A start-up in education: Talking to Sutori’s CEO
We are Central, a design studio that helps start-ups and multinationals create websites and apps. Every month or so, we organize an Umami Talk: an event during which we have a live interview with someone who creates digital products for a living. This article is a shortened version of the chat we had with Thomas Ketchell.
Thomas is the CEO and co-founder of Sutori, an online tool used to create interactive stories. Designed for teachers and students of all grades and subjects, it is also accessible to any other type of user. In addition to running Sutori, Thomas is an Entrepreneur-in-Residence at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, where he helps students launch new ventures.
Thanks for being here, Thomas. Could you tell us how Sutori works?
Sutori is a storytelling platform primarily used by teachers and students. By ‘storytelling’ we mean a linear sequence of events. Sutori is very visual: you can add pictures, videos and quiz questions. The big differentiator is that it can be used collaboratively, like a Google Doc. Teachers use it as an alternative to PowerPoint, and they get students to create their own stories through project-based learning. It can be used in any subject from History all the way to Math.
Note: If you want to see some examples of Sutori stories, check out this one on Pink Floyd or this one on the French Revolution.
How did you start your company?
We came up with the idea about 4 years ago. I was living in China at the time. My business partner and I were thinking of ways to engage a new audience in talking about how bad Beijing’s air pollution is. We decided to look back on history and one event that stood out was the London Great Smog of 1952. Twelve thousand people died in 5 days in London because the air was so polluted. Not many people knew about that event, so we created a fictional character who woke up in 1952 and started tweeting as he was living through the Great Smog. We compared that to Beijing today. It was just a one-off Twitter event. That’s how we started re-creating historical events. From there, the idea evolved into an educational tool because we felt this could be very beneficial for teachers and students.
Many people advised you not to create an education-related company. Why did you decide to do it anyway?
I think it’s because we were really naïve. I have 2 co-founders: my brother Jonathan (who is a teacher) and Yoran (who is a developer and our CTO). When we looked at the actual scope of what was out there in EdTech, we noticed that products were really outdated, kids hated using them and they would always run on Flash. So we had this idea of building a consumer-like product for education. That’s kind of been our driving mission since we started. We still get told that we shouldn’t be spending so much time in education because it’s such a hard market. But we just keep going.
What are the challenges of working in EdTech?
There are loads. For example, we originally wanted to create and sell educational content about history. When we moved from China back to Europe, we decided to start our platform in Belgium. But Belgium is split. There’s a different curriculum in the North, the South and Brussels. So we thought of doing European History. But Europe is also fragmented and teaches different histories. So we decided to go for one big market and moved to the US. We thought American schools would all teach the same history: American History. But the curriculum is different from state to state. So it’s really difficult to build an educational platform that sells and provides content. That’s why we switched to letting the students and teachers create the content themselves so we wouldn’t get stuck by district standards.
A second challenge is technology. Some schools have iPads and Chromebooks, but some still don’t have any tech. And a lot of schools have a very low bandwidth. The actual Internet connection isn’t very good. That’s also difficult for applications like ours.
The last challenge is budget. Teachers are getting larger budgets for technological products but often, schools still use a top-down approach. A school administrator or principal purchases the products, which are traditionally textbooks. It’s very difficult to sell to a district when you’re competing against million-dollar companies.
You’ve gone through a few accelerators. What’s their take on design?
It’s very limited. What matters most for accelerators is how you look on Demo Day. The whole image of an accelerator is how the companies present. They have a strong impetus on the design of your pitch deck, your presentation, your slides. In terms of the product, I don’t feel like many of them put a lot of effort into it. It depends on the kind of product you’re building, but having a clean presentation is very important to them.
We’ve been part of 3 accelerators. One of them is LearnLaunch in Boston. They did a UX workshop in which they got an agency to work with each company for 2 or 3 hours. That was really helpful, but the accelerator didn’t really help too much with visual identity.
You eventually hired a designer. When and how did you decide to do that?
In our founding team, there’s no real eye for design. But we realized the importance of it. Your product has to be functional but it has to look good too. It has to be visually appealing, especially for students. We toyed around for the first year working with small agencies and freelancers, but we weren’t really getting the right fit. It was difficult because we had certain expectations. Then, in the end, we found Pierre Stoffe and he joined the project. He’s got a full-time job but he was working with us one day a week. Having a designer on the team really changed the whole mindset for us.
Our company was called HSTRY but we evolved into Sutori. With the rebrand, we hired a second designer: Alexis Jossart. He built up the visual identity of the product and Pierre moved on to a UX role. A lot of investors and companies look at us and say “Hey, who’s doing your design? It’s really cool.” And we say “Yeah, they’re part of the team.”
We often joke that we have more designers than business people. Design is very important to us.
What UX challenges have you faced in trying to build a product for students of all ages?
When we first started building the product, we thought we’d make it very general: for elementary school, middle school, high school and even college students. But they’ve all got different needs. Elementary school students need the product to be very visual without too much text. But at the same time, we want college students to use Sutori as well. It’s been difficult to find that balance. So what we’ve been doing is we’ve built our product with a middle school student in mind. If we have more and more students from elementary, we’ll keep making our product simpler. We keep taking feedback on, so if a school or a teacher has issues, we put that into a spreadsheet and discuss every month how we can make Sutori better.
How do you gather feedback and what do you do with it?
We have different structures in place. Jonathan takes care of all the customer interactions. We have surveys and we take all of that feedback and do a presentation internally, using Sutori. We then discuss the key pain points brought up by the comments. What usually happens next is that we present that data to our UX designer, Pierre. Then we try to figure out how to improve the process and prevent teachers and students from making mistakes when using our product.
Another thing we’ve done is work with a school in California. We were going into a classroom every Tuesday for 2 hours to test Sutori with groups of kids between the ages of 8 and 12. That’s the best way to test your product because you see kids who just click everywhere. We were seeing issues ‘live.’
You also tested your product in the Netherlands, right?
Yes, we did. When we first started we had no users. We just had this idea of Twitter in the classroom. So we emailed people in Belgium, the Netherlands and France. One of the schools that got back to us was a Steve Jobs School where they use iPad-based education. We went to the school and tested Sutori. We translated the product entirely in Dutch, which was a lot of work for us. But it was really worth it because it was that use case that got us to move to the US. People were like “Hey, there’s this cool thing happening in the Netherlands at a Steve Jobs School.” That’s what got us to Boston and what got us initial funding. It played a big role in the evolution of the company.
How do you create new features?
We use a lot of Scrum methodology. We have strategy meetings where we do a road map for 3 months. It’s flexible, we adapt to the users and the feedback that we get. In this 3-month strategy, we establish what we need to accomplish. Then we split the 3 months into 2-week sprints which are led by the CTO with design, UX and business. It works well. We switch to 1-week sprints when we have a tight deadline. For example, when we were rebranding we only had about 6 weeks ahead of us so we switched to 1-week sprints. Now we do stand-ups every day across the team. Having the sprint format really works well, especially when you’re working with designers because they can clearly see the road map and what’s coming up.
We like to ask speakers one last question (inspired from Ways We Work): Why do you do what you do?
I’ve always wanted to build something. The more users we get, the more I feel like we can get millions and millions of users. That’s what’s really motivating me to keep going. And then it’s the educational values of what we’ve been doing. Now, we’re actually seeing kids who are doing better in their exams because they’re using Sutori. That kind of efficacy is driving us as we have a greater social impact.
