Finding a problem that needs to be solved

Insights from an Entrepreneur – Value Based Entrepreneurship

Johan Brand is a creative technology entrepreneur. He is the Co-Founder of Kahoot!, one of the world’s fastest-growing learning brands with over 70 million unique monthly active users in 200+ countries. Johan shares us the story of Kahoot & how he sees entrepreneurship.

How did you become an entrepreneur?

I began studying in a business school, but quit after three months. It felt like I wasn’t learning practical skills, just theory. This took me to art school studying photography to learn more creative skills, how to ask questions from the world and originate my own ideas.

At art school, I learned to deal with uncertainty and understanding things that have no given answers. This was also where I could vocalize my own taste and values. Critiques force you to defend your choices and can also answer your own questions of why. This is a skill I am so fortunate to have learned and find so much more relevant. At the time, I didn’t know I would become an entrepreneur but discovered my interest & talent in starting new things.

Story of Kahoot

When working in London, I got more and more interested in play as human behavior. I see it as our first language. It is what we do with animals or with other humans if we don’t have a common language. This is the entry into developing relationships.

At the time, I was introduced to the other founders of Kahoot. They were working on other projects, but we were all in a similar field. We connected through aligned views of the world. Our drive was coming together and seeing problems that needed to be solved. We brainstormed, challenged each other and fell in love with different ideas. In the end, we chose the best bits and pieces that fit our collective vision.

However, none of our ideas were so exciting that we would be willing to give up our careers. We started to think, for what are we ready to sacrifice everything – and then we realized that the problem with education needs to be solved.

The problem & solution

We wanted to make learning awesome and as fun as hanging out with your friends after school. To do this, there needs to be engagement, play, and social interaction.

We started to think about what does it mean: how can we make people engage more? Technology plays a big part in how both students and adults connect outside of work or the classroom. Now we just had to find a way how technology can enable learning to be cool. In school classrooms, we saw students using clunky, dated clickers to give answers. Why couldn’t we turn everyone’s smartphone into a personal gaming controller you always have with you? Our vision emerged to turn the outdated, boring classrooms into a game show with everyone’s phone being the controller.

The first step was to help the teachers get behind our idea. They needed to be the ones to introduce the game as something cool and then have their students log on to the platform. It’s no fun to be a teacher in your 40s with technology native students trying to do something with technology and fail.

We invented the pin code engage model. This means when the participants sign up, they will see their names on a big screen. Everyone wants to see their name on a big screen and get their 2 minutes of fame. This was our first innovation, creating a fun way to connect to the game which is actually a game itself.

Our research led us to quizzes as very engaging types of games that also work pedagogically. This entry point is the hook to have people to engage with the platform.

Customers and users

I think it’s important to understand that your customer might not be the user: you might create value for someone using the product, but someone else is actually paying.

At first, we defined our two users as students and teachers. Both need to have equal value, but both have different objectives. Teachers need to be able to facilitate the game and gain learning value while the students need to be able to participate in the game and gain social value. Our goal was to take both user needs into account, but have them somehow meet in the middle.

Turning the product into a business

It was clear we needed teachers to use the product. If their students love it, the teachers would use it again. This we coined, product-led growth. Once we created a product that the teacher would adopt and students would use, we gave it out for free to the end-users. If both the users adapted well, we used that leverage to sell the school administration on the value of this becoming a paid service.

However, it was very clear from day one that schools were just a laboratory for business. This product works on a basic, humanistic level for all. We opened our target groups to workplaces or social gatherings and now have found commercial growth as well.

Value-based-entrepreneurship

At Kahoot, our goal is to ensure the product is always free for students and extract the value from businesses. I call it value-based entrepreneurship: you create solutions that add value before you extract value for yourself. Of course, I want people to have commercial success, but only as a consequence of having a positive impact. By giving, you also tend to get back – this is a fundamental attitude of a good entrepreneur.

A while ago I also founded a company called The EntrepreneurShipOne. I identified that the Ocean and its potential for a sustainable future was not part of the public agenda, neither at school or political level. I wanted to take action in solving that problem. We facilitate voyages and expeditions with entrepreneurs, politicians, and corporations to physically expose them to the problem and the solutions within technology and entrepreneurship that can provide solutions for the betterment of the world. At the moment, this is not a commercial business, but a community built on creating positive, societal impact. There could be a commercial element to draw from this venture at some point, but first, we should have a positive impact.