The Story of Eduwatch
Eduwatch was a verified feedback system on educational institutions that I built in early 2018, with the hope that students will contribute to the project and transform it to a community maintained project. But I was wrong. The project now lies in limbo awaiting a revival. This is an account of what happened.
Eduwatch was a culmination of an unpleasant experience I had with an institution, where for a brief period of time, I worked as a onsite digital marketing consultant. As part of my job, I had interacted with many students and over a period of time I figured out the institution was engaging in certain unethical practices in their sales and operations. I insisted on ending these practices, but apparently, it was easier to terminate our relationship. After parting ways, I realised there was space for a feedback system on educational institutions given by students of respective institutions.
Up until then, the major feedback systems were Google reviews, Facebook reviews, and ratings on aggregator services like JustDial and Sulekha. But they all had a flaw: anyone with an account can rate and review the listing. This allowed institutions to engineer massive number of fake reviews and ratings on these platforms and the institution I worked was engaging in such acts too. It was evident that a verified feedback system would be the closest that portrays the true image of an institution and will thus help students make informed decisions, especially when choosing institutions.
So, I started with the design of the product, and it started with a fundamental question: what does a student or parent want to know before considering admission in a particular institution? I thought as a student looking for an admission and as a guarding looking to admit someone into an institution. Several questions came up and I shortlisted few of them. They became the foundation of my feedback system and the very image of the institution depends on these questions.
I now set out to develop it. I wasn't a computer illiterate: I could troubleshoot computers, build static websites and design products, but I was not an engineer capable of building dynamic production projects like this. But since I did not have have a lump sum of money to pay someone to build it, I considered learning Django and develop the product myself. However, the product manager in me made a convincing argument that I still will not be able to ensure the security aspect of the product given the possibility that rich institutions may hire engineers to infiltrate our database and change feedback in their favour.
So, I started my hunt for developers who were both affordable and competent. The product wasn't complicated at all — it consisted of a form where students enter their feedback and submit it, the system stores it in the database and retrieves it when requested. I found a developer through a reference, explained to him the product, showed my HTML & CSS mock up of the front end I had designed and he started working on the project. Performance was a key. So I also asked him to avoid certain unnecessary frameworks such as bootstrap to keep the technical side lean.
After a day, he showed me the home page he designed which I was not happy with. It looked like a failed attempt on reproducing my design. We then agreed that he would take care of the back end and render the front end in the semantics I require, which I will later style it myself with CSS. This workflow turned out to be rewarding as I could control every part of the design right down to the individual pixel. In few weeks of collaboration we finished the development of the product and tested it.
When I first explained the project to him, we didn't particularly talk about his remuneration. In any other case this would be a mistake, but fortunately in this case, didn't turned out be one. He charged an extremely affordable price of ₹20,000, which I borrowed from a friend of mine and paid him (since I was short of money and in few weeks I repaid it).
Now that the product was now ready for launch, I launched it stealthy as I wanted to evaluate the product in the production environment making adjustments to the application. Such a launch would minimise the confusion consumers will face in case of any drastic change. Thereafter, my intention was to find a way to mass market it. And so, I called up some students I know, explained to them the product and asked them to give feedback on their institutions (at that point, I called it a review). They participated and told me that the product was much required in the educational space. Soon, I gathered tens of verified feedback which, considering that I had to individually call them and gather, was a good number.
Few days into the launch, I started noticing the hesitance of some students in participating. One day I called a student of the particular institution where I briefly worked, explained to her the product and asked for her participation. She said she will look at it. The next morning, she sent me a reply stating that she did not like the way I am trying to shut her institution, and that I was to never contact her regarding this matter.
I felt the need to explain something to her. The Eduwatch feedback system does not shut educational institutions. If students score an institution bad, there is only one consequence: new students are warned and if they choose another institution, the admissions of the said institution decreases. No establishment shuts themselves simply because of bad feedback. Instead they are forced to change their way of functioning, market it and survive. As I was typing this response, I noticed her profile picture disappearing: she had blocked me. Something happened since my call the previous night. I don't blame her for thinking that way because the questions on the feedback form were indeed troublesome for institutions that engaged in unethical practices. I should admit that my experience with the design institution did influence the design of the feedback form. After all, that was the inspiration for this project.
I usually ask students to forward the feedback link to their batch mates and put out a word for me in person to participate. This was efficient and assuring. In one instance, a student outright refused to put out a word saying that if anyone is interested, they will use the link she had shared. But no one gave the feedback. Such hesitance were the first blow to my hope of students taking over this project and owning it.
I did take into account the 'fear' factor of students if the institution was bad: that many will hesitate to give honest feedback fearing targeted harassment from the management. This is why I designed the feedback system to provide confidentiality to feedback posted. Now, I was left with only one option: soliciting students for feedback just as I was doing all these while; except that there was a problem with that: this process demands a good amount of resources. Since this project was not built as a business, resources was indeed a problem. Like any other product designer, I created this out of the necessity of such a product, not with a business intension. I expected the students themselves to take over the growth of the application and I would take care of the technical side including minor cost.
Now, I pondered on transforming the nature of this project to a for-profit venture. Since I have a small application and some traction, attracting inventor interest would not be a difficult task. But since there was no business plan to generate profit, any interest from investors would yield no fruit. In fact, I had another business project in mind that I wanted to work post Eduwatch, and working on Eduwatch as a for-profit venture would require me to sacrifice this plan. Add to this some of the responses from students that made me wonder if the project was worth it, such as one day, as I talked to a student who have been complaining about her institution for a very long time so much so that she was known for her complaints among those in the administration, she agreed to her dissatisfaction with the teaching, infrastructure, practicals and how the management dealt with her complaints, but she will not hold the institution accountable for all these. This seemed weird because a student's deal is with the institutions who should be held responsible and accountable for the infrastructure, teaching, administration and everything related to the course. Her response sort of beats the very purpose of my feedback system as it held the institution accountable for such failures.
Another student was dissatisfied with almost all metrics said she still recommends the institution: a strange conclusion to come to given her feedback. In fact such unjustified recommendations made me wonder whether recommendations overruled the rationality of every other metric. I concluded that it was and hence removed it.
Nonetheless, I explored some business models for Eduwatch, one of which was selling admissions in these colleges to students. But I vehemently disagreed with the current educational system that commodifies education. So, selling admissions was not a business activity I wished to implement. Moreover there is a potential conflict of interest: there is an incentive we enjoyed if the institutions who pay us good commission has good feedback. I trust myself to stand on my ethical ground, but often with outside investment, power may not be with the founders, but with the investors.
Ads were another revenue stream with privacy invading ad services being the most profitable one. But as I am an ardent personal privacy advocate, I would only allow privacy respecting ads which may not be as profitable as its counterpart. As with the earlier case, the control of the company may not be with me to consider such nuances of conflicts.
I considered developing similar feedback systems for other businesses such as restauraunts and turn this into a feedback agrgeation business. The difficulty was in verifying whether the participants are indeed a customer. With education, verification was easy since a student remain a customer for at least a year (certifications are a one year course). With restaurants, the customers remain customers only for few hours. So peer to peer verification was impractical. Although the bill is a reliable verification method, people have the tendency to either leave it in the restauraunt itself or dump it outside. By the time we approach consumers for a feedback, they are without the bill.
There was however one business model that seemed sensible and profitable enough to make investors invest: e-commerce. Students form a consumer category in their own right: their fashion sense is different, their emotional sense is different, their socialising nature is different, and they span a considerable amount of age group. Products can be categorised specially for students: apparels, footwear, accessories, study materials, printing services, food services, accommodation, etc. I could transform Eduwatch into a brand serving the student community. But I guess I was so much in love with the other business plan that I chose leave this and pursue that.
So, I started working on my business venture (music streaming model) which later evolved to a privacy ecosystem of multiple products and services. However, due to the lack of a solid team and funding (both forms a catch-22 problem), the privacy project lays in limbo. So is Eduwatch. But meanwhile, while developing the model for privacy ecosystem, I kept an eye on the retail sector too, analysing where some of the biggest players are flawed, and whether the retail market indeed serves the best interest of consumers. I developed a retail project model too. Now, Eduwatch is in the process of rebranding and filling up a space in the retail ecosystem.
So, what went wrong with my expectation that students would give unsolicited feedback. Years later, as I studied basic psychology from a marketing perspective, I realised that the hesitance I saw in students was merely a human nature. We tend to take an initiative to leave feedback only when we are extremely unhappy or extremely happy with an experience. When everything is fine, we almost never take the initiative to leave feedback. The only way was to be solicited into giving feedback, which is why the direct approach method was fairly working. The lesson: never disregard the consumer psychology when building a product.
Another way to look at this is through basic business sense. You sell a product or service to consumers, and if you are not producing the product, you have to buy it with something. Feedback on institutions was what I was offering, but I don't make them and I could get it only from students. In cases of extreme satisfaction and dissatisfaction students have with their institutions, the emotional response they receive from giving feedback pays them for the feedback. But in every other case, there isn't anything that pays them for an unsolicited feedback. When solicited, the emotional response from helping other students make informed decisions pay the students for their feedback.
In hindsight, I don't regret leaving Eduwatch for the privacy project even though it didn't materialise. But I regret keeping Eduwatch in limbo all these while. I could have dedicated one hour of my daily time to build the feedback system focused at a particular city like Bengaluru. By now, the system would have had around 3000 to 5000 verified feedback on institutions, which would have been a wonderful springboard for further growth.
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Sometime late 2022, with improved product design skills, I started working on relaunching this service as part of another ecosystem. It was now that I realised then that the original product design wasn't as good and relevant as I thought it to be. The survey results segregated institutions into two large buckets — extremely bad institutions and the rest. While this seem nice, it actually becomes useful only on rare occasions since most institutions are fairly good. The best, the good, the fairly good and the average institutions fall in the same bucket of 'good institutions', and this does not help students to choose between these majority of institutions. The product was thus useful only on rare occasions, almost like a warning about bad institutions.
But this purpose of warning the students about bad institutions can be better achieved by writing investigative articles about those institutions. This will also elaborate the issue much more than a few lines of student review buried among many other reviews. The exposure and impact of an investigative article would be higher if warning about bad institutions is the goal. This made me realise that the feedback system's product design must be improved. It is still lies in limbo.