In an exclusive interaction, Prerna Jhunjhunwala, Founder, Creative Galileo, speaks about the need for apps like Little Singham, how it helps in kids’ early development and about the characters, marketing rights Creative Galileo exercises. She also discusses Creative Galileo’s expansion plans for India, its content strategy and other marketing initiatives.
An alumna of New York University, Prerna is the Founder of Edu-tech startup Creative Galileo and Little Paddington Pre-school in Singapore. It was her firsthand experience of the stark reality of education in India that led her to start both her ventures.
What was the insight behind Creative Galileo Kids’ launch and how has the company scaled its operations since?
While travelling across India at a young age, I witnessed a vast divide in education access. It felt as if education was only accessible by a few, while it was a luxury for others. This deprivation led me to make up my mind to make education accessible to children in the remotest parts of India.
After my successful pre-schools in Singapore, I decided to foray into the online education space, thus leading to Creative Galileo, a new-age edtech startup transforming early learning globally for children from three to nine years.
Our character-based kids early learn App- Little Singham was launched to provide quality content and learning experience to children in their foundational years. Since its launch in July 2020, we have witnessed over 3 million downloads, with over 500K Monthly active users with 60% downloads from Tier 2 and 3 cities, without any marketing spend.
The tremendous response we have received in the last year is remarkable and testimony to the fact that hunger for quality content and edutainment will be the key to making learning fun for children.
How did the company navigate the Pandemic, and what impact had the ‘Learn from home’ model had on Creative Galileo?
The education sector is a dynamic one. The Pandemic exposed the gaps in the modern education system. The complete shutdown of schools and colleges revealed the fragmented adoption of digital capabilities.
We decided to fill this gap by coming up with student e-learning and associated platforms. We carefully designed, curated a curriculum with award-winning creators to suit the learning needs of little minds and launched our App amidst the Pandemic as a POC. And the results were overwhelming.
The App weaves together the best of education and entertainment to create personalized, integrated learning experiences for young minds and accelerate a child’s development through narrative videos, gamification and personalized learning journeys. We have seen tremendous traction for the App, with 90% downloads from India and 10% from other countries.
How does Little Singham help in a child’s early learning and development?
A plethora of research suggests that the early years of our children’s lives are the most crucial, the number of connections (synapses) between brain cells (neurons) doubles. Two-year-olds have twice as many synapses as adults.
Because these connections between brain cells are where learning occurs, twice as many synapses enable the brain to learn faster than at any other time of life. Therefore, children’s experiences in this phase of 2 to 9 have a lasting effect on their development.
Creative Galileo is a character-based early learning app that focuses on ensuring children have a strong foundation in the six learning domains of numeracy, language, social and emotional development, motor skills, creative expression, and the discovery of the world.
These learning domains have been captured into themes consistent with learning videos, games and e-books with a single unifying concept to help children learn and retain ideas. Hence, we achieve our overarching goal of making learning and what seems a tedious process of education fun. It engages children and helps them visually analyze and process all the information.
What reception did Creative Galileo’s learning app ‘Kids Learning APP’ garner and what is its USP
We are India’s first and only Indian character-based App focusing on the six holistic developmental domains. We help in Pre-emptive aptitude tracking for children through games so that their personalized learning journeys are built on their prior knowledge.
There is also Performance benchmarking for Age group, Geography, Friends (closed group) and sharing these updates with the parents on the child’s progress and suggestive learning modules to improve Performance.
In the future, we will have characters interacting together in one space, be it Singham, Chakra, or Krishna, which is pretty unique, thereby allowing kids to play with all the characters in a controlled manner.
Our App’s size is also significantly lower when compared to other e-learning apps, given the data use limits and internet connectivity issues that could become a challenge with users in remote parts.
Can you share with us your plans for Creative Galileo’s growth and expansion, market outreach?
Since we are available for download on Google Play, we have seen markets in UAE, Nepal, Bangladesh and Pakistan. We want to penetrate newer markets, strategically selecting edutainment content that can offer crucial reinforcement for learning. The aim is to achieve 10 million downloads in the next 12-14 months.
To enter international markets, we plan to make our content more inclusive and relatable. So our focus is to build a content library, introduce new characters (a mix of Indian and some beloved international characters) and vernacular languages.
How did Creative Galileo acquire the Little Singham IP? Why Singham? And what other characters can we expect in the future?
My time operating schools, spending time with children and parents, allowed me to identify key differentiating factors that make for an immersive education experience for the children.
For instance, our favourite subject in school also used to be the one with our favourite teacher. Hence, we decided to introduce kids’ favourite characters as part of their learning so they can associate themselves with them and feel a strong connection.
We started with little Singham because it’s one of India’s most liked characters; children enjoy watching Little Singham. We work with animation studios and gamers to bring onboard popular characters and to redesign and gamify the content to make it relevant for the children.
Soon, we plan to introduce additional Indian and foreign characters, such as Chakra, Shaktimaan, Big Bees Jr and tiny Krishna, to name a few.
What is your marketing, content strategy for expanding the Little Singham IP? And the overall Creative Galileo brand?
Marketing your product is one of the biggest worries for an Entrepreneur. When I launched this App, it was the same for me. However, in the last 12 months, we haven’t spent any money on marketing the App and have had great results.
Our cost of acquiring a user is less than 20 cents. Our App received a lot of acceptance due to the quality content, engaging storylines and, above all, kids’ favorite character.
How has Little Singham been engaging with kids, parents during the Pandemic?
We are leveraging the technology in its most “effective, interesting and meaningful” way as it gives access to the parents to analyze the learning chart/growth of their child on the App itself.
Our cutting-edge Parents Zone gives parents regular updates on their child’s learning so they can plan learning activities to achieve learning goals. Using the parent’s zone, they can understand the aptitude of the child and plan the review sessions based on the Performance.
The Pandemic has pushed students, parents towards online learning. Do you think the industry will continue to soar once students go back to physical classrooms?
We believe we are at the cusp of the Edu-tech revolution, the market is enormous, and we are still in the formative stage. As far as the popularity of the edutech platforms is concerned, most kids have gotten used to the blended learning model.
We believe this is the future and will drive growth in this market. The idea is to leverage students’ interests, hold their attention longer, keep them engaged and create opportunities for learning that they enjoy and look forward to through multiple avenues.
What are the trends and opportunities shaping the ed-tech sector, especially platforms targeting children aged 3-6 years?
According to a recent report by RBSA Advisor, India’s Edtech sector is set to become a $30 billion industry in the next ten years on the backing of growing demand and strengthening business models and estimates the current industry size between $2.75 – 3.00 billion.
India has emerged to be among the top three countries globally after China and the USA to get venture capital funding in the edtech sector.
Edtech sector will offer greater opportunities to digitize, dematerialize, demonetize and democratize education. We believe there is tremendous potential in this category, and deploying digital platforms will play a vital role in this new normal, helping to connect students and impart exciting and relevant content.