Shikho: digitizing education in Bangladesh

This interview was conducted and transcribed by Timothy Motte.

Biography:

Shahir Chowdhury is the founder of Shikho, a Bangladeshi edtech startup. Shikho is an app where students can watch live courses, test themselves and prepare for Bangladeshi national exams. The company has raised $8M so far. Shikho has around 2.5 million registered users.

Prior to Shikho, Shahir was a banker at Barclays and HSBC. 

Why switch from banking in London to startup founder in Bangladesh?

I grew up here before moving to the UK for university. I graduated in 2009, at the height of the global financial crisis. The crisis piqued my interest in finance, a sector which clearly had a massive influence on the world but that only a handful of people seemed to understand. I started working at Barclays and got my CFA. I then moved to HSBC, as a wealth advisor for high net worth individuals. 

Many of the clients I advised were entrepreneurs. I got exposed to more and more stories of entrepreneurship, risk-taking… I also knew I ultimately wanted to move back to Bangladesh. London is great, but the problems to solve are higher on the Maslow pyramid than what needs to be fixed in Bangladesh. 

I made the plunge in 2021. 

Why pursue the Shikho idea specifically?

I initially wanted to do fintech, since that was my background. After living in Bangladesh for a bit, I realized that fintech’s foundational layers had been laid, with fantastic products such as bKash. My value-add to the space would be limited. 

I soul-searched for other sectors where societal impact would be massive. Edtech was a compelling thesis, personally and market-wise. Both of my parents are teachers. I stumbled upon an internal Barclays report on the Chinese edtech space and instantly saw parallels with Bangladesh’s current situation. 

Bangladesh suffered from a stark mismatch between the number of students and the number of teachers. There simply weren’t enough teachers. A scalable way to bridge that gap is through technology: a single teacher filming a live course over the internet can theoretically reach millions of students. 

That seemed like a better fix than waiting for the number of teachers to adequately grow (Bangladesh hosts around 85 million people under 25, according to our estimates). Especially considering that Bangladesh spends an awfully small amount of its GDP on education, compared to global averages. 

Source: World Bank

What did your MVP look like?

We looked to India for inspiration. Indian edtech was already booming the year we launched Shikho. 

We wanted our app to do two things: enable students to watch live or recorded classes filmed by professional teachers, and test themselves on the content of those classes. We launched during Covid, so those two value propositions exploded in pertinence as schools closed.

How would you summarize the Shikho app today?

It’s still focused on those two core elements: video classes (+ associated resources, such as class summaries) and assessments (ie: tests). As we grow, the number of subjects we offer increases and our testing modules improve. Today, we cover grades 6-12. All classes are crafted based on the Bangladeshi national curriculum, in Bengali. 

We’ve also recently introduced Shikho AI. It’s trained on the students’ data, making it a powerful learning co-pilot. Shikho AI is customized for two particular use cases: teacher tools (building curriculums/worksheets and grading assistance) as well as student aids (AI tutor, personalized exam questions based on the student’s learning path…)

Shikho is a mobile-first company. That’s core to our mission. Teaching standards drop as soon as you leave Bangladesh’s large urban centers: we want to provide education from the best teachers to students, regardless of where they live. All they need is a smartphone, which they are more likely to own than a laptop.

Shikho is used during students' “free time”. How do you incentivize kids to do math tests on their phones after spending the day at school? 

We serve grades 6-12, so we serve three types of user personas.

From grades 6-8, the parents make the decision to purchase Shikho and encourage their child to use it. It would be like a parent telling their 13 year-old child to do their homework. 

From grades 9-11, kids and parents negotiate. Who initiates Shikho usage is generally a mix of both.

At grade 12, a lot of the usage is for university entrance exams. At that point, the parents take a step back and it boils down to how motivated the student is to get into a good university. 

Our best bet to encourage usage of Shikho is to make the classes fun, engaging and practical. On top of being experts in their fields, the teachers we hire need to be charismatic on camera.

How do you make money?