I can't figure out what to name this blog post, so, I've defaulted to using a generic "Product Update" title with a number. Since there are multiple fronts to the product, acquiring customers, the technical side, competitors, general overview, I'll be diving them into sections.
Onboarding
Fresh off the demos last week, I randomly selected fourteen schools for a start. I added all the schools that have 200+ students. From those 14, only 4 has registered as of this blog and only 1 has fully setup their dashboard. Fully setup means they've started generating bills and receipts. I created a WhatsApp group, added them all to it posted updates there. I was initially appalled that no one responded to the messages or no one even registred in the first or second day. Then some things occured to me:
- Schools are in their exam periods now, so, they're very busy. I tried to follow up, by putting calls through, and I got almost the same feedback from those that haven't set it up.
- The real value and importance of EduHisab might only be known to them after a full term of usage. It makes things easy for them at the initial stage, but, I think they can't fully grasp what it does for them until they've gotten to at least half of a term.
With all these said, they're actually still really interested in using it. I ran a poll on the group, only five people responded. Three said they're interested but, haven't had the time to set it up. I plan to see how this goes, then add some other schools by next week.
Technical Angle
- We got two bug reports from the users. We did some role updates and it affected our earliest customer, thankfully, it was easy to solve.
- One thing I forgot about entirely was how to promote students. How do you move students to the next class. This was also raised by one of the schools. Depending on how I solve it, if it deserves its own blog, if not, I'll include it in the next update. And I think implementing this well, will be a killer feature.
- Since we need to get the code stable, I pointed Claude's Opus 4.8 (i used Fable initially, but it downgraded to Opus), to the backend to find bugs and issues. Most of it, I already knew and were as a result of how the product chnaged.
- A user mistakenly deleted a class, so, it disconnected the students from that class. They recreated it, but, didn't know how to add students back. We've actually built it in, but the solution was not efficient, so, we'll have to rework that too.
Competition
I'm aware of Klacify, but, I don't think they offer what we give schools. While speaking to a school owner, they sent me the contact of their bursar. Co-incidentally, the bursar also runs a school fees managment system. I was intrigued, but it turned out to be excel based. So, I understood his initial resistance to using EduHisab.