They started out renting university textbooks. Now they’re making Netflix for class notes

Photo credit: Francisco Osorio

Jon Tse had always dreamed of becoming a businessman. He pictured himself in a suit and a tie, going to work carrying his morning cup o’ joe and a briefcase. Studying accounting and law at MacQuarie University in New South Wales, Australia, Jon figured he’d be able to leverage his studies to get what he wanted.

Things didn’t turn out exactly that way. Jon got jobs in accounting and banking (reading The Wolf of Wall Street may or may not have contributed to this decision), but found the corporate world too restrictive and uninspiring. He realized that more than being a businessman, wielding power (and briefcases) and making money, he wanted to build products and make an impact in the world.

So Jon and university friends Ahmed Haider and Chris Zaharia, from MacQuarie and the University of Technology Sydney (UTS), decided to start their own company. “We knew the student space quite well, the market, the problems students faced,” Jon tells Tech in Asia. “So we thought maybe we could find one of those problems and provide a solution, and maybe that could somehow turn into a business.”

From idea to execution

It turns out that textbooks are a pretty common problem in student campuses. They’re expensive, you need to buy lots of them, and they’re not much use once you’ve passed your exams. Identifying the problem, the team looked to the US for inspiration, where a startup called Chegg does textbook rentals and sales and also offers a variety of services useful to students. And so Zookal was born.

The Zookal team

The team borrowed money from friends and family, which they used to buy about 300 textbooks. Within a week, their website had 20,000 visitors and they were able to rent out all their books. Clearly the idea had legs.

Largely bootstrapping up to that point, the team scored a US$1.2 million investment from a London-based angel, that prompted all team members to quit what they were doing, be it work or studies, and focus 100 percent on Zookal. Now the business has 50,000 paying customers in Australia.

Brace for impact

The team still wanted a product that made an impact, however, as well as provide a service that was more scalable than textbook rentals. Part of the team stayed back in Australia to keep working on the textbook rental business while Jon and a colleague came to Singapore to explore more options as they felt Asia presented a huge opportunity in the university education space. “[What is] interesting about Asia is the importance of education, even over health,” Jon says. “Because that’s the stepping stone to a stable job and life, and opportunities for your job and family.”

Zookal answered the education tech call with an online video marketplace. The idea is that senior university students who have excelled in a particular subject can upload a video of themselves explaining this subject for junior students. They can use methods like handwriting, powerpoint presentations, and other materials to enhance their videos.

Students can then access those videos by paying the fee set by the uploader – and Zookal of course takes a cut out of every purchase. Think of it as senior students selling their notes and tutelage to younger ones. Jon says the site is home to about 25 different courses, each of which is about five hours long. There are about 2,000 videos on the marketplace at the moment, with an average running time of 5 to 10 minutes.

An example of a class on Zookal’s website.

Class is in session