As we have been focusing more on education in the past several months, we have covered a ton of great EdTech startups and companies. However, the great majority of these companies have been involved in the more traditional K-12 and/or college education track. However, we just came across a great education company that is more focused on skills-based learning, rather than the traditional education tracks. BranchTrack provides a pretty unique approach to education. The company allows users to create online training courses, utilizing RPG-like NPG customers. We had a chance to ask the team a bit more about their simulations:
BranchTrack
What is BranchTrack?
We help learning designers create better online training in sales, customer service, telemarketing and other areas. Using RPG-like simulated customers allows to engage and motivate learners much easier than vanilla online courses (a.k.a. “information dump”). A number of Fortune 500 companies are already trialling our public beta version.
So who is BranchTrack for? Who are the users?
Jack works in T&D dept of a big hotel chain. He needs to train their staff on dealing with angry customers. He can build a course with some info on slides and a quiz in the end. Or he can add a BranchTrack game, let learners face a customer in a game where their dialogue choices actually matter and lead to drastically different outcomes. Let them fail, let them try again. Let them learn, instead of dumping information on them. This is what BranchTrack helps him do.
Also, sales coaches, customer service trainers, instructional designers, e-learning developers, game designers, guidance councellors, even shrinks.
What makes your product different than what is currently available?
BranchTrack requires minimal effort to deliver meaningful and good looking results. We demand zero technical skills, so training professionals love us as much as they hate developers. And we are very much focused on the T&D field, so we really know our users.
Why did you get involved in Education?
I’ve been running an e-learning development company for 5 years when I decided I wanted to build a PRODUCT, not a SERVICE (the WhatsApp aquisition news get to everyone, even me). So I took the thing our clients loved most – simulated customers – and built a tool that lets anyone add some gaming to the learning mix.
Tell us about your team and their backgrounds
Sergey Snegirev – BSc in Economics and Business Management from Stockholm School of Economics in Riga. Five years of managerial jobs all over Europe. Then I started and e-learning development company. Then I spun off BranchTrack.
Raivis Freimanis – my coursemate from SSE Riga with background in HR, head hunting and sales. Head of sales at BranchTrack.
Sergey Margaritov – MSc in Comp Science, Ruby ninja with 10 years in web development.
Jean Mauris – UX wizard, designer-turned-serial-
That’s it for now. We have a lot of people contributing their time and smarts to BranchTrack, too, and we love them for that.
What is the next step? What do your current goals look like?
We will launch subscription plans on July 1st. So we need to sell. Typically, any training professional who tries BranchTrack, goes “Wow, I love it”, so we really need to get out there and make sure a lot of people hear about us.
And surely we have a long roadmap full of exciting features. There’s a certain feature that might makes us a multi-million business but I will have to tell you about it personally.
