[Interview] LittleLives – Love educators, Connect Schools, Modernise Education





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Officially set up in 2011, LittleLives provides Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) to aid theefficient running of preschools. Founder Sun Ho, alumnus of NUS Computer Science, envisions the creation of a preschool education network that serves to facilitate the sharing of teaching resources across schools.

Having focused on Singapore preschools since its inception, LittleLives is currently working on bringing its software abroad to expand this education network.

Sun shares her story with The Ridge in hope of finding individuals who share her motivation and would like to join her team as a designer, programmer, public relations officer or simply as someone who believes that he or she has something to contribute to the group.

Accepting the offer for an interview, I walked into LittleLives’ office on the eve of Christmas Eve, only to see a crowd of young employees around a coffee table cracking their brains to solve a board game. Their storyteller, JiaYi, then told me, “We work hard and play hard.”

What was the trigger that prompted you to start LittleLives?

It wasn’t so much of a trigger. I had worked for about 10 years and at that point, my career was giving me a comfortable life. But, I wanted to do more.

I’m always an ideas person and I’ve always been very hands-on with my ideas. Even though I was working fulltime, I was still trying out different business ideas. When I first started business, it was because I was hard up. My family, we come from a poorer background. From my younger days, I always thought money was one of the most important things.

When I had reached a point where I was very comfortable with my career and I could take good care of my family and myself, I started to see what it was that I really wanted to do – I wanted to give back. To give back, I looked at what made the biggest difference for me and I believe that education was what made the biggest difference. In a lot of countries, if you’re in the bottom twenty percent (of the socioeconomic ladder), you end up stuck in it for your life time, while for me, I could get into the best school, turn my life around and basically go for any job that I wanted to.

I felt that I had to give back to education. Technology is my expertise, so a combination of education and technology resulted in the idea of Littlelives.

Why did you choose to target preschools?

I started with primary schools because I like children. They are innocent, they play, they learn and we learn from them as well. I wanted to capture them at an age where we can learn from each other. Eventually preschools came to me saying that they wanted me to develop something for them. The preschools liked what I did and they were pretty open to allow me to develop what I wanted in terms of vision, but at the same time, they had a problem. It was good for me because I had the problem statement and my users from day one.

What we did is we built a phototaking check-in app, when they kids come to school, they check in to school, show their parents and when they check out of school, they go home. This automatically checks the time-in and time-out of the child, and this is sent to the parent. This way, the parents know who has brought the child home.

From there, we also submit the statistics to the Ministry, so the Ministry knows the attendance rate of these children. In the past they were just signing in, but with this one simple action of photo taking, everyone from the Ministry, the centre and the parents benefited. That is what technology can do different.

When you quit your previous job to work on LittleLives full-time, was Littlelives already providing you a stable income?

It was starting to. In the very first year, no. When I first started Littlelives, I did it on the side, so I still had my fulltime job. For about three years, I was doing it part-time, at night, during the weekend and any free days I have.

I had one friend and then some part time students working on it together, and then I reached a point when I became very confident and passionate about it. I wanted to focus entirely on it.

At that time, I had no stable income yet. It was still shaky – you never know whether it’ll just one day crash or if there will be days where you don’t have enough money to eat or something.

There was that risk, but it was the passion when you know you love something, you work on it and you enjoy it. It was satisfying and I enjoyed doing it. I’m glad we finally managed to build it up to the current team of 22 people but there is never a point where I feel like we can sit down and relax.

What do you think sets Littlelives apart from other similar startups?
I was talking to a friend about the differences between Singapore start-ups and overseas start-ups. In China, workers in start-ups can work longer hours there. They can do twelve hours a day for seven days a week while for Singapore start-ups, as much as we are passionate, we have work-life balance.

So I was asked by my friend, “how do I compete with them?” And I said, in school, do you have friends who study shorter hours but do better. So it’s really a mind against mind. Rather than working longer hours and looking at the physical hours, we look at the actual results that we build.

Another difference I observed in the office, compared to the other places I’ve worked at, is that I always hear people laugh in our office. Every day, you just sit in the office and you will hear people laughing. There is that joy in our work.

Jia Yi: One thing I’ll like to add as an employee, they (Sun and her partner, Arjuna) really takes care of the team. It’s intrinsic motivation. During our mundane morning meetings, Sun will always inspire us, so it really reminds us to keep thinking about it in a different way.

I really appreciate the time that Arjuna and Sun put in to give us feedback. It’s really like a very flat hierarchy. You can just approach whoever can help you best. In that way, it’s not just about product and money. Sun always like to say that there is heart in our software. It is the company culture that sets Littlelives apart.

Regarding Littlelives’s aim to expand overseas, at this point, what kind of connection have you built between local and overseas preschools?

We did a project called ‘Love from the World’. We got all the kids to make a little flag and then take a picture of it and mail it in. It was a project where we wanted to show that kids from around the world can actually come together to do something.

It was amazing. There was a little boy from Nepal. He took a photo of him kissing the flag and I notice that the photo was quite dark. They were having an electricity ration so on some days they had no electricity. They read about us through their father’s Blackberry. You realise that gadgets like these are fundamental to them. A Blackberry is a phone that can be charged and used for 24 hours. They did the project in darkness and mailed them to us.

I think that is the beauty of technology. You can really connect people from different areas together and there is more collaboration that can be done. It is not just the individuals in front of their gadget but a connection to the world.

We hope that LittleLives opens up doors to schools from around the world. If someone has an idea for a lesson, this lesson can be shared to others. A child in another country can share their kind of environment to people from other parts of the world. We are not providing the education, Littlelives is trying to create the community to allow for the exchange of information.

LittleLives is currently looking for mobile app developer and back end developer to join their team! For more information, please contact Jia Yi at jiayi@littlelives.com.



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