effectively and what didn't work so well?
Whatsapp messages can spread like wildfire and can go around the world (literally) in seconds (again, literally).
Our advertising efforts on various platforms have shown mixed results.
Do not dismiss TikTok. It can be a marketing tool for serious products too, despite its reputation as a social wasteland. We are still learning the ropes when it comes to TikTokking but we like what we are seeing so far.
As of January 2021, you've been rolling out online ads. How effective have the paid ads been in growing your user base? What other paid marketing activities will you be exploring this year?
We started rolling out online ads in January 2021, and in just 4 months, our registered users have doubled from 104,000 to 200,000 students. Our marketing team has run several ad sets in different formats, on Facebook, Instagram, Youtube, and Google, so soon we will focus on further fine tuning the ads to optimise them.
We are also initiating network marketing and recruiting commision-based distributors, so hopefully we can reach even more customers.
About the Malaysian Education System and Education Industry
The local education system in Malaysia has gone through a number of changes over the past two decades. What are your thoughts on the current state of our education system in Malaysia? What areas can there be vast improvements in?
I can say that the current state of education is pointing to the right direction. First, the good parts. Emphasis on thinking skills and conceptual understanding, various ways of assessing students competencies other than pencil-and-paper, focus on cross curricular elements, and higher sensitivity to differences between students, all these are codified into the Dokumen Standard Kurikulum dan Pentaksiran, the master document of the national education system.
Although we are pointing at the right direction, getting to move there is a totally different story. We need to invest more on teachers training and re-skilling, to make them more effective in unpacking the curriculum, and introducing various elements of the curriculum in the classroom other than the syllabus content. I believe our teachers are capable of doing this at a large scale, but we should embark on an ambitious program that captures the imagination of our teachers. Traditional teachers training won’t cut it anymore.
There are still children out there who don't have access to formal education, what more technological devices, which greatly impacts their learning ability and capability. This, in turn, results in a never ending cycle of them growing up to have no high school certificate to their name and a string of low wage jobs which further perpetuates the poverty problem. What realistic solutions can you suggest in order to make education more easily accessible?
This issue is much deeper than educational — it is a fundamental societal issue that has to do with development policy, history, culture, and economics.
We lack expertise in this matter, so we reserve our opinion.
In your opinion, how can Malaysia cultivate a healthier and more intuitive method of learning?
Decouple learning with exams. We should clearly demarcate the process of knowledge acquisition and the process of knowledge assessment.
We have to make clear to students, teachers and parents, that the ultimate goal of learning is something bigger than exams. It is the development of a complete human being. While exams are necessary parts of learning, they should not be treated as the raison d’etre of the whole education experience.
What the previous Education Minister did, which is to forgo all exams for Year 1 to Year 3 students, was a good step in this direction. Of course, there were loud complaints from those who did not understand the rationale behind such a decision. However, that decision was exactly what is needed for students and teachers to unburden themselves with exam pressure, and to approach learning at their own pace.
Teachers have to be more courageous to teach not for the exam, but to teach from the heart. What does that mean practically? I remember a piece of advice given to me by a wise educator from India: a teacher should not reduce teaching to two fingers (i.e. writing on a blackboard), but instead teach to the five senses.
In any topic, teachers can engage the five senses. What can the students hear, touch, see, taste or smell, to understand the world around them? Every teacher should start from this point of inquiry, regardless of the subject they are teaching.
Where do you see the global education industry moving towards in future?
Some of the megatrends are: the rise of microcredentials, the normalisation of personalised learning pathways, and the higher integration between K-12 with tertiary education and the job market.
As for microcredentials, the future is already here. Employees in the US are accepting microcredentials issued by companies like Google in lieu of traditional bachelor’s degrees. Will it lead to the slow death of tertiary education? I do not know, but it is not an impossibility in the increasingly specialised world that we live in.
This also relates to the prevalence of personalised learning pathways. Much work has been done by educators to recognise implicit bias in the education system, from the content to delivery. This leads to a lot of research on personalised learning, and we in the edutech sector are creatively finding ways to make personalised learning affordable to students.
As for the third point, the integration of K-12 education with tertiary education and beyond, we have seen the manifestation in the form of coding classes, some offered to children as young as 5. Where we previously never had to learn a programming language until university (or on the job), kids nowadays know not only how to code “Hello World” but how to write a complete mobile app. Whether this hyper-specialisation is a net positive or net negative (too much pressure too early!) to society remains to be seen.
Your Passions and Goals
I've gotten to know that you love travelling! What are your top 2 and bottom 2 destinations (be it a country or city) and why?
It is hard to choose only two destinations! For me, among the best countries to visit would be San Marino for its fairytale castle fortresses nestled upon mountaintops, and Lebanon for its ancient ruins, natural wonders, and other hidden treasures.
As an ardent traveller, how has this impacted your views on the world and how have you applied your viewpoints into your personal and professional life?
I have been to more than 50 countries. I believe each journey brings something innovative which opens me up to find my strengths, weakness, morals, and values. This helps me to learn new things, not only about other people and other places, but about my own self as well.
I have also been in several underdeveloped countries in Africa, Asia, and Eastern Europe. Witnessing the undesirable conditions first hand, it is clear there are some deep issues happening. I learned that life isn't always black or white. There are complicated issues and generalisations don't solve problems; they add to them.
And I came to realise that apparently I am more privileged than many others. So it is important to be thankful and to seize the opportunity to contribute positively to the world in any way I can.
What are your personal and professional goals for 2021?
Personally, I would like to improve my work-life balance. I’m learning to say ‘no’ more often, so that I limit my time and effort on activities that I actually am responsible for, or that I really enjoy.
Professionally, I spend most of my capacity on growing Pandai. As the CEO, I am responsible for the success or failure of the company. This year, I am focused on building our executive team, leading our team towards accelerated growth, and ensuring that we are building a product that our users love.
What gets you out of bed in the morning?
What gets me up in the morning is the opportunity to learn something new. I’m excited about the possibilities, about learning more, about getting it right and becoming better.
Since young, I’ve been very passionate about team sports and competing. Working with competent partners and passionate team members in Pandai gives me that same rush.
At the moment I'm really motivated by growing Pandai. We have just started last year, but we have a huge ambition to contribute towards the education sector by providing personalised quality education to all students, in Malaysia and elsewhere. It's easy to be passionate about something so meaningful.
Where do you see yourself in 10 years?
In ten years, I'd like to find myself in a position to mentor others in the field, putting my experience to use in ways that can hopefully help others achieve what I've attained.
For more information on Pandai, visit http://www.pandai.org.
Startup Events and Happenings
An employee stock option plan (ESOP) is a popular way for startups to get new recruits on board. While advantageous, it’s a complex procedure that many first-time founders spend a significant time wrapping their heads around. Join in on this virtual workshop hosted by Ravi Ravulaparthi, CEO and co-founder of Qapita, who will be discussing ESOP as a culture in Southeast Asia, the different models that could work for your startup, the challenges of implementing ESOP and learning to make it count. The workshop will take place virtually on Thursday, 29 April 2021 from 4pm to 5pm (SGT) and is available for you to attend at USD18.90 per ticket or you can otherwise subscribe to Tech In Asia Live at USD59 per annum which will unlock your access to all the workshops and conferences.