Building an EdTech Startup: An interview with Emma Warren-Jones

Emma Warren-Jones is the co-founder of Scholarcy, an EdTech startup that helps students and researchers worldwide to read, understand and apply knowledge from academic texts. In this interview, Emma shares some of her experiences transitioning from corporate life, to freelancing, and later co-founding an EdTech business.

I was lucky enough to sit down and talk to Emma about her impressive career and what she has learnt along the way to becoming a successful entrepreneur.

JMR: Please tell me a little about yourself and your work with Scholarcy as co-founder, and how you met your business partner, Phil Gooch?

EWJ: Phil and I worked together at a previous startup called RefMe, which was a referencing software company. After that, we both went our separate ways. After 20 years working for large, multi-national publishers, I’d enjoyed my brief spell at a startup and it was this experience that gave me the courage to go it alone. So I made the leap to freelancing and used my experience to write articles for publishers and Edtech companies.

JMR: How did you navigate this change in your career?

EWJ: I was lucky because I found a couple of publisher clients early on. Working with Springer Nature and some other publishers, I got the chance to interview authors, editors and leaders in publishing tech. As part of those writing assignments, I had to conduct a lot of research, often in wide-ranging areas that I had limited knowledge of such as robotics and global sustainability science.

I’d promoted my freelance service on LinkedIn and around the same time, Phil had just finished working at Babylon Health, and was also freelancing. He’d also just built the beta version of Scholarcy, which was a Chrome extension in those early days. He wanted help with marketing and content, so we met up in a café in North London.

I think one of the reasons Scholarcy resonated with me so well was because at the time I was conducting quite a bit of research into areas I wasn’t an expert in. When Phil showed me what Scholarcy could do, I immediately saw the utility for my own work – getting a well-informed snapshot of a handful of research papers gave me a much easier route into a new subject. I guess I understood the benefits of Scholarcy straightaway, and the rest is history. Phil and I agreed we would partner in Spring 2018, but we were bootstrapped. We both carried on working part-time. We incorporated Scholarcy in January 2019, and secured some investment in September 2019, so it was a frugal couple of years up to then.

JMR: Based on your experience with Scholarcy and previous roles, what advice would you give entrepreneurs entering the EdTech space today?

EWJ: I think the EdTech industry has changed a lot. My background for the most part was in business-to-business publishing and EdTech solutions. I worked on publishing platforms and related solutions such as citation analytics tools and reference managers.

In my previous roles, we were selling technology or platform licenses to universities. University libraries would have a budget they would spend on one to three-year licenses of content packages and related tools which meant they could provide access to all students and staff. Early on, Phil and I thought that this was the biggest opportunity for us - selling licences of Scholarcy to universities through the library. But we soon realised there were barriers to that strategy.

I spoke to lots of librarians across the UK and in the USA. There was some scepticism around the technology. The librarians argued that they spend a lot of time encouraging students to read the full text, to spend time on their reading, and to keep up with their course material. But our vision for Scholarcy was always that it would help students do exactly that, it would just give them a helping hand. Scholarcy has never been about finding a replacement for reading the full text, its goal is to facilitate the reading of not just one but sometimes tens and hundreds of articles. If you are new to reading academic research, Scholarcy makes it less of an intimidating experience. It helps students get to grips with a new subject without sitting in front of a stack of research texts and not knowing where to start.

So, we thought our main revenue stream would come from institutional or university licenses. We probably hung on to that hope for a bit too long. But around the same time, in early 2020, we saw our individual subscriptions really start to takeoff.  We were seeing more students sign up and pay for the service themselves with a credit or debit card. The way I have seen the EdTech space change in the past five years is that students are less reliant on the institution to provide them with the resources or the technologies that they might need to study efficiently. If the student can find a solution that is going to help them with their work, they are willing to pay for it themselves. Fast forward to today, our entire business is built on the direct-to-consumer model.

For any entrepreneur going into the EdTech space, and for anyone thinking of setting up an EdTech business, I think that business model is worth bearing in mind. The days of universities and libraries buying software licences for the entire institution seem to be limited, or at least that’s been our experience.

This was a little scary, given my background, as I didn’t have the knowledge or skills to run a direct-to-consumer business. But you have to just adapt and I had to get over my fears of not knowing anything about this whole world of consumer apps and direct-to-consumer marketing.

JMR: How do you think has Scholarcy changed the way academic content is consumed, and what impact do you see it having on study and research practices?

EWJ: If you’re a researcher and you’re doing a literature search across the many article and preprint databases that are available today, you’ll end up with a long list of full-text search results which you somehow need to read and digest to get to the most pertinent information. You’re likely to be either reading the full text on screen, printing them out and saving them to read when you have time. The first thing Scholarcy does is bring consistency to articles and other texts in any format. It doesn’t matter if it is a thirty-page PDF research paper, a textbook chapter or a manuscript in Word – Scholarcy converts all files into interactive flashcards that highlight key concepts and important terms, provide an accurate, referenced overview of the text and present you with the key facts and findings. So instead of trying to skim-read your entire collection of articles or rely on the abstract, which doesn’t always give a well-rounded representation of the paper, with Scholarcy you can get a good, informed overview of a collection of papers and identify the most important ones more easily.

Scholarcy helps students analyse the text by answering important questions including: what is the paper about? What were the author’s key observations? What kind of results did the study generate and how significant are they? How does this paper sit within the wider body of research and how does it compare to previous studies? What work is needed in the future to build on this area of research?

The way Scholarcy is changing traditional reading and research practices is that it’s getting students to the point of understanding, analysing, and applying information faster than they’ve been able to do in the past. It’s taking away some of that cognitive load and helping them become expert in a subject in a more structured and systematic way.

The technology was never intended to be a shortcut to writing an essay, dissertation or thesis. What we have focused on is helping more people, whether they are experts in a subject or not, to understand and assimilate complex information more easily. Our engineering team have done a lot of work on improving the readability of the content in the flashcard, to make research as accessible as possible, whether you’re a general reader, undergraduate or PhD student.

JMR: Moving from a startup to a scale-up involves numerous challenges and opportunities. What were the critical factors that contributed to Scholarcy's successful growth and global brand recognition?

When we received seed investment, it enabled Phil and me to leave our freelance jobs, work full-time on Scholarcy and pay ourselves a salary. The tipping point came in the Spring of 2020 when we started to see individual subscriptions of the app really start to grow. Then at the end of 2021 Scholarcy was approved by the UK Department for Education to be sold as an assistive technology for students who receive the Disabled Student Allowance That was a huge factor in transforming Scholarcy from a start-up to a scale-up.

JMR: Considering your involvement in discussions on assistive technology and inclusive learning, how does Scholarcy address the needs of neurodiverse students and researchers?

EWJ: I think the challenges that technologies, like Scholarcy are trying to address for neurodiverse students are challenges faced by all students. Feeling overwhelmed, procrastinating, gettingdistracted when you are studying or reading, not being able to remember what you have read, and then having to go back and read the whole article again, not having the confidence to apply what you have read, to either your writing or when you are in a tutorial – all of those things are the problems that Scholarcy aims to solve for neurodivergent students, but these are also universal challenges. I don’t see this as a separate audience, it is part of the student and researcher continuum. Some students may struggle more with organisation and procrastination, while for others the challenge is retaining information. Although, Scholarcy is not a writing tool, what it does do is help students structure their thoughts to get to the point of writing an essay, dissertation, or literature review. It’s like sitting down, reading an article or a research paper, making your notes, and then using those notes to structure your work. Scholarcy facilitates that entire process.

Improving our knowledge extraction and summarisation engine has been a relentless pursuit of Phil’s. Every time we get feedback from a user who says, ‘I didn’t find these highlights useful or ‘this isn’t what I would have identified as the key points of the text’ – Phil takes all of that feedback on board, looks carefully at those specific papers and the examples provided and uses that data to refine our technology. He’s continually striving to improve the reading experience of our users and it’s really inspirational.

JMR: Looking ahead, what are the new features can users expect from Scholarcy? How do you see its role in the evolving landscape of academic research and education?

EWJ: One of the things we did last year was a complete rebranding exercise. We went back to square one and looked at Scholarcy as it was when we started - an article summarizer - and what it has become for users today. This has changed a lot since we started in 2018. When we launch our new website, it’s going to be different from the article summarizer proposition that you see now, and that goes back to our vision to help students read, understand, analyse and apply their knowledge. We want Scholarcy to be an essential part of every student’s toolkit.  

We want to distinguish ourselves from all other chat to your PDF and general-purpose summarizer applications on the market. That is why we make it our priority to talk to our subscribers, and I find that endlessly fascinating. I love talking to peopleabout Scholarcy and seeing how they are using the software; exploring what their study-related challenges and understanding how they approach these. The way our subscribers use Scholarcy is different in every case.

JMR: Do you have any advice for women working in the AI tech space?

EWJ: I would say to keep going, to not lose faith and to not submit to the dreaded imposter syndrome. I still don’t see a lot of women in the EdTech space, certainly when it comes to founders, engineers and even in finance and legal environments, it’s still quite male-dominated which sort of surprises me.

I don’t see myself as a classic entrepreneur, more of a business shaper. Phil is an entrepreneur. He had this idea. He built this product. I had real faith in what he created and in his talent, and I helped to build a business around it. We have complementary skills, and we work well together. In the early days especially, it is a massive gamble and a huge leap of faith. Building a business from scratch is a marathon. It might sound cliched, but you have to approach it one day and one step at a time. We are still doing that today. But without a shadow of a doubt, Scholarcy is the best thing I have ever done in my career. We’re so lucky to have such a talented, driven and brilliant team.

Emma demonstrates the power of innovation, adaptability, and collaboration in the world of academic research and education. Through Scholarcy, Emma and Phil have navigated the fast-evolving world of AI and tapped into the growing potential of EdTech to make academic content more accessible for all students. As Scholarcy continues to evolve and grow, its impact on educational practices and research methodologies promises to be both profound and far-reaching.