Nino Sarishvili
CEO and co-founder
SimpleStudying Ltd - Educational technology company based in London. Around 70% of UK university students are dropping out throughout their course and only 7.5% gets the highest qualification. We are building a digital platform significantly decreasing the dropout rates and improving students’ grades in the universities. We do this by minimising the time students lose for searching the information they need to pass their exams and focus their’ effort and time on studying and practicing. Our platform is like Google for students. They can find everything they need within one click in simple and condensed form instead of reading hundreds of pages in dozens of complicated books. Also, we are building an active community where students can connect, participate in forums, create study groups, find study buddies and learn critical thinking.
As a CEO, I manage the team; I interview and employ new members of the team; I establish milestones for the business to guarantee the fastest growth; I talk with investors and get funding for the business.
What I love about my job is that I always do new things every day. This is because building a startup is introducing something new to the world and we have to do many different things to make that happen. I love creating something new and changing the world for good. I strongly believe that the higher education system all over the world is broken and I created my startup to fix it. It is very exciting when I see that something I invented already helps hundreds of thousands of students around the world with their studies.
We have set agendas every week that my co-founder and I have to follow. These agendas change constantly so I never do the same thing every day. Currently, I am actively working on preparing our fundraising round. Thus, my typical day at work includes meetings with our advisers, employees and business partner to create necessary documents for investors. These documents include presentation of the business, financial forecast, product road map, business executive summary etc. In April, we will be pitching to investors and starting raising the required funds to take the business to the next level.
I am an immigrant female founder who came to the UK from a developing country 7 years ago to start her education. After years of being a student and observing problems that students experience I came up with the idea of SimpleStudying. Without having any connections or sufficient capital to start a business, I managed to launch my educational technology company last year where I am a CEO and co-founder. I convinced my business partner to join me in this venture and invest. In only 1 year, I achieved my startup to be a finalist in GradVenture 2019 (startup competition where hundreds of startups from 7 London universities are competing); Won 2 biggest startup competitions of Cass Business School awarding £8,000 equity free cash and £4,000 worth of office place; I was endorsed for startup visa after proving to the committee of business experts that my business is innovative, viable and scalable; I achieved £15,000 early revenues in only 12 months of launching; Total capital raised £60,000 in only 18 months. I achieved 200,000 active users reading our content; 2600 member registrations; students from 65 UK universities actively using our content and services; Traffic from 150 countries; I created jobs. I grew my team to 7 people in only 12 months. I hosted 13 internships with invaluable training for students. I achieved partnerships with careers services of UK universities to host internships of students as part of their degree. We have recently joined Accelerator Academy. After Cass Business School assisting us to launch our Minimum Viable Product, we needed to take our business to the next level and launch the final product. With the help of the Accelerator Academy, that is our potential investor, we are now raising £150,000 for our Seed investment round.
I aim to change the higher education system for good in the world. My startup will help students study better and be more successful. We are also helping students be prepared for what is coming after the university and make sure that they are employable. My startup will help the world have more educated and successful youth. I aim to donate more than half of the money I earn from my startup to charitable causes that I believe in. These charitable causes are helping young girls get education in developing countries and generally promote advancement of women in the society. Also, I love animals very much and I will be supporting charities fighting for ending cruelty against animals in the world.
I like to work out to take my mind off work and have some rest. Also, in my free time I love to dance with my partner. Dancing Latin American/Spanish dances is my passion and it helps me distract myself and have fun.
"If you don't build your dream, someone will hire you to help build theirs" Dhirubhai Ambani