Our trip to the 2014 Florida Educational Technology Conference (FETC) exposed us to many innovative companies that are working within the education sector. Although they were not present at FETC, Brainly is one such education company. The Polish company has built an interesting social learning network where students can help one another with homework. Brainly launched in Kraków, in 2012, and their mobile app just recently passed the 1 million download threshold. The Brainly team was kind enough to answer a few questions for us:
Brainly.com
What does Brainly do, and how do you do it?:
Brainly group was created in mid 2012 following the successful performance of the concept in Europe. The group consists of multiple social learning networks, each creating an online community where students help each other by solving subject specific problems and exchange knowledge. The concept is based on peer support. It successfully combines social network features (Q&A, comments, profiles, chat) and gamification (points, rankings, prizes), resulting in engaging, self-learning communities. Until December 2013, Brainly consisted of six educational social networks. Now it continues its growth and international expansion.
We’ve recently had over 20 million unique users world wide and 1 million downloads of our mobile apps.
What problem are you taking on?
We try to take what’s best in offline student collaboration and bring it to the online space. We understand the great importance of the traditional education, but also see its shortcomings. Students often do not like a subject because of a teacher, the time of class or something irrelevant to the subject itself.
We give them a place, where they can share their knowledge and exchange skills. Someone who’s good at Math can help a friend who prefers writing History essays.
What prompted you guys to build Brainly?
The concept worked great on the first market – Poland. Soon, we realized that we have an idea with a scalable roll-out model. After success on more European and Latin American markets, the number of our uu rose to over 20 million in December 2013. At that point we started a massive international launch, including the English version – Brainly.com.
Tell us a little bit about the founders
Our founders are Micha? Borkowski (CEO), Tomasz Kraus (CTO) and ?ukasz Haluch.
They were three friends from Poland, who noticed a need for an online tool for sharing school knowledge.
What’s the next step for Brainly?
Now we focus on succeeding on our freshly launched markets. We already see a great traction in Indonesia and Romania. American market is also of great importance.
Later this year we plan to go ahead and launch in more new countries. The goal is to see students from all corners of the world profit from peer support.
We would like to thank the Brainly team for answering our questions. To find out more, visit Brainly.com, and check them out on Facebook and Twitter.
