An Opportunity missed is an opportunity lost.

Every so often a startup founder is technical, with an extensive knowledge of business domain and technology implementation, however may not know about marketing and sales. These scenarios open a different tangent of conversation. Startup Glide sees such customers as opportunities. These are scenarios for us to invest and flex our non tech muscles.

The journey for such scenarios beings as identification of an investment opportunity, its validity as a business case and our ability to help the founders in aspects other than technical. Further with higher stakes and risks takes involved and ownership in our plate it is imperative that not only is the idea great and profitable but also that Startup Glide is motivated to play the founder.

Before we dive deep into the set of problems of the project it will be insightful to understand the school ERP space. The schools industry within India has two types of schools public and private schools. Public schools currently lack infrastructure to exploit and capitalize on technology. The private school is highly federated with induction and use of software being left at the management of schools. Typical issues exist around a lack of understanding of software as a service infrastructure and most products historically being in premise installations. There exists a resistance towards technology and lack of literacy towards computers. Thus despite having an excellent product there exists a need for an excellent sales and marketing team. In this space the proverbial hotcakes do not sell themselves.

Coming back to our story, one such opportunity that came across and has become a profitable line of business for Startup Glide is Edumarshal. Edumarshal’s founder team has a rich background in education, they had built a MVP with all bells and whistles but did not have skills beyond business understanding and product implementation. They lacked in area of market research and sales.

This was a uniquely oblique problem for Startup Glide, while the core group is business and technology focused, the areas such as product ownership, marketing, sales and other activities lie with business owners. Startup Glide having launched its own products was in a unique position to take this challenge on, while customarily we compliment customers with development teams in this unique opportunity we augmented them with set of mentors, product owners, sales and marketing staff, support and developers.

In essence Startup Glide took over operations and executions of the product while vision, focus, features and other creative inputs remained with product owners. While in essence this is also the holy grail we wish to achieve in all our projects, it provided us with excellent opportunity to spread our wings.

The opportunity was a win-win scenario for all involved teams while the founder team got to focus on creative inputs and a round 1 investments, Startup Glide got to open a new line of business. Startup Glide ended up being a co founder and an investor in a successful business partnership that has enriched all parties involved.

Success is defined by dividing a problem and assigning the right person to drive success. Edumarshal is one of the many success stories that define Startup Glide, our modus operandi remains choosing steps that lead to “only success”.