- Ismail Sadurdeen of UNIVISER on taking a tech company global
As social creatures, we tend to rely on people we know (directly or indirectly) when it comes to making decisions. This is why the concept of an ambassador has such powerful marketing potential – they offer you a personal face with whom you can form a shared experience.
This week, Brunch sat down with an entrepreneur who has harnessed the power of the ambassador to build a platform that allows college students, especially first-generation college students, to form connections with student ambassadors with a UNIVISER-partnered college to get first-hand experiences and be mentored by people who have themselves been in that same place.
Ismail Sadurdeen’s customisable peer-to-peer platform UNIVISER, in a technical nutshell, is a custom cloud-based plug-in on the college’s own website where prospective students can connect with a university student ambassador (current student/alumni) to build meaningful connections from across the globe and build valuable partnerships.
Text-based, UNIVISER allows prospective students to chat with students already enrolled at the university of their choice and ask the kind of questions they would be reluctant to ask a recruiter – how classes actually work, how day-to-day life works, what solutions there are to specific problems that only another first-time university student might understand, and so on.
UNIVISER has recently made the shift all tech startups dream of – going global, launching its first new offices in India and the UAE. We chatted with Ismail about how UNIVISER approached this milestone.
Creating UNIVISER
“UNIVISER solves an innate need,” Ismail explained, “humans are social creatures, we make decisions based on recommendations of friends and family. And for education, it’s no different. When you want to enrol in a programme, you want to look for someone you have confidence in and can trust who has gone through the same journey. Many people are also the first in their family to go to college, and so, they don’t know anyone in that college or don’t have a direct way to hear it from the horse’s mouth. From a university’s perspective, this is a huge loss of info that can also be a loss of business for the university. Through UNIVISER, they can hear from students within the university who are doing that same programme or from the same country.”
UNIVISER was born partly out of Ismail’s own experience as a student studying abroad who had no one he directly knew to ask about the experience. Choosing to study at the University of Nottingham, UK (in Economics), Ismail also made history by becoming the first international student to be elected Student Union President. In fact, as Student Union President, Ismail set up a physical peer-mentoring programme, called Global Buddies, the concept of which, at its core, was very similar to what he would eventually digitise when he created UNIVISER – a system where new students could be matched with volunteer student ambassadors with whom they could form meaningful connections and learn about university life.
Building UNIVISER
The initial idea for UNIVISER came to Ismail in late 2017, and he spent two years in R&D perfecting the first version to take it to market. Seed funding for UNIVISER came through a startup accelerator programme, Spiralation, as well as an interest-free loan from another Government programme.
“These programmes helped not only in terms of money, but also in terms of mentorship and networking. I don’t come from a tech background and it gave me a crash course and initial seed capital,” Ismail said, quipping, “it also gave me confidence – I got money from the Government, whereas otherwise it’s the Government taking money from you, and that investment gave me confidence that I was onto something.”
At the time, Ismail was working for a Silicon Valley company with an office in Sri Lanka, and this experience had given him a keen understanding of the power of tech. “It opened my eyes to the power of code and technology’s ability to solve problems for me. There are so many cool things you can do using technology, I’ve always been very passionate about building my own startup and one thing I’d always heard was to find your passion. I did an audit of myself, which led me back to my days at the University of Nottingham and the student ambassador programme I set up. I thought ‘why not digitise that buddy programme and make it easier?’ and that initial thought slowly became a small business.”
Ismail started UNIVISER with a very small, agile team (full-time and part-time) until the platform got off the ground. He now employs over 20 people across three country offices and UNIVISER is used by many private universities in Sri Lanka, India, and the UAE. A business-to-business product, UNIVISER is sold directly to universities as a tool that helps them market across multiple channels.
Founding a company that has global application
Ismail’s vision for UNIVISER has always transcended just Sri Lanka. “I would say if you’re running a tech company in Sri Lanka, it has to be a global product that you’re building while using Sri Lanka as a springboard,” Ismail shared, “because our market is very small. Successful tech entrepreneurs need to start experimenting and getting processes in place for foreign expansion. I had always wanted to build a product I could sell overseas because at the back of my mind I know that while many companies focus only on Sri Lanka, Sri Lanka can only give you that initial growth. To get bigger you need global scalability.”
What does it take to be an entrepreneur who can take their company global? A little bit of everything: “Being a tech entrepreneur is surprisingly challenging. Two main things to realise are: while it is a tech company, tech only forms about 50% of the knowledge you need to run it, you also need many other forms of knowledge to run a company – finance, HR, legal, etc., but you just need to play to your strengths and get trusted people to help you with the knowledge you don’t have; and products don’t sell themselves at the early stage – this is where focusing too much on the tech side can result in an over-engineered product with no one to sell it to.”
In essence, to take a tech startup global, you need a balance of skills – and this can in turn mean a balance of people. Ismail, for example, shared that his lack of foundation in tech meant that he was able to work with coders and developers and focus on his strengths – marketing UNIVISER. If it had been the other way round, with him being an expert coder, he may not have had the confidence to be able to sell in the global market. It’s a delicate mix of perfecting your product while also placing emphasis on going to market and market strategy.
“A startup is a marathon,” Ismail said. “It’s like a buffet. You can’t eat everything. You need to pick and choose your battles, and this is what we did with UNIVISER. Our first goal was to achieve 10 Sri Lankan customers, then it was five foreign customers in the UAE, which we have now been able to achieve and grow. Our new goal is now in India where we have opened an office and started to grow month on month as the Indian market has massive potential.”
For more information about Univiser visit www.univiser.io
