Startup is a rollercoaster ride; your team is the seatbelt

Pankaj MishraOver 30 million kids use SplashLearn to play games that help them learn math, practice better.Arpit Jain, Umang Jain, Joy Deep Nath, and Mayank Jain, the co-founders of SplashLearn, were batchmates at IIT Kharagpur.The biggest tipping point for SplashLearn was when it decided to shift from $10 as a lifetime fee for using the app, to $10 as a monthly fee."We were nervous," Arpit tells me in this podcast.Today, with over 100K+ paid members, SplashLearn has navigated that transition well.As Umang adds, listening to the users relentlessly and shaping the product with them has been the key. "You co-own the product with your users."SplashLearn's journey of building a product, acquiring the product-market fit, and transitioning to the SaaS model, offers deep insights about what works and what doesn't. Their early bet on iPad in 2010 as the learning device to be used by the schools, didn't work out well. But they transitioned away quickly and learned from things that didn't work out. "Startup is a rollercoaster ride, your team is the seatbelt," says Arpit. Listen to this podcast to learn about the edtech industry, product building blocks, and managing co-founder relationships.