Play and learn – apps by Greysprings

 

Greysprings is based in Hyderabad, India and develops apps in the “play and learn” market for kids aged 3-9 years, providing them with goal-oriented experiential learning through theme and story-based apps

The company has successful revenues from leading mobile app stores.

Greysprings products are also being used in some of the top tier schools in the Delhi and Hyderabad regions of India.

At whom is your startup aimed?

Greysprings has products for kids in the age range of 3-9 years, providing them with apps for literacy and numeracy, while at the same time making learning enjoyable through a “play and learn” approach.

How does your startup stand out against its competitors?

Greysprings does user studies with schools to define the gaps and needs that current digital products fail to address.  Our belief is that being close to schools in India is very important for adequately addressing the needs of our users.

The company has also identified the gaps in quality for such offerings in India, which makes Greysprings stand out.

Where did the idea for the startup come?

Greysprings promoters have always been passionate about education.  Education as a sector in India has tremendous opportunities, especially when newer technologies are widely available, for example internet penetration, affordability of hand held smart portable devices, etc.

Did you have any concerns when starting your business, if so what were they?

We were concerned with initial bootstrapping, and hiring the right talent (and convincing them to join the start-up),  which were some of the initial challenges. Balancing engineering and marketing needs is another challenge, which an edu-tech apps start up will always face.

What is your business background, and what got you interested in startups?

Promoters do not have a business background, but we always wanted to create a higher impact and add value in socially emerging sector like education (in India). Technology provides us that platform

How did you initially raise funding for your company?

Founders, bootstrapping, and raising small debts.

What has been your greatest achievement so far?

We have a very lively office setup where we co-create our products. We are proud that we hire best available design and engineering talent. This creates a long-term value for the company.

We are pretty happy with this achievement

How have you kept your business relevant and engaged with your audience over the last three years?

We analyze loads of information from our analytics, get direct user feedback from schools, and also monitor our app store reviews carefully. We have consistently improved on user engagement parameters like session lengths in our apps and the quizzes we create.

Our outreach to schools in Hyderabad and Delhi has helped us in building the ecosystem where parents, children, schools, education, and technology are the pillars.

How long has your business been in making, and who is the team behind the business?

Greysprings was founded in 2012. Greysprings’ first product was released in November 2012. We are five founders who are leading the efforts in Greysprings. Each of us have spent more than 10 years in global organizations and bring wealth of experience in leading teams and setting up right environment and processes for business success

What has been your biggest challenge so far?

We have spent less time and money than we expected on Marketing and PR. It has been ongoing challenge.

Recently we made an internal agile team to address this.

In the coming year, what would you like to achieve with your business?

We have been doing well on Windows for couple of years now with many apps being featured on the store a number of times, and this year we want to establish ourselves on iOS and Android as top players in educational products.

A parallel objective is to start larger programs with schools and identify physical distribution channels for our products.

What has been your most valuable lesson so far since starting your business?

Three things:

Identifying the target user’s pain points, delivering passion in our products, and having strong conviction in our team

If you could give one piece of advice to someone thinking about starting a business, what would it be?

Just get started. Thinking too much over an idea never helped us. Things change quite a bit when we actually start executing our ideas. Also, its important to refining based on market and user needs.