Kidstellar: Content Creation & Publishing Platform

PROBLEM: Quality educational content for children is extremely limited on mobile platforms. This presents a significant challenge since mobile devices are becoming the de-facto medium to consume content.

The biggest barrier is the technology complexity for creating content& lack of skillset amongst traditional publishers.

SOLUTION: Kidstellar addresses this holistically by:
1-Dramatically simplifying the creation of mobile&interactive content
2-Making this content accessible&affordable, globally, through an online Marketplace.

This approach enables anyone to create content, without possessing the technology skills. By so doing, we focused on enabling a vast (&hitherto untapped) source for compelling content: teachers/educators.

We incentivize teachers by publishing&monetizing their content on our marketplace; this globally accessible marketplace allows anyone to access the content at very affordable prices.

IMPACT: The Kidstellar solution will enable millions of educators around the world to develop content while helping 2 Billion children to develop a solid learning foundation early on in life.

Low Availability of Content for Children

UNICEF declares that 3rd world countries can break the cycle of poverty by increasing access to ECD programmes. Participation in quality pre-primary programs has positive effects on the cognitive development of children but ECD programmes remain severely underfunded in Sub-Saharan Africa, Middle East and North Africa, Latin America, Southeast Asia, despite the need.

As a result, several children are missing out on the opportunity of developing life essential skills to reach their full potential. UNESCO estimates there are over 250 million school-aged children in the world who do not know how to read/write/perform basic counting. Many of these children do not have access to schools/teachers at all. Limited access to content is the key missing component in the current education ecosystem. We must solve this problem: 

“Lack of content for children to develop the critical learning and cognitive skills.”

Questions which guided us to create an effective solution:

How can we…

• Provide accessible-affordable-creative-relevant content for all?
• Make the content resources available?
• Leverage every person who can create good content?
• Create a solution for each special need of different children groups?
• Break down socioeconomic & geographic barriers for easy access?

"We are serving content creators to serve children."

1- All creators of content for children: We are leveraging the vast untapped talent globally to create content and make it widely available. 

• Teachers&Educators: Source of creative, diversified, tested and proven content is usually teachers&educators. They are in direct roles for educating children which makes them the most experienced & insightful segment on any specific developing or learning needs. We are enabling best practices; a teacher can share what works (tried & tested) to anyone in the world.
• Academicians&Researchers: A psychologist who has designed a model for “cognitive skill development” or a researcher who focused on supporting “responsive relationships” between children&parents can share their work as mobile ready content.
• Publishing Houses & Writers: They are moving slowly to mobile publishing because of skills and technology needed. We are enabling their books on mobile devices with enormous time&cost savings without outsourcing.
• NGOs: Even if an NGO wants to provide free content for low-income communities, there are still printing/manufacturing and distribution costs to compensate. We are enabling them to create&distribute free content to children in low-income communities.

2- Children: They will immensely benefit & be enriched from better, cheaper & easier to access content.

Mobile devices are widespread & increasingly becoming the preferred way to consume content for children (CommensenseMedia). Because it offers see & hear, touch & interact experiences at the same time for the age group (2-5) which has the shortest attention span.

Although it is the easiest way to make any content accessible and affordable; less than 0.1% of the content created for children is in mobile form (~10M books, toys, learning materials are available today in physical form) due to the technical barriers: Technology complexity for creating new content & lack of appropriate competencies amongst the traditional publishers.

ONE-STOP-SHOP for: The Kidstellar solution addresses the problem holistically, focusing on a vision that would enable a vast and powerful, and hitherto untapped, source for great content: teachers and educators.

1- Content Creation (KS-Studio): Dramatically simplified the whole process with easy-to-use tools and by point & click creation without coding or any technical skills. With our desktop app  anyone can create:

• Interactive book including voice-over and animations
• Activity including quiz and sound effects
• Interactive map including video and vocabulary
• Text book including animation and games

2- Publishing (KS-Server): One-Click Automated publishing for any mobile devices.

3- Marketplace (KS-Marketplace): will be the ultimate source of content for children, which all the creators gather to create a solution for any specific education need.

You can see (above) KS-Studio (desktop app) interface. For example, you want to create an interactive story for mobile devices (or web). And you want the ball to bounce with a sound effect when the user (children) touch it on the screen. It's at least a 2 person job which takes 3 hours to do in conventional ways if you want it on a mobile device as a mobile app. Instead, you can use KS-Studio and create a bouncing ball with sound effect on a mobile app in 5 minutes; without coding or any technical skills. Then you can publish your interactive book (through KS-Server) on KS-Marketplace with one-click.

We are disrupting existing models of creation & publishing & distribution and enabling a big source of content to benefit kids. 

ONE-STOP-SOLUTION FOR CONTENT CREATION

We are disrupting existing models of creation & publishing & distribution & enabling a big source of content (teachers&educators) to benefit kids.

Anyone who has a unique content for children; a funny story, a brilliant model for developing cognitive skills, a lesson for teaching numbers to a specific group; can create a mobile book/game/animation of its content and distribute it; without any initial investment, outsourcing, coding or any technical skills. All these can be done in a single Platform. We combined the value-add of mobile app and game development and mobile design in a unique platform.

MORE ENGAGING EDUCATION METHOD FOR CHILDREN

We combined 3 delivery methods of content in Kidstellar Platform; Game, Book & Animation and so the 3 entertainment activities; Play, Read & Watch. We didn't accomplish that by just including these 3 content types in one platform, we actually combined these methods in every single creation of our platform. You can create a Game with Book features or create a Book with Animation/Game features on KS Studio. 

COST & TIME SAVING FOR NGOs WHICH HAS RELEVANT AGENDA

Many NGOs have specific goals in investing in early childhood development. We are offering them an end-to-end solution so they can use it to leverage the teachers & educators & partners (companies, governments, publishers, content or fund providers) on their network, and provide free & accessible & quality content for children in developing countries and low-income communities.  

PRECODED FEATURES OF INTERACTIVITY
We pre-coded all the necessary features (100+ &counting):

• actions>move-scale-bounce...
• animations>sprite-timeline...
• sound>effects-music-voiceover...
• games>customizable mechanics...
• quiz&vocabulary

and made them relatable objects on a visual drag&drop interface. Coded on C# and deployed in Unity, so the output of KS Studio behave like a mobile game which gave us the ultimate scalability; can export as Android/iOS app/Web application for any screen resolution.

DATA-TRAFFIC ON CONTENT DISTRIBUTION
Distributing enriched content (with animation/sound/etc.) in high-volumes, to millions of mobile devices which run on different operating systems was a big challenge for us. We found a solution;

• Defined the constants&variables of the outputs of KS-Studio(DesktopApp)
• Developed containers on KS-Marketplace(MobileApp) for the “constants” to ensure that all the “constants” will be downloaded to the device one-time-only.
• Developed KS-Server(back-end) which connects KS-Studio to KS-Marketplace and delivers the “variables” of content to devices. 

GAME GENERATOR(AI)
We developed 5 different game layouts that you can add/edit: Characters, background-images, difficulty-level, prize/points, obstacles, game-rules according to the target age-group. The game generator in KS-Studio became fully customizable AI-tool. 

BOOK GENERATOR(AI)
We are working on Book-Generation. The creator only inputs the story-text, then KS-Studio selects the most favorite page design, characters, game-mechanics, colors&sound effects of the target group (for example age 3-4) and generates interactive-book especially attractive for this group.    

PARENT DASHBOARD(MACHINE-LEARNING)
We want parent&children interact with each-other. When a child plays a game about numbers in KS-Platform and cannot learn some specific numbers, our system recommends a physical & one-on-one task to the parent on that specific numbers.

Mission: Help all children under five develop the critical learning and cognitive skills to reach their full potential.

CONVENTIONAL APPROACH: Provide free or affordable educational materials (book, toy etc.) and programs (events, pre-schools, sessions etc.) to all children under five.

BARRIERS: Logistics, operation, manufacturing, distribution and initial investment costs.

SOLUTION:

• Create or find a solution for each developing & learning need.
• Plan & execute manufacturing and distribution operations.
• Find donors & contributors for the whole process.
• Implement each step for every single country & region.

OUR APPROACH: Enable teachers, educators, academics, writers who has content (lesson, activity, model, story, design, curriculum, theory etc.) designed for ECD, on mobile content ecosystem for children. So, all children can access high quality educational content in form of entertainment (game, book, animation).

BARRIERS: These potential content creators don't have the necessary technical skills for mobile app/game development, and they have none or limited initial investment for outsourcing the job or learning how to program.  

OUR SOLUTION: Enabling this segment to create & publish & distribute mobile content.

1- Currently Serving: 16K users(children), 70 teachers, 3 publishing-houses

• After we developed the beta version of KS-Studio in August 2018, we started to create mobile ready content with 70 teachers&writers (as testers) 
• And launched the results on Appstore to test the outcomes of KS-Studio and get feedback from real users; children. 
• These apps reached 16K active users from USA without any marketing.
• 3 publishing houses in Turkey started to use KS-Studio in June 2019 and started to convert their own printed books to mobile interactive books with animation, sound, voice-over, game and quiz.

2- Serving in 1 year: 150K users(children), 400 teachers, 7 publishing houses 

3- Serving in 5 year: 2M users(children), 10K teachers, 50 publishing-houses

Ultimately, we want to be the enabler platform for children-related content.

Our first mobile apps proved that (16K active users without marketing), we just need to attract the creators, needed communities will eventually come to the content we enabled. We estimate that each creator will attract 30-50 users per month with his/her own mobile content through Kidstellar Platform. We need to reach 2.000 active creators in 3 years and double it each year in order to pursue our growth goal.

We will attend relevant events to spread the word: “Anyone can create mobile content children. Organizations and Events such as; Promise Venture Studio (ECD Network which we were accepted in June 2019) and MIT Solve will be the key to create awareness of our solution among teachers, educators, writers, academicians, governments and NGOs.

Publishing houses have already tremendous amount of content; 8 million unique printed children books are available on the market.  If we can leverage them on mobile ecosystem, they can deliver value to children globally through mobile devices. We will attend Bologna Book Fair and Miami E-Book Fair.

1- First barrier: Too good to be true

We need 2.000 active creators in order to pursue our growth goal. But it's not an easy task to attract potential creators from different groups, field of expertise and regions from all over the world.

We developed KS Studio as an easy-to-use, drag&drop software, just to ensure that any new user becomes a power user in 1 day. This claim sounds first a little unrealistic to potential creators we encounter but they are amazed right after they try and see they can create & publish a mobile interactive book in 15 minutes. So, we need them to experience it.

2- Second barrier: Variety & Diversity

We want variety of content on our platform, for each specific need of children. We fear that there will no diversity and variety of content in our platform. Most of the educators may pick easy subjects to work on; numbers, alphabet etc. So. It will a significant barrier for growth if the users see similar content on KS Marketplace. 

1- Overcoming the first barrier: Too good to be true.

• Experiential Marketing: We literally saw (among teachers&writers) that 2 minutes of KS-Studio experience is way better then hours of explanation of its functions.
• Events: We are attending relevant events where we can find potential creators, in order to draw attention.
• More Examples&Success Stories: Members of our target creator group usually copy the solutions which their peers find and use. Even a simple example from one teacher friend can easily attract another one to KS-Studio. We will encourage current creators to publish more examples and will create success stories.
• Demo Days: We are planning to make demo days in schools. We will create a demo book in 15 minutes with attending teachers. So, they will witness the capability of our solution and how they can create mobile content in minutes without any necessary skills.  

2- Overcoming the second barrier: Variety & Diversity

• Guided Creation: We will moderate&manage the first creator base very carefully to unsure that most of the projects don't have similar subjects. We will inform all the creators about the missing subjects or developing need among current published content.
• Content Challenge: We are creating a list of specific needs which consists of STEAM, cognitive& essential life skills. We will encourage the creators to cover the need list and search for experts on specific needs such as; teaching alphabet to dyslexics or children in areas disrupted by crises(refugees). 

• 9 full time staff (including 2 co-founders)
• 3 part-time advisors (business model, technology, network)
• 4 part-time interns (developers)

Izzet (co-founder & CEO) and Muhammet (co-founder & CPO) worked together at Turkey’s leading digital education and entertainment organizations that creates game-based apps for children. 12 Mobile Games they developed for TRT Cocuk (PBS Kids of Turkey) achieved 30 million downloads and 2.4 billion sessions in 2 years. They started Mobile Application Division in TTNET (which was the largest Internet service provider in Turkey and has around 7 million subscribers): including planning, budget, execution and P&L reporting. Planned Short and Long Term mobile services road map, business strategy and revenue model. As a result; 32 new apps, more than 5M downloads in Turkey in the first year. 

Our team consists of: 

• Full-stack senior software developers who have 20 years of combined experience on mobile/desktop app development, machine learning (Unity, C#, Python) and created more than 30 mobile/desktop apps.
• User interface and user experience designers who have 15 years of combined experience on mobile app development and SaaS interface design. 
• Illustrator highly experienced in children book graphics and design.
• Product designer who has developer background.
• Child developmental psychologist who has game development background.

Murat Onsekizoglu (advisor) worked as an investment banker at 3 Seas Capital Partners and PricewaterhouseCoopers. He has an MBA from Stanford University.

Abdul Kasim (advisor) has over 20 years of experience, most recently in the education technology market as the CEO & Co-founder of Critical Links (US), whose products have been successfully deployed in over 50 countries. Abdul has a graduate degree from MIT.

HUG (Hamdi Ulukaya Initiatives): In April 2019, Kidstellar was selected as 1 of the 6 start-ups chosen from 4.653 applicants for Mr. Hamdi Ulukaya’s (Billionaire Entrepreneur-Chobani) Start-up program based in New York. HUG supports Kidstellar with; company establishment and operations, introductions to educators, publishers and meetings with angel investors and venture capitalists in New York. 

Promise Venture Studio: In May 2019, Kidstellar was accepted to Promise Venture Studio Network after the evaluation of potential ECD support. 

1-KS Studio is free-to-use (no service fee) for anyone who share (paid or free) his/her content through KS-Marketplace. If the creator charges the user for the content, then we get 50% revenue-share for our value-add through creation(KS Studio) & publishing(KS-Server) & distribution(KS-Marketplace) processes.

Value Proposition for Teachers-Educators-Writers-Academicians:

• No need to learn how to code or to design mobile app.
• It’s a free tool that they can generate revenue on their own
• Can share their expertise/insight/experience on children-education
• Can enable their educator-network with mobile-content for a specific purpose in a specific region(war-zone-refugees-developing countries)

Value Proposition for Governments-NGOs: They can provide content for needed communities cheaper&faster.

2-We charge service fee for KS-Studio (like SaaS) if the creator does not publish the content on KS-marketplace. Such as, children book publishing houses. They prefer to distribute their content on their own mobile app (with their brand). We connect KS-Studio to their own mobile app through KS-Server. We charge license fee (one-time) per book which they created in KS-Studio and charge service fee (monthly) for content distribution (data usage through KS-Server).

Value Proposition for Publishing Houses is Time&Cost Savings:

• Publishers spend at least $5,000 & 1-month to digitize a book.
• They outsource the work and often receive poor-quality product.
• Kidstellar does the same task for $500 & within 1-week.
• The Publishers no longer need to outsource the work
• All work can be done in-house with existing-staff. 

Mobile content market has high profit margins because there are no manufacturing or re-production costs. And we dramatically decreased the creation cost with KS-Studio and data transfer costs with KS-Server. We will cover the expenses through 2 revenue streams:

1- Revenue Share on KS-Marketplace: Any transaction (in-app-purchase or subscription) between the creators and consumers will provide us revenue (50%). We estimate that our business will become sustainable even without the 2nd revenue stream, when we reach 150K users (children) on KS-Marketplace, with the metric of 11% view-to-purchase rate.

2- License & Service fee from Publishing Houses for KS-Studio: We already acquired 3 publishing house in first 2 months of active due-diligence for potential sales. And we will receive $76.250 from our customers just in 2019. We estimate that our business will become sustainable even without the 1st revenue stream, when we acquire additional 4 publishing houses as the customers of KS-Studio.

• Introduction & Interaction with other Solver Teams which has "content solution". So we can join forces and build partnerships with tech entrepreneurs across the world, on content creation & distribution.
• Media and conference exposure to attract teachers, educators, academicians and NGOs.
• Cross-sector community connections to accelerate our work especially on AI and Machine Learning. And we are hoping to find other application areas for our solution because it can easily be extended to new and adjunct segments.
• Receive funding from smart capital which provides not only the funds but also access to talent (experts on AI, interns, consultants & senior executive employees to hire or collaborate), networks (connecting to dedicated executive coaches & partnering relevant tech companies, universities, research labs) 

NGOs like UNICEF & UNESCO: 

• They have specific goals in investing in early childhood development. 
• They think it's the best way to boost shared prosperity, promote inclusive economic growth, expand equal opportunity, and end extreme poverty.
• We want to share our solution with them so they can use it to leverage the teachers & educators & partners (companies, governments, publishers, content or fund providers) on their network, and provide free & accessible & quality content for children in developing countries and low-income communities.  

Universities & Research Labs like MIT Media Lab & NYU Create Lab:

• They are working on new education models for specific needs
• They are finding new ways to enhance & elevate education system 
• They are developing new methods for developing cognitive skills
• We want to share our solution with them so they can execute their work on mobile devices to test, get feedback and improve it. this way, the most advanced & up-to-date solutions will be available for children globally.

AI - GAME & BOOK GENERATOR

We developed a game generator and developing a book generator in KS-Studio. 

We want it to generate best possible outcome for the target age group. 

• We get the necessary data from users of our mobile apps; 
• such as the time spent on each screen, the learning curve of the activities and challenges 
• and the preferred colors, sounds, characters, engagement actions, interaction points, bouncing points, difficulty level, focused area.
• We need additional resources (team members expert on Python) to evaluate the given data and enhance the variables of the output game and book. 

MACHINE LEARNING - PARENT DASHBOARD

We want parent & children interact with each other on daily basis. When a child plays a game about numbers in KS Platform and cannot learn some specific numbers, our system recommends a physical & one-on-one task to the parent on that specific numbers. 

• Additionally, we want our system to find and recommend outdoor activities, family movies, play-groups, weekend trip offerings through web & open sources, according to the specific need of children. 
• We need additional resources (team members expert on Python, Web Crawling and Big Data) to find the relevant data and correlate it with the need. 

AI - GAME & BOOK GENERATOR

We developed a game generator and developing a book generator in KS-Studio. 

We want it to generate best possible outcome for the target age group. 

• We get the necessary data from users of our mobile apps; 
• such as the time spent on each screen, the learning curve of the activities and challenges 
• and the preferred colors, sounds, characters, engagement actions, interaction points, bouncing points, difficulty level, focused area.
• We need additional resources (team members expert on Python) to evaluate the given data and enhance the variables of the output game and book. 

MACHINE LEARNING - PARENT DASHBOARD

We want parent & children interact with each other on daily basis. When a child plays a game about numbers in KS Platform and cannot learn some specific numbers, our system recommends a physical & one-on-one task to the parent on that specific numbers. 

• Additionally, we want our system to find and recommend outdoor activities, family movies, play-groups, weekend trip offerings through web & open sources, according to the specific need of children. 
• We need additional resources (team members expert on Python, Web Crawling and Big Data) to find the relevant data and correlate it with the need.