Hey guys, I’m Omelihunna, and if you’d told me a few years ago that I’d end up building a school management software with a couple of my “colleagues turned friends” because of a comment my dad made in passing and years of watching my mom drown in heaps of paper every exam season, I probably would have looked at you with skepticism and gone back to whatever was eating my life at the time, which I lowkey believe to be CODM. 

This whole thing started as a passion project, though I didn’t call it that at the time. If you’re like me that grew up with African parents, you know the rule that anything outside school counts as a distraction, at best a side hobby you’re supposed to grow out of. So in a way, building something for my mom became my excuse to somehow legitimize the fact that I had begun to have a career outside of the four walls of Uni. 

Around the same time, my father had been watching me work myself to the bone at one of the many startups I was grinding through. He mentioned, almost in passing, that I should try building something of my own. It wasn’t a big speech or anything dramatic. He said it and moved on.

But it sat with me for a few days, and eventually I reached out to Innovin, one of the smartest Engineers I’ve had the pleasure of living and working alongside; if I do say so myself. We’d been roommates from 200lv up until 400lv, so by the time I called him about “Klasstack”, he already knew how my brain worked and I knew how his did too. He was in almost immediately, and the two of us became the first co-founders. 

Klasstack started from a single Google doc

When I tell you we began with a single Google doc, it almost sounds unbelievable. For about two weeks we dumped every idea we had into it, because we knew the people (School owners, Teachers, Parents) we wanted to make life easy for, needed to see tangible value in whatever we were building before they’d bother paying any modicum of attention. So we shadowed about 5 different schools over the course of 3 weeks. Got to understand how things worked day to day, and kept running into the same handful of problems everywhere we looked. 

Parents had no reliable way of knowing their kids had been checked in; Result compilation was messy with human error; School fees came with its own chaos of missing receipts and miscommunication that made reconciliation a headache; And child pickup relied almost entirely on School admins recognizing a parent’s face, which is a fairly shaky system when you think about it for more than a minute.

We spent roughly 4 months building out the MVP. Somewhere in that process, Innovin and I both landed on the same realization, which is that great products get built all the time, but it takes an equally great team to make sure people find out how good the product is. 

The other half of the Klasstack team

So we brought in David, as our third co-founder, forever patient and always ready to be on the ground. He took on operations, which meant he became the one dealing directly with our founding schools, sitting through the same conversations more than once when a principal needed convincing or a teacher needed to see a feature work before trusting it. He was willing to visit as many times as it took to get things right, driving out on short notice, waiting around admin offices for someone with the right authority to be free, going back a second or third time when the first visit raised more questions than it answered.

Then came our fourth co-founder, who for now would prefer to stay anonymous. She joined at a time when every day felt like there was something new to fix or figure out. Somehow, she loved it from the start. One of the first questions she asked me was whether I was hungry. I remember being confused enough that I just went huh, huh a couple of times before she explained what she meant. Hunger, she said, has a way of pushing people either to give up too soon or to push harder than they should. 

Building something like Klasstack meant we’d need to know how to sit in that tension, how to push hard without losing the sense of when something wasn’t working, and how to be willing to go back and rebuild if it failed, and rebuild again if it failed after that. That conversation stuck with me longer than I expected it to, and it was really all the confirmation we needed that she was the right person to bring on.

And that, more or less, is how the four of us ended up here — building Klasstack together to make schools operate with more ease and still figuring out most of it as we go. 

PS: All em dashes and semi-colons are sponsored by our marketing team.