Rex Academy Helps a New Generation of Girls and Boys Develop a Lifelong Love for Technology
While leading a 200-person technology team at Harley Davidson, Sandhya Padala was always searching for new technology talent. At the same time, she searched for a way to help her six-year old son learn how to build a video game.
Both quests led her to start Rex Academy and lead the way to train the next generation of girls and boys how to code and build robots.
Company Background
As a technology design director at Harley Davidson, Sandhya Padala recognized how scarce and highly paid software engineers were--partly because how few women were choosing computer science as a field of study.
If she wanted to help close that gap, she needed to find a way to encourage young girls to develop a lifelong passion for computer science.
Padala started Rex Academy after also discovering four related trends: the gender gap had created a serious shortage of computer science professionals, the US wasn’t paying computer graduates enough to encourage them to become computer science teachers, and that girls were dissuaded from continuing their computer education after initial interest in early elementary grades.
Key Challenge: A Tale of Two Opposing Roadblocks: Gaining Funding from Investors and Selling to K-12 Districts
Padala faced two barriers to her success: one from potential investors and one from her primary market:: K-12 districts.
Her potential investors wanted to see more traction and sales before funding her company, and school districts wanted to see a stable flow of funding before adopting Rex Academy’s technology.
So which one should she try and tackle first?
K-12 districts are notoriously complex to sell into with long sales cycles, disparate buying committees that are slow to select new technology, but yet loyal once a vendor gains adoption.
Padala knew her window was limited--so she turned to StartEd’s 5-day Hyper Accelerator for help because of its expertise in helping entrepreneurs learn how to gain adoption with complex K-12 districts.
The Solution: A Time-Based Freemium Model to Fuel K-12 District Adoption
One way to speed adoption was to offer a time-based freemium model: give a full Rex Academy license free to a district for a limited amount of time, knowing once adoption grew, the number of advocates in a district would also grow and this traction would attract potential investors.
Using a time-based model, instead of a feature-based model, also avoided having to use precious development time to gate some features or limit a students’ ability to experience Rex Academy in full.
The result: Rex Academy now has over 1,000 hours of curriculum, 30 courses, 15 organizations, 200 summer camps, and 10,000 students using their technology with 65 school districts in pilot programs.
What the Team Said About StartEd
“StartEd helped us understand how to get the traction we needed to get past both school districts and fundraising roadblocks. We now have over 10,000 students using our technology and 65 school districts in our pilot programs.”
“After years of seeing the gender gap in technology talent,, our vision is to create a program to help close that gap by keeping girls interested in technology all the way from kindergarten through high school. I’m so thankful that StartEd gave us the opportunity to learn how to recognize that vision.”