The usual way to enter a sector is to study it, build what the study implies, and then look for someone to sell it to. I have watched that fail often enough to be suspicious of it.
We do it the other way round. Find one partner who is willing to let you into their real operation. Build for their actual constraints. Deploy it properly, where it matters, where failure is embarrassing. Only once it survives that do you get to call it a product.
In education, that partner is Deccan Springs Global School in Hyderabad. The pilot is deployed and the memorandum of understanding is signed.
Why a school, and why this one
A school is a deceptively hard operating environment. It runs on a fixed calendar that cannot slip. Its users range from administrators to teachers to parents, with wildly different tolerance for software. The data is sensitive and concerns children. And the people doing the work are already overloaded — a teacher's time is the scarcest resource in the building, and any system that costs more of it than it returns will be quietly abandoned no matter what the contract says.
That difficulty is exactly why it is a good first partner. A system that works in a live school, through a real term, with real parents asking real questions, has been tested against conditions you cannot simulate.
What we are building there is a next-generation school management system with AI worked into the operational layer rather than bolted on as a feature — the administrative load that currently consumes a teacher's evenings, handled so the teaching gets the time instead.
What a pilot partner actually gives you
It is easy to describe a pilot as a sales motion. It is not. A real pilot partner gives you three things you cannot buy:
- Truthful failure. A customer tells you politely that they will think about it. A partner tells you the attendance module broke on the second Tuesday and here is why.
- Constraint discovery. Every unorganised sector is held together by undocumented practice. You will not find it in research. You find it when someone says "we don't do it that way" and you ask why for the fourth time.
- Standing. The second school is a far easier conversation when the first one is real, named, and willing to say so.
In return they get a system built around how they actually work rather than how a product manager assumed they do, and they get it early enough to shape it. That exchange has to be genuinely fair or it is not a partnership, it is an unpaid trial.
The method generalises
Education is one sector. The approach is the same everywhere we go:
- Pick a sector where the work is real and the organisation is poor.
- Find one partner who is credible in it and willing to be a genuine collaborator.
- Build against their constraints until it survives live operation.
- Only then generalise — and expect the second deployment to break in ways the first did not.
We work the same way with academic institutions, which is why the collaborations with BITS Pilani, Hyderabad and RV College of Engineering matter to us. They are not logos for a slide. They are where the hard questions get asked early and where the people who will build the next version of this are currently sitting in a classroom.
On the delivery side, USM Business Systems is our partner across both the United States and India — the infrastructure for taking something that works in one building and making it work in many.
Why this is slower, and why I prefer it
You cannot announce much during this phase. One school is not a press release. For a year or more, the honest answer to "how is it going" is "we are in one building, and we are learning what we got wrong."
The alternative is to launch broadly, collect a lot of trials, and discover the same lessons across forty customers at once while all of them are watching. I would rather learn in private with a partner who has agreed to learn alongside us.
Organising an unorganised sector is not a campaign. It is one building, done properly, repeated.