Teach Middle East Magazine Sep - Dec 2020 Issue 1 Volume 8 | Page 47

A Moment with
workload and develop a closer teacher
community. Many sites allow teachers
to take other teachers’ resources but
there is no real collaboration taking
place, an issue which Teacherly.io,
addresses.
Share two major challenges
that you faced. How did you
overcome them?
One challenge was recruitment, very
early on when I started, with little
money, trying to get talented people
to help me was hard. I was lucky to have
a good network, and I was able to work
with school improvement officers,
teachers and head teachers, who
helped with product development.
They also became our evangelists
and spread the word. This helped us
get early sales and generate some
revenue, which in turn enabled us to
recruit more great talent.
The second challenge was ensuring
that we did not run before we were
able to walk. Early stage startups can
easily get distracted and start adding
too many features to their product
or start expanding too early. I am a
huge believer in staying true to your
core value proposition. Keep asking
yourself one key question, ‘what is
the core problem that I am trying to
solve?’. Focusing on this and making
sure we did not get distracted, helped
us establish ourselves in the UK and
now expanding to other countries.
I’d like to add a third, having gone
through the cycle of founding and
trying to fund my start up with external
funding, I found being a single founder
very hard. I am of the view that, there
still needs to be more funding options
available to Black and Minority
Ethnic Entrepreneurs (BAME). Some
reasonable progress has been made
to help women entrepreneurs, but not
enough, in my opinion, is available to
support BAME entrepreneurs.
What Is Teacherly?
Teacherly is a collaborative lesson
planning and peer to peer coaching
platform. It connects teachers across
departments, schools and countries,
by creating clusters of teacher
communities. Teacherly improves
workflow and efficiency and drives
up the quality of planning, reducing
workload and saving teachers time.
At a school management level, it
also helps with compliance and
understanding the quality of teaching
that is happening on a day to day basis.
What is the hardest thing about being
an entrepreneur?
Making sure that as an entrepreneur
you transition from just thinking and
executing an idea, to running it as a
business. It is important to have a mind
set of wanting to continue to learn and
better yourself as an entrepreneur and
Founder, and finding time to do this.
What is one of your proudest
achievements to date?
My proudest moment as a Founder was
making it to the top 10 of the Founders
and CEOs of tech startups 2017 in The
Northern Stars/Tech Nation Annual
Awards. This was a great achievement
because the award was judged by some
amazing CEOs, as well as an audience
vote, too. It was streamed live, and my
daughter and wife watched me for the
first time on TV.
What are three fun activities
that you do to relax and take
your mind off work?
I love running. I get up at 05.30am and
run every morning, this helps me to
reflect and relax. I love playing with my
daughters Huriayya and Haniya, who
is 1 year old. We love dancing to Kids
Bop. I also enjoy watching football, I
have supported Manchester United
since I was 11.