It always sneaks up on you how fast your children grow. Before you realize it—they're not babies anymore. Before you know it, they go through their clothes, toys. They have their lives next to you but these are their own lives (already). They have their friends, their interests, and their school lives. And—now the computers and electronics. Well, the kids started with taking over our home computer, then my laptop. I found an old, used laptop for them—it ended up being too outdated for what they needed.
The truth is that, in today’s world, students cannot even get through school without having access to a PC. They start routinely using PCs in elementary school and, in some places, they're perhaps using EdTech in kindergarten or earlier. By the time they are in middle school, they cannot do their daily homework without a computer, never mind papers, research and other numerous projects they have at school.
So, I ended up needing two additional computers just for our home. And these computers also needed the operating systems, office applications, and other software. This is when we started talking to other parents and realized that most of them were considering three options: giving their children their own old computer, getting them a used or a refurbished computer, or just going to the store and buying everything new.
What was interesting was that almost none of the parents realized that they could buy the computers and software for their children with academic discounts based on their children enrollment in schools.
Here's how it works: let’s say you find a vendor that offers an academic discount with any product you are interested in, then you need to get a letter from your child’s school confirming their status as a student, you fax or email that letter to the vendor, wait for the vendor’s verification and approval and then you can finally make your purchase. Yes, this process is rather cumbersome, but it is possible to get academic discounts from many vendors. The thing is that parents are simply not aware of it.
Then came another idea—what if we would sign up a school so that all its families would be able to benefit from academic discounts and buy products based on their association with a school? And, what about the faculty? We could do that for them as well. That’s how we started thinking about this business.