Educational inequality confronts millions of students daily. While wealthy families purchase tutoring and premium resources, others struggle with basic materials. This is the story of how we discovered that ambitious visions require careful execution. Meaningful change happens through deliberate, measured steps rather than revolutionary leaps.
Inequality in the access to educational resources is a problem that confronts me on a day to day basis. How is it fair that those who can spend on tuition and extra classes gain more knowledge than those who don’t have these resources. Education is not a platform for the richest 10% to keep themselves the richest for perpetuity. The democratisation of knowledge matters. This was our thinking when we decided to build Reprose: an application that would harness AI to make educational material more accessible.
Big Ideas
Our first instinct in reaction to the problem was to make education material cheaper while retaining quality. This was in 2023. Foundation Models and RAG had just emerged and we decided that this was the key to unlocking better education for everyone. It sounded like a plan!
We could benefit thousands of students with this idea. Being fresh into the world of entrepreneurship, I was naive enough to think that because we were gunning to solve a social problem, we would get immediate support for our idea, allowing us to scale our idea as fast as possible.
As a result, we decided to make our solution as generalist as possible. All of us wanted our idea to work with any education system. I believed that this new advance in AI would enable us to create change in ways that were simply not possible before. We were all excited to get working on this game-changing idea.
The bricklayer’s manifesto: why small wins
There was an elephant in the room, however: The disconnect between great abstract ideas and the reality of implementing them became a growing chasm standing between us and our objective. This slowly became apparent when we started thinking about how we would bring our plan into reality. Once we had a functioning RAG system we had to upload content to be retrieved manually. This was a bottleneck with a serious consequence: there was no way we could productionise our system to create quality educational material for everyone.
It wasn’t just a technical bottleneck. There was a business bottleneck as well. For example, our solution was going to be used by students: this is obvious. However, it isn’t at all obvious how students would get to know our app existed. Thus, marketing was a mystery. It also wasn’t obvious how we would charge students in a way that is both fair for them and sustainable for our enterprise. Pricing strategy was also a mystery.
Making these decisions is a bottleneck on growth. We realised that as our product range and user base grows, the number of decisions increases. This would slow down our team and pull the focus away from our core mission.
We did this project with support from the Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD) Create4Good Innovation Fund which gave us the opportunity to better understand the entrepreneurship journey. It opened my eyes to the importance of understanding the complex ecosystem in which our product was going to operate.
The incubator made us aware of the solutions to these sorts of problems that start-ups face. Our mentor advised us with words that have stuck to me till this day: “you need to validate your hypothesis”. For this, a necessary pre-requisite was to clearly identify a small enough target market that we could test our business on.
The advice resonated with me because as a STEM student I was familiar with hypotheses and how to test them. Looking at entrepreneurship as the process of coming up and testing hypotheses of business proposals gave me a surprisingly clear framework to think about solutions. You cannot hedge all your bets on grand visions that you haven't yet proved. This is why you need to start small and check that a small case is true before you put all your money on your hypothesis.
This project gave me not one but two reasons why something small wins. So this was exactly what we decided to do.
The coming storm - why this matters more than ever
There is a great promise that AGI will help us solve all the problems we have: poverty, climate change or political instability. But it’s misleading to think that all of this change will happen automatically as soon as we get very smart computer algorithms. It is misleading because it gives an excuse to wait for the technology to arrive before we can go and conquer the problem.
On the contrary, as my experience has shown me, change doesn’t happen overnight but rather, is created brick by brick. Repose taught me to start laying the bricks. To solve the biggest problems, it is necessary to start small so that we can get the necessary feedback to best tailor the solution to the problem. We can start today.
Change is created brick by brick
That is what my team did. We decided to go back to our Junior College as alumni and implement the solution for them. This was a market that we knew well so we could get meaningful feedback which we could then take to conquer a bigger market.
The blueprint for change
In essence, to make meaningful change happen, here is the starter kit that you can use:
Find the small community that you can target the most effectively. Choose the one you know best.
Build the solution for them and perfect it.
Let the solution grow from there.
The world doesn't need another grand vision gathering dust while we wait for perfect conditions. It needs builders who start today with imperfect tools and incomplete knowledge. So go out there and dare to build your idea, brick by brick.