HSTRY
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HSTRY
Education - Technology
C Corporation
United States
Creating and sharing interactive timelines
Yoran Brondsema
Benoit van der Maas
Thomas Ketchell, Steven Chiu and Yoran Brondsema
Summary
HSTRY is a digital learning tool that makes it possible for teachers and students to make and share school projects by using interactive timelines.
Background
Thomas Ketchell, one of the founders who studied history was in Beijing in 2013. At that time the air pollution in Beijing was at an extreme high level, because he studied history he thought this was what “The great smog of London” in 1952 would have looked like. He then came with the idea of creating an imaginary person with a smartphone who woke up in London in 1952. He made pictures of the smog and tweeted this on his twitter account.This reenactment received a lot of attention by the British media.
When Thomas returned to Belgium in the beginning of 2013 he and Steven Chiu were thinking what they could do with this twitter reenactment. After some brainstorming HSTRY was born, a web-based educational tool for creating interactive timelines. Because they wanted to modernize education they came up with the name HSTRY, a text-message styled version of ‘history’. Because Steven and Thomas needed someone with programming skills they asked their old classmate Yoran Brondsema, a passionate computer science graduate to join the team.
In 2013 HSTRY joined the Belgian accelerator NEST’up, where they received a total funding of €60.000 spread over several terms, this was really useful and now HSTRY was able to hire employees.In February 2014 the company moved to the U.S. where they were they were selected for another accelerator and they received another funding of $18.000.
After a while they also found their current investors, mainly private investors in the U.S.
Mission
HSTRY’s mission is to captivate students.
Vision
HSTRY wants to become the leading digital learning platform.
Values
HSTRY believes in free sharing of the creativity and wisdom of students and teachers in a transparent and easy way
Business Model
There are a lot of technological developments in the educational sector but a tool like HSTRY is completely new. HSTRY makes it easy to create interactive timelines with images, videos and audio. Teachers can create timelines and also add questions towards the students on the timeline. HSTRY also encourages students to unleash their creativity and create timelines themselves, these timelines can be seen and assessed by the teacher. Timelines can also be shared in the HSTRY community so everyone can learn from them. Because online classes are gaining popularity with students and teachers, HSTRY is an excellent tool to make learning easier, more efficient and more fascinating.
What makes HSTRY so special is that it is very user friendly, the design is clear and logical, the basic functionalities are free and HSTRY is accessible by any computer, laptop or tablet that is connected to the internet.The basic functionalities of HSTRY are totally free, but more advanced features for teachers are offered for a fee. The fee for gaining access to all HSTRY features is $49 a year per account, but packages for entire schools have a lower price.
Growth
Each week, the amount of users increases with 5% and HSTRY wants to maintain this steady growth. Today HSTRY has over 170.000 users from 136 countries and keeps growing as seen in the graph below.
Customers
HSTRY’s users are mainly students and teachers at middle schools in the U.S. In the beginning they gained a lot of interest from teachers on Twitter, the challenge now is to also reach teachers that aren’t very active on the internet. HSTRY didn’t spend anything on online advertising, most of the users found HSTRY through other enthusiast users. Another way of encouraging teachers to use HSTRY are the professional development sessions HSTRY organizes. These sessions take place in schools where they present their software and let teachers try it out, by doing this it’s a lot easier for teachers to get started with HSTRY.
Competitors
HSTRY is the only company of its kind in education, therefore they don’t have direct competition.A lot of schoolbook publishers start making online applications for schoolbooks, but these applications aren’t as interactive and user friendly as HSTRY. Because these publishers have more resources and are able to reach a large public it is definitely seen as competition for HSTRY but rather indirect.
Conclusion
HSTRY sees a lot of opportunities in the future because there is no dominant player on the market HSTRY is located. They have the possibility to grow and become the market leader in its sector. A possible thread could be that another company like HSTRY would start with much more resources and outpace HSTRY.
When starting HSTRY the founders faced some difficulties, the first one was language. HSTRY wanted to be accessible by a broad public but in Europe this would have been very difficult, they would have to build the website in numerous languages and customize for each culture. This why they moved to the U.S. where an English website can be used for an entire continent.A second issue the founders faced was finding investors, the education sector isn’t known as a very lucrative sector. In Belgium investors weren’t interested in HSTRY but after the relocation of the company they’ve found their current investors in the U.S.
The best advice Yoran Brondsema could give to starting entrepreneurs is the following:
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Time is your most important resource, use it wisely.
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Solving people’s problems is what it’s all about
The founders have an ambition of becoming the main player on the market in the U.S, they aim to provide HSTRY’s service to at least 20% of the middle schools in the U.S.Besides becoming a strong player in the U.S. they also aim to expand to other continents, mainly South-America and Europe.
Posted on 07/04/2016