Muhammad Zubair, Co-founder & CEO at Queno, while in conversation with The Strategic View elaborated on their journey in addressing the pain points of school administration and how they have become a bridge between parents and their respective school’s management.

1. What led you to create ‘Queno’? When was it founded?

Ideas flow in when you are only months away from your graduation. We too, like all others, would come up with something new every time and sit together to make it real. We believed in the thought that no matter how big or small the idea is; we can always make it happen. We took our FYP (Final Year Project), a health tech startup enabling a queue-management system for patients to The Nest I/O (A Google For Entrepreneur Tech Incubator). We failed that startup due to a lack of market research and a poor business model but by then a business insect had taken place in our hearts.

Then one fine day we got lucky when Farida (Queno’s COO) and I were sitting at a cousin’s wedding. Farida spotted a little girl whose mother was worried about her daughter’s school test that was to take place the next day. She couldn’t recall the syllabus’s details. That was the moment when Farida came up with the idea of developing an application that would bring the little girl’s classroom to her mother through an app. An app that would allow the mother to have access to all the information regarding her daughter’s school whenever and wherever she needed it. It was an amazing idea. We liked it, so we began working on it. We met a few teachers, talked to parents and realized that the issue was common and that some help in this area would be a great deal for everyone. Thus, our Queno app came into existence as a bridge between parents and school teachers enabling all to be on the same page always when it came to their children’s education.

2. What is the core service/solution you are providing? What pain points are you targeting and what is the key differentiating factor from similar offerings?

Schools are non-digitized and they face problems in performing their daily tasks. Paper files, unnecessary data collection, and bureaucracy in schools make simple work cumbersome. Lengthy procedures to follow since they have to keep records all on paper and bulky registers.

Teachers’ workload and burden increase due to tasks duplication such as writing homework diaries manually for all students. They complain because it’s getting in the way of their core tasks of teaching. Tuition fee management is another big problem for schools as they are stuck in the stone age which results in late payments. When parents don’t get good services schools can’t increase tuition fees.

We are bridging the gap between parents and teachers using a simple yet innovative mobile application. Our app impacts daily tasks performed by teachers by making them more efficient, reducing paperwork and automating data storage. School Administrators get a portal to manage daily tasks, monitoring attendance, tuition payments, progress reports and school ERP. They can send fee challans to parents directly via the app, allowing them to pay online and reconciliation is easier than ever before.

Queno is a product-focused company (unlike other solutions/software). We provide a customized app and the best after-sales services. We not only stick to a few features but we are launching other exciting features in every 2 to 3 months that are useful for the schools. We are also offering competitive pricing to our clients.

3. What are the parameters to measure client satisfaction?

The best way to measure client satisfaction is to see how they are discussing you in the media, in public and their circle. Word of mouth is the most honest and organic marketing one product can have. A satisfied client pays you on time, markets your product & gives you good reviews.

I have learned in my startup journey for the past 3 years that if you want your client to be happy and satisfied, provide the best after-sales service. Even if your product fails to deliver as per your client’s satisfaction, show them that you are trying your best to revamp it and keep your clients updated with all the work that you are doing for them. We are also leading with pricing point of view and better features. We are the only company in Pakistan that is focused on school tuition fee management and enabling online payments to parents.

4. What is your future outlook and what will you achieve by next year?

Our vision has always been to become a standard of education for schools. Queno is not only an app but also a way/policy for schools to run and manage their operations which directly enhances the quality of education.

Our target for this year’s end is to have 100 schools on board with us, out of which we have already achieved our half milestone (52 schools). Another important feature that we have launched with schools is the online tuition payment enabling all possible ways for the parents to pay fees online. We are targeting to achieve monthly transactions of more than PKR 1 Million a month by Jan 2021. Queno is going to scale to KPK and Public schools by early next year as currently, we are operating in Karachi, Islamabad and Lahore.