The NEN Interview: Mervi Palander, CEO & Co-founder at GraphoGame and Co-founder at Claned
With significant international deals with the African Union and across Latin America, Finland’s Claned and GraphoGame are showing the way for Nordic EdTech to expand onto the global stage. Co-founder Mervi Palander has an enviable track record of building EdTech businesses and is also heavily involved in building the wider EdTech ecosystem through her work with Edtech Finland and Teach millions.
As a result, this latest Nordic EdTech News (NEN) interview is packed with invaluable insights. Our wide ranging conversation covered everything from selling EdTech internationally to handling the impact of the pandemic as well as what makes Finnish EdTech unique and the importance of keeping your customers happy.
As previously, the transcript of our conversation (edited to bring you all of the very best bits) follows below.
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Best regards, Jonathan
Jonathan Viner (JV): Hi Mervi! Thanks for talking to me today. Let’s start with the basics, can you clarify the relationship between Claned and GraphoGame?
Mervi Palander (MP): Both businesses are part of the Learning Intelligence Group (LIG). LIG is really a business development company for educational or EdTech ventures. LIG just has these two companies at the moment, but hopefully there will be more at some point.
JV: What do you mean by the phrase ‘business development company’?
MP: It’s all about helping our two EdTech businesses to penetrate global education markets. Lots of the work involves partnerships - just last week, for example, we developed a global, co-marketing campaign for GraphoGame with Eduten. There’s a good fit there as Eduten is all about learning mathematics and GraphoGame is focused on building literacy skills.
JV: So what’s your role with Claned and GraphoGame? Are you actively involved in both businesses?
MP: I'm a Co-founder of both businesses. I ran Claned as CEO for more than six years and then in 2017 when we founded GraphoGame I jumped over to manage it as CEO. My Co-founder (and husband) Vesa Perälä took over at Claned.
Most of my day-to-day work at GraphoGame is running the business and helping our customers to design learning activities and programmes,
JV: We’ll come back to GraphoGame later, but just so we get the full picture, can you please outline what Claned is and does?
MP: Well, there are perhaps a million different ways to actually describe Claned! Many of our customers describe it as a learning management system, but I’m not sure that learning is something that you really need to manage. Claned is a personal learning environment for learners and it enables learning to happen.
It has been created to support learning activities for corporates, other organisations and schools. The whole system is based on AI and the very latest algorithms and learning theories.
JV: Which is your largest group of learners?
MP: It has been designed for adult learners and is widely used in businesses as well as universities and polytechnics globally. But we’ve started having more and more conversations with K-12 settings recently. That might be down to the impact of Covid, but I don't really know.
JV: These markets are all incredibly competitive, so what is it that helps Claned stand apart?
MP: I would say that it's a combination of software, learning design and data. It's very much positioned as a service for companies rather than just technology or software.
Also customer service is everything for us. We work very, very hard to ensure that we have very, very happy customers and very, very happy learners. That’s the same whether we’re building an internal training course or a customer service programme.
JV: What’s the business model for Claned?
MP: Well, we’re a SaaS company, so the main revenue comes from online licences. We also generate revenue through learning design consultations with customers.
This is really valuable as they might otherwise just dump lots of PowerPoints into the software. Instead, we help them to design the learning activities so that users can actually engage with and learn from those materials. This is really important to our clients as is the data that we collect about the learner’s activity and the interventions they need.
JV: How do those interventions actually help learners to improve their outcomes?
MP: We can quickly see if something is wrong - how learners are using their time and what kind of material they are concentrating on, for example. Importantly, we can immediately identify interventions that will help the learners to make corrections because we don’t want to wait until the course is over. There’s nothing the learner can do if they got a grade F - it’s too late!
JV: You mentioned the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic earlier. How has that affected Claned, given the move to online learning and remote, distributed employees?
MP: This is something that I am always very careful to discuss because it’s been a major disaster for many industries. However, it has had a positive impact for Claned and other digital services.
I have been in business for 25 years and have been waiting for the day when people realise that digital learning is something that they need. The pandemic made that happen and there are now lots of possibilities for long-term change. Not just in digital learning and digital meetings, but far beyond that. In Finland, for example, most of the businesses are in the capital area, but the pandemic has proved that we can be located across the country and that we can still work very effectively.
JV: Selling outside of home markets is a challenge for many Nordic EdTechs. So how have you been able to do that from Finland?
MP: We have very good partners in many countries around the world, who have helped us with customer acquisition and to understand the market. One thing we have noticed is that the pandemic has made sales cycles much shorter - virtual meetings are much more focused. It’s “Do you want this or not?”
Potential customers used to ask why would they need this kind of system. Now the why is totally removed - they already know that they need a remote learning platform, otherwise they have no way to train their customers, suppliers or salespeople.
JV: So the need for Claned is now really clear. The need for GraphoGame in tackling global illiteracy is presumably even clearer?
MP: Illiteracy is obviously a huge global problem in the world. We’re focused on solving it by uniting universities, game developers and educators to develop effective literacy apps for teachers and parents.
It is traditionally a problem in the developing world, but we’re also already seeing falling literacy levels in the developed world as a result of the pandemic. In many countries, there was no provision to teach these skills online, so if students miss a year, there’s no possibility to repeat that learning. Early maths and literacy skills are therefore suffering very, very badly.
JV: What’s the global reach of GraphoGame? How many users do you now have?
MP: At the moment, we have national deals in 11 countries. But we haven't been too loud talking about it yet. We’re also negotiating new deals all the time.
In some countries, like France and Norway, Graphogame is a very widely used literacy resource. In Norway, we actually have over 640,000 children using the site. In Finland, Visma provided the game free of charge to all children in first grade and we now have over 75,000 children regularly using it.
JV: How do these amazing whole-country deals actually come about?
MP: We launched in 2017 out of a partnership with the University of Jyväskylä, who had conducted a major research project into dyslexia and reading. They created the GraphoGame method and because it was so effective, it was quickly adopted by some of the best universities in the world including Yale and Cambridge.
When Yale first tested the game, they were really impressed and wanted to give it to all children in the US for free. They then organised the funding to make that happen. The Inter-American Development Bank is very active in running a global literacy hub with Yale. They then said that they wanted to roll-out GraphoGame across LATAM. This agreement has now extended into Argentina, Chile, Colombia and Panama.
Our deal in Brazil came about as a result of my Co-founder (Jesper Ryynänen) working closely with our local university partner. We co-created the Brazilian Portuguese product with involvement from the Ministry.
We’ve also had to recreate all of the literacy resources to make these deals happen. Because of poor internet connectivity, they have all been rebuilt as offline games, so that users can learn wherever they are.
JV: What other international markets are you looking at?
MP: We’re now using the same approach to develop an Arabic language version of GraphoGame. We already have a local university partner, who wants to follow the University of Jyväskylä model - we’re now in the process of finding the funding to make it happen.
JV: You make it sound very easy! But I’m sure that there must have been challenges along the way. What were the biggest problems you had to tackle?
MP: As we’re usually working with governments and NGOs like the African Union and the World Bank, things do take a really long time to happen. We’ve been getting wonderful support from the Finnish government and lots of international embassies are helping us, but decisions don’t just happen overnight. It’s really painful for a small company like us!
JV: You’re also heavily involved with developing the ecosystem through your work with Edtech Finland and Teach millions. How did that come about?
MP: I have been really lucky! I’ve worked in the sector for many years, starting at Business Finland more than 10 years ago with Niko Lindholm trying to figure out what education export looked like for Finland.
Back then there were only a handful of big companies in the space. But now we have more than 300 EdTech startups in Finland. I started talking with Antti Korhonen at xEdu about setting up an association and over the years we’ve worked towards establishing one. EdTech Finland started in May 2019 - Heini Karppinen is doing a wonderful job as Chair and I’m supporting as an advisor. It’s really great to help these startups to grow.
JV: Why do you think Finnish EdTech is so globally distinctive and so globally successful?
MP: I think that there are many reasons why, lots of which are closely tied up with our wider society here.
Certainly over the last 150 years, being a teacher in Finland has been seen as a very respected profession. Pedagogical research has also always been at a very high level in Finland and we’ve many globally respected researchers here. That helps ensure that we have a really solid pedagogical backbone to support people in teaching positions.
And, of course, we have Slush. This event helped us discard the idea that being an entrepreneur in Finland was somehow criminal.
JV: Given your international success, what advice would you give EdTech founders about selling and scaling their products internationally?
MP: First of all, it’s really important that you are known as a company. I have learnt how important it is to ensure that you’ve got all of the marketing and growth hacking activities in place.
You also need to take extremely good care of your customers. We have been very lucky with our staff as they have always helped our customers to grow and succeed. In my experience, customers can handle bugs in your products if you’ve got great customer service. The customer is king - so taking care of the customer is vital.
I would also say that you actually also need to choose the right resellers. This is perhaps the most important lesson we have learnt.
JV: OK, but how do you know which is the right reseller for your business?
MP: It is, of course, slightly down to trial and error, but they should have customers ready to sell to, they must have sales channels ready and ideally their portfolio should have a gap where your product sits. Be wary of those who say that they need to do market research before starting - they should already know the market they’re selling into! It’s best to try and find somebody who knows who to sell your product to immediately, but make sure that they really understand how your product works.
JV: And finally, what are the next big targets that you're working towards for Claned and GraphoGame?
MP: International markets are really key for us. Africa will be important for both companies and Claned also has a number of customers in Southeast Asia.
But I’m really on a mission for GraphoGame. I have seen the research conducted by universities globally. I’ve also seen the results with children - the Brazilian Minister for Education said that they had already seen literacy skills improve in just a couple of months. He was amazed about the power of the game. So I really want to enable as many kids as possible to learn how to read with GraphoGame.
My mission is to convince the Finnish government that it could be a perfect aid project for them. They could fund the distribution of this amazing literacy resource to countries and governments around the world. It would be a powerful, affordable, scalable mission for everybody to get behind, particularly at this moment.
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