Supporting student well-being and mental health is no longer a luxury

In this 6th episode of EdTech Founders from EdTech Garage we interview Miska Noponen, CEO of Annie Advisor, a company that proactively finds students in need of support and helps them when it's most impactful, increasing student satisfaction and decreasing dropout rates. They offer this service for K12 and Higher Education schools & institutions and are based out of Helsinki, Finland.

We talk about: Identifying student well-being, the limitations of a data-driven approach, the benefits of a diverse team, team energy & workload challenges in startups, testing assumptions and more.

Outtakes from the conversation:

"…student well being has become more and more critical, also, throughout the pandemic. And the research related to that has highlighted that students are generally not doing great."

"And schools data in general is either lacking or it's kind of a mess. So it doesn't scale as a solution either."

"…a lot of markets and countries who didn't originally think so much about student well being and were more oriented on the pedagogics and the academic achievement have kind of come around during this specific time."

"…a big challenge that probably all startups work with is managing energy and workloads in your team. And it's not something we talk about in startups a lot. We try to keep this illusion of endless youthful energy in a startup team that they can do everything and anything. And there is no need for free time, or recuperation, or sleep or anything like that."

"…the most common mistake I see also when mentoring edtech startups is that people work from a lot of assumptions they have not validated."

"If I were to design a money wasting machine .. I would have a huge product team build a lot of stuff before testing it with actual users."

The EdTech Garage is a network for early-stage European EdTech startups where founders can scale up faster through the founder community, matchmaking and specialized resources.

• Join the network on edtechgarage.org

• Follow us on Linkedin (www.linkedin.com/company/edtechgarage/)

Host: Frank Albert Coates