"Knowing that I’m building something that will reach a billion people gets me out of bed in the morning..." says Scoodle co-founder Ismail Jeilani

Interview with ​Ismail Jeilani, Owner of Scoodle - Ismail love telling stories. He graduated from King’s College London, furthering his learning with programmes at Oxford & Harvard before joining Google. While funding his degree, Ismail built his first company which helped raise over £900,000 for charity and interest-free funding. With his experience, he co-founded Scoodle, an app connecting students and teachers. Scoodle is a platform that allows students to "learn anything." Their tagline is: "Designing a world where parents can start choosing teachers, not schools’. They were even featured as Apple’s app of the day!’

Scoodle received funding from the co-founder of Twitter, and is the first education-based startup supported by the University of Oxford's incubator. What an achievement! 

Ismail Jeilani has been featured in Buzzfeed, Business Insider, BBC and Vice News - as well as being ranked as one of the 'top 100 coolest people in tech' by Business Insider 2017. Read on to find out about his journey in business so far...

• Welcome to Business Spotlight -  A place where we shine the spotlight on successful entrepreneurs to inspire others. To get started, can you explain a little about your background. How did you start your journey of discovering Scoodle?

In 2012, I was faced with a choice. I had been accepted to King's College London, but university fees had just tripled. I could go — but doing so would mean paying £9,000 a year for my education, and taking out a loan I wasn't comfortable with.


I didn't think it was fair that I had to choose between what I held closely to myself and my right to education, and I felt that anybody who's in that position should definitely be able to do both.


I went to King's, paying the nine grand a year — but I didn't take out a student loan. Instead, I moonlighted as a personal tutor, teaching Economics for between 15 and 20 hours a week alongside my studies. I also created small classes of 10 students, and in just over a year, I made enough to cover the cost of my entire degree.

• What was it like in the first week or two of starting your own business?

It was just three people in an empty room. Literally an empty room. My uncle had an empty house and we bought three IKEA tables and chairs, and worked out of an otherwise empty room. Looking back, it was pretty crazy.

• How did you fund your business in the initial stages and how has that changed as time went on?

The great thing about tech is a lot of things are free - and we’re great at finding free stuff. Since we didn’t need to hire anyone, we were able to offset our tech costs with credits offered by tech companies, or subscribing to free versions of tools. We also put a small amount of our savings into a pot, just in case we needed to buy anything (like chairs and tables).

• What's the most important thing you're working on right now, and how are you making it happen?

Making sure our website matches our app. In just 4 weeks, we’ve built all of the core functionalities which is great. Now we’re just making sure all of our tutors and answers can be discovered all over the internet!

• Tell us about your support network - did you have the backing of your friends and family?

Of course. Startups can be quite lonely, especially when the future is so undefined. At the early stages, you are your startup. It’s important to have a network around you that believes in you because, by extension, they have to believe in your start up, too.

• What gets you out of bed in the morning?

Knowing that I’m building something that will reach a billion people gets me out of bed in the morning.

• Tell us how you got your first few clients (include tips on attaining new business)

Friends and family - that’s how it always starts. Your first users are from your immediate network, who then tell their network. As long as you build something that they love, they’ll continue telling their friends.

• Any tips on how to make it past the 12 months mark for our business readers?

Remember to discuss why you started the business in the first place. Vision is a weird thing; it’s this non-tangible thing that for some reason, we never think about.

It’s easy to think: ‘Of course I know my vision, I started the business’. But having regular conversations about it with your co-founders (or friends if you haven’t got any) can spark up excitement again. It’s so easy to get lost in features, bugs and all the different company things.

Every now and again, it’s just really exciting to get lost in a future where your company reaches its full potential. Spend time describing that world, and it becomes so much easier to stay driven as a result. I’d recommend doing this at least once a month.

• What is your commercial strategy and how do you plan to make even more money?

We’re focusing on building something our users love, first. That has already driven 90% of our growth, with our users telling their friends. We are, though, exploring a few more ways to reach people at a larger scale.
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• Where do you see yourself and your business in 5 years time? 

We will have helped 100 million students learn, that’s the target. 
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