No more waiting in long lines. Klaseko takes the school enrollment process online

During enrollment season each year, both parents and students dread the same problem: standing in long lines for hours, with aching legs and rumbling tummies.

Philippine startup Klaseko simplifies the enrollment process by bringing it online.

Most schools and universities in Manila already have websites that allow them to process student registrations. However, many of them are not capable of handling online payments. This is where Klaseko makes a difference.

“We significantly cut the time that families spend on the enrollment process. You see it takes a couple of hours or sometimes days. This is time they can spend on other valuable things,” says Klaseko co-founder and CEO Carlo Valencia.

Born out of failure

Valencia came up with the idea for Klaseko when he was running a website development business, which seemed doomed to fail. At the time, he was struggling to land deals. He was lucky to have bumped into one prospect – the Bert Lozada Swim School (BLSS), which would eventually become Klaseko’s first client.

“During negotiations with BLSS, I offered to automate their enrollment at no additional cost. Instead, I said I would charge their enrollees,” he explains.

It was a problem that wasn’t unique to one school, which meant scaling would be easier. “Other schools had the same needs so I started thinking about turning the project into a business.” Hence, Klaseko was born in September last year.

The next months were spent building Klaseko’s prototype and testing it with users. Valencia, along with his co-founders, Mannix Chong (chief technology officer) and Monique Morales (chief marketing officer), sat down with BLSS to know more about its needs. Morales has three kids whom she enrolls in the school every summer, so she gave input from the parents’ perspective.

If Klaseko’s founders were naturally motivated to build a useful platform, they were even more so because their financial prospects depended on it.

Valencia says enrollment through Klaseko is still only an option at this point. Since it charges parents/students a fixed fee of PHP300 (US$6.78) per completed enrollment, they can lose revenue if their customers are dissatisfied with the service and choose to go back to the manual process.

Tool against corruption

In the meantime, the schools have everything to gain. By switching to online enrollment, school administrators can easily keep track of student records and payments, avoiding fraud or any leakage through corruption. They can also easily export their student databases, send out newsletters, school schedules, and other important announcements via email or SMS. “No more sifting through papers and folders,” Valencia notes.