Startup tutorial offers via livestream

Everything had started harmless enough with a little help among brothers and sisters. Moritz Ohswald had a question on the subject of mathematics at home – and wrote to his older brother, Felix, who had a lot of pbadion for the subject. According to Whatsapp, both photos, text and audio files were exchanged. "At one point, his friends also wrote to me, and all of this is exhausting more and more," recalls Felix Ohswald. First of all, it was mathematics, then physics. And the student sent message after message, until he ended up thinking with his brother: "Why do not we start-up?

The idea of ​​GoStudent was born. In 2015, the start-up was founded in Vienna and both developed an application with a free online chat. And where other founders had to fund expensive marketing campaigns, Ohswald's idea spread through schoolyard conversations. "Most often, there are questions in the field of mathematics, for example, probability theory, statistics or geometry," says Ohswald. The start-up has developed an algorithm that says it already knows how to automatically answer half of the questions. A fully automatic treatment should not exist in the future, on the contrary. "Education is something very individual," says Ohswald: "In a clbad of school, there is one teacher for 25 students, while everyone learns differently in the end." GoStudent also offers a paid tutoring with individual support by video. "We think the trend in the aftermarket market will focus more and more on online education," said Ohswald. In Germany and Austria alone, more than a billion euros a year would be spent on offline tutoring every year.

At the same time, the startup wants to reach new target groups outside the clbadroom with group clbades via video. Many people would be interested in programming, even if it would not be taught at school, said Ohswald. Such offers should be available from GoStudent in the future. People around the world could then learn more about the platform, as the start-up also wants to attack with new capital on the English market. There are already a lot of suppliers. Sebastian Thrun, who co-developed the autonomous car for Google, founded the Udacity start-up in Silicon Valley a few years ago. The company should become an online university open to everyone in the world. But the foundation was ahead of its time in 2012 and had to adapt its concept. Today, their offer is more suitable for companies that want to train their employees, for example in the field of cybersecurity or artificial intelligence. His clients include large companies such as Ford, Bank Credit Suisse and General Electric. The work is tedious, especially in the German-speaking countries, which may also have historical reasons: in the United States, students go to private schools more often and often cost tens of thousands of dollars. In Germany, on the other hand, education is largely free and some parents are already complaining about giving money early in the school year.

As a result, the founders are obviously reluctant to become active in this area. Some bankruptcies are an example of a warning. Only 3.6% of start-ups surveyed this year in the "German Start-up Monitor" sector survey come from the education sector. One of the best known is the start-up Sofatutor, founded in 2009 and which already has more than 1000 learning videos and additional worksheets online. The Berlin subscription model already has more than 250,000 users. And then there is the mathematical Math42 application, which was presented by two students at the founding issue "The Lion's Grotto" and then bought by an American company. It is said that it is used by more than two million students worldwide.

The two Austrian brothers should also hope for a similar success. They also tried their luck on a television show, specifically in the Austrian equivalent of the lion show "Two Minutes, Two Million". From your point of view, for example, public institutions could also be more open to digital offerings such as theirs. "I think it would be incredibly charming that, for example, job centers or educational institutions are saying that we are giving video lessons to GoStudent for socially disadvantaged kids," says Felix. Ohswald. Then they could see the founder live in action. Ohswald offers his own group course: mental arithmetic.