5000 schools in 50 countries: learnings from Mohit Midha, co-founder of Mangahigh

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, Mohit Midha, co-founder of Mangahigh, shares his journey of reaching 5,000 schools in over 50 countries, as well as insights on how to measure impact, the challenges of running a business and the next big thing for Mangahigh.

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 doesn't matter how confident and how good you are, you can’t do it alone. You have to have a team around you. It comes from living those values as a leader. If you say ‘people’ are important to you, make sure that, when you have to make decisions, you’re thinking of your ‘people’ as your main factor. Here are some highlights from the interview:

??Being an entrepreneur means you can control your own destiny, you decide how big you want to be, how hard you’re going to work and what it's going to take to get there. It's a journey of self discovery and you’ll often find yourself doing things that you’d never imagined.

??The real success has come not from hitting any specific milestones, but from the underlying grit and perseverance of the Mangahigh team that has worked tirelessly in continually creating value for the teachers and the students who’ve been the proponents of our success.

It has gone pretty well for you Mohit. How well?

In terms of reach, Mangahigh has been adopted by over 5,000 schools in over 50 countries.

If you go to Twitter now and type in “Mangahigh”, you’ll see students from around the world engaging and enjoying learning maths using our game-based approach.

Here is an example, where you can see British International Schools in various different countries come together to compete on the Mangahigh leaderboard.

What is your one line elevator pitch for Mangahigh?

At Mangahigh.com, we’ve tried to re-imagine what learning should look like for the 21st century students. We have developed one of the world’s first game-based learning (GBL) websites, where students learn mathematics through creative activities that balance play and learning.

Designed by a team of experienced educators, to match international mathematics curriculum requirements, and gaming experts, the Mangahigh platform uses a blended learning approach with content that adapts and individualises to each user. Additionally, comprehensive data collection affords teachers a variety of summary and reporting tools.

So how did it all start? Why did you decide to become an entrepreneur? I suppose it comes down to the upbringing I’ve had. I grew up in a family where everyone is entrepreneurial: my dad started a manufacturing business with little savings and a bank loan, my mum has always made amazing things ‘happen’ regardless of the resources she has had access to, and my brother scaled-up the family business to a whole new level. I certainly owe my entrepreneurial instincts to my family. So, I guess it wasn’t a decision that I had to make, it's kinda in my blood.

However, at some point during my teens, I decided to go on my own. I arrived in the UK on a scholarship when I was 19, having never met anyone who’d lived or travelled abroad. I got a 1st class degree in Electronics Engineering & Computer Science from Sussex University, but didn’t quite feel ready to start something of my own right after an undergraduate degree.

I joined the graduate training programme at Deutsche Bank London that helped me develop a well rounded technical skill set. However, I felt I lacked the business knowledge or connections in the UK that I would need to be successful as an entrepreneur.

I got a scholarship to do an MBA at The London Business school that really boosted my confidence, and provided me with an unparalleled network. Even before I finished my MBA, I was working on a startup idea and I’d met other MBAs who wanted to work with me on that idea. That didn't take off, but through my London Business school connections, I met my current co-founder & mentor and that’s how Mangahigh was born.

It must have been exciting. What has been the best thing about running your own company? Being an entrepreneur means you can control your own destiny, you decide how big you want to be, how hard you’re going to work and what it's going to take to get there. It's a journey of self discovery and you’ll often find yourself doing things that you’d never imagined.

The key, however, is to build a very strong team around you that share the same purpose as you. I am very proud of the team we have at Mangahigh, and I am almost certain that we would not be here if it wasn’t for them.

I joined the graduate training programme at Deutsche Bank London that helped me develop a well rounded technical skill set. However, I felt I lacked the business knowledge or connections in the UK that I would need to be successful as an entrepreneur.

I got a scholarship to do an MBA at The London Business school that really boosted my confidence, and provided me with an unparalleled network. Even before I finished my MBA, I was working on a startup idea and I’d met other MBAs who wanted to work with me on that idea. That didn’t take off, but through my London Business school connections, I met my current co-founder & mentor and that’s how Mangahigh was born.

There are always challenges to overcome for a growing business. What has been the most difficult aspect of the entrepreneurial journey for you? The worst thing is realising that you don’t actually control your destiny, because you might think you know everything, you might think you know where you want to take the company, but there are always external things that are beyond your sphere of influence.

For instance, we started Mangahigh in 2008, that was the time when there was an economic crash. Suddenly people were not willing to part with their money, they were not willing to invest in startups, because they were trying to work out how much of their money was left after the stock market crashed. The risk appetite had plummeted. Starting a business when there is a macro economic downturn certainly makes you realise that you are not in control of your destiny. But that’s when you have to get entrepreneurial and make stuff happen.

Can you remember back to where the idea for the company came from? The idea of Mangahigh came from my visionary co-Founder Toby Rowland, who was also the co-Founder of King.com, the company behind ‘Candy Crush Saga’. Toby is one of the rarest people I’ve met in my life who is both incredibly creative and extremely analytical. It is usually one or the other.

Toby’s idea was to bring his learnings from the casual gaming sector and apply it to a sector that had a greater purpose. He’d already done some ground work around education before I met him. We were introduced by my entrepreneurship professor at London Business School.

In the early days, Toby and I sat in a two-person office and brainstormed around how we could build on his idea. We then made the first game, wrote the first curriculum and put some content together for v1 of the product.

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? We launched Mangahigh in 2010, and got acquired by a large German publishing company in February 2018. In between those times there have been so many milestones to get us to this point today:

• Our first successful game launch was very special
• I can never forget our first overseas sale to JFK International in Switzerland
• Pivoting from B2C to a B2B model was a big decision but with hindsight was the right decision
• Landing the first large US district-wide sale was very satisfying and put us on the map
• Getting sponsored to make a Portuguese product for Brazil provided a turbo boost to our growth trajectory

The financial milestones are obviously where you see a step change in the company. We had a few of these as we raised capital from VCs in the UK, in the US as well as in Brazil.

I must add getting a testimonial from Bill Gates "Mangahigh is successfully delivering fun, competitive, game-based lessons that drive greater engagement and understanding” was a huge confidence booster.

The real success has come not from hitting any specific milestones, but from the underlying grit and perseverance of the Mangahigh team that has worked tirelessly in continually creating value for the teachers and the students who’ve been the proponents of our success.

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'? I think it's when you hear feedback from teachers saying that all their children were asking for more homework on Mangahigh, you know that this isn’t usual behaviour!

We had a librarian from California who sent us a video and said it was at their lunch break and the bell rang. She had thought all these kids who were playing Mangahigh would leave. But then she had 30 more children who came into the library, they sat on the floor and begged to play Mangahigh to be able to get more points for their school.

Around the same time, we saw a picture from a teacher in New Zealand who posted that they had done an overnight camp, where kids were playing maths games all night to be able to beat schools in Brazil and win the Mangahigh competition.

That’s when we realised that this is something special, that we were onto something here. We did an empirical study with NSW Dept of Education in Australia involving 46 schools. The outcome? 100% of teachers said that Mangahigh use had resulted in improved student learning outcomes.

More recently, something amazing has also happened. I met someone who has been using Mangahigh to successfully train students to pass their GCSEs. What was different about his approach however is that instead of teaching typical 16-year olds, he is actually getting 6, 7 and 8-year olds to take GCSEs in maths. He has taken our game-based approach and completely challenged the status quo. Watch the video below on how these children see maths as a game and do not let age get in the way of their learning. When I saw this, I felt I’d seen it all.

Making an impact is really important in Education. How do you measure yours? I think the success of our company is the cumulative success of all of the schools. We can’t say Mangahigh is being successful if our schools are failing at maths. So if every school that’s using Mangahigh is successful at what they hope to achieve, that is when we are successful.

We have several metrics that measure the impact of Mangahigh. We measure how well the teachers are using the product, we look at how many activities they are assigning to students, whether the students are able to complete those activities, what they are learning, what their academic growth has been etc.

We’ve also been working closely with Featherstone High School in London, who’ve improved their GCSE results by 25% through using Mangahigh. Watch the deputy headteacher’s interview here:

In Brazil there's a study that came out with 17 schools, where the students attitude toward maths had gone up 70% from using Mangahigh.

We also did a study in Australia with 46 schools, with the Department of Education in New South Wales, where 94% of students said that it was better than traditional forms of instruction.

Just last week I was talking to our sales team in India and the British school in New Delhi ran an assessment and concluded that the students had made 1.5 years of progress in one year of using Mangahigh.

There are all of these efficacy studies, plus we are doing more to help build the evidence base that Mangahigh is effective around the world and that it's helping engagement and learning.

You have done well against a background where everyone says that selling in the edtech market is really hard — how did you do it? Selling into EdTech isn’t hard, it’s very slow.

If you have a good product that solves a real pain point for the teacher, the schools will find a budget for it. You sometimes (ok very often!) have to wait to the buying season which in education is once a year. Schools in the US want to buy in August. If you have missed the boat of selling your product into a school, or your new innovation came out in September, then you have to wait a whole year. Unfortunately, startups don't have that luxury of waiting a whole year to have a second go at selling to the same school.

One of the ways we mitigated that is that we decided we are going to be an international company from the get go. So whilst the US buy in August, in the UK we are buying in September. In Australia they are buying in November and December, in Brazil they're buying in February and March and in India it’s March and April. By having different markets to focus on, we managed to diversify the impact of seasonality on our cash flows.

I don’t want to make it sound easy. It’s been incredibly hard to be a small company based in the UK and to be selling to schools in Hong Kong, Singapore, Australia, India, the US and Brazil. Especially if you’re doing B2B, which, in traditional sense, means that you expected to have “feet on the street” i.e. where you have to have people visiting those schools, meeting ministries, and run local training sessions.

So you can imagine the amount of travelling I’ve had to undergo during my time at Mangahigh as we went from being in 1 country to being in 50+. In fact, my son had visited 18 different countries before he’d turned 2. My wife and him came along to a lot of my work trips during her maternity leave, which really helped me focus on building up the company, without the guilt of leaving my loved ones behind. I should add that you do need a very supportive family to have any chance of being successful in a startup world. I can’t thank my wife enough for all the sacrifices she has made during our start-up journey together. It’s been one hell of a ride.

Part of your journey involved raising investment — what did you learn from that?

I think one of my biggest lessons there is that it's real money and it comes with a sense of responsibility and accountability. I've seen startups that raise investor money and think that it needs to be spent as it might go out of fashion. Obviously VCs put their trust in you and they have accountability to their own investors.

There’s one question I always ask my teammates when we're considering doing a trade show, booking a flight or doing anything that requires funds: “is this something you will be doing if it was your own money?”

This helps us to stay focused and make the right decisions, because it's easy to lose sight when you’re dealing with someone else's money. I'm not saying underinvest or don't spend, just don't waste.

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

• The first one is to make sure you’re solving a real pain point, because it needs to pass the common sense test. I think interviewing customers, spending time with them and understanding what they do and how they operate is really important. You also need to determine whether there a millions more people like your customer, or if it’s just 5,000 people you are designing your product for.
• The second is that you have to back yourself. If you’re not confident that you can do it, then you’re not going to be able to convince others to follow you or to get a team behind you, let alone get anyone to put their money into your startup. When times are tough, and you’re really down, which happens to every single founder, you have to just believe that you’re a fighter, that you can do it and show everybody the light at the end of the tunnel that you can so “clearly” see.
• Thirdly, as humans, there are so many biases* at play. You won’t get things right the first time. My business partner used to say, “we gotta keep the momentum going, knowing we can’t get everything right. However, if we are getting more things right than wrong, we should be on the path forward”. Don’t be put off by a failure or a set-back, bounce back harder.

*Here is a really interesting chart that explains some of the biases and why certain things might not be as you believed them to be:

Can I squeeze in a fourth?

• Lastly, it doesn’t matter how confident and how good you are, you can’t do it alone. You have to have a team around you. When you start to grow, make sure that you keep the company’s core values and design an organisation with the culture that you really want to see. It comes from living those values as a leader. If you say ‘people’ are important to you, make sure that, when you have to make decisions, you’re thinking of your ‘people’ as your main factor.

As regards learning from others, is there one course or book you think everyone should take/do that has helped you? I think there isn't necessarily one course or one book that would help any entrepreneur, because entrepreneurship is a continuous learning journey. I went through an MBA at London Business School and that was quite helpful for the network and the knowledge, but I don't believe you need an MBA to be an entrepreneur. I believe there's lots of really good books out there that can be helpful, depending on what stage you and your business is at.

In the beginning there was a book called “The art of the start” by Guy Kawasaki. This book is all about getting to v1 of the product. It helps you understand if you are solving a real pain point, and if you are doing it for the right reasons. In the early days, it’s much more important to find a product that creates meaning. As Guy points out, no startup died because it couldn’t figure out how to scale!

When you are more established but things aren’t going to plan, which is inevitable, I’d recommend “The Hard Thing about Hard Things”. I think every startup goes through ups and downs, and times can get really tough. So this guy, Ben Horowitz, talks about his own journey when he had to lay his team off. It’s incredibly hard to let go off a team that you've put together as you’ve spent days and nights working together and bonded like a family. So the book describes times when other entrepreneurs have had to do this dirty job, and how they managed during those difficult times. I think it's a great book to read for inspiration & support.

The one that I've most recently read is about how to be a “scale-up” called “Hacking Growth” by Sean Ellis. It has a really good structure and makes you think hard about how you are acquiring customers, how they are onboarded, and how you're selling to them. It has really helped shape our thinking about the metrics that we track across the company and has provided a framework for doing A/B testing and continuous improvements. That book has been very helpful for our stage now, because at the start of the company you're not really doing A/B testing, you're simply trying to get to v1 of the product.

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?

To be honest they’re all related. You can have a network, but the network is only helpful if it’s going to help you with capital or if they’re going to help you with knowledge — at the early stage, you need both.

The knowledge/expertise of the network can help you avoid making mistakes that others have already made, but equally you need the capital to bring your ideas to reality. So it’s not one or the other.

In our case, Toby had been a serial entrepreneur which meant he had huge depth and breadth of experience in starting & scaling a business. Despite that we did tap into various mentors, industry experts and put together an advisory board around specific skills that we lacked between us.

So Mohit, what’s the next big goal for you?

We’ve just released our new coding product and although it’s early days, we’re really excited to take our learnings from our maths offering and use them to educate children around the world in computer science. Coding is the new universal language so our goal is to help prepare children for their pivotal roles in this fourth industrial revolution.

This interview was kindly given by Mohit Midha , co-founder of Mangahigh 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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