I first met Samson Opaleye at the Climb23 conference in Leeds three years ago.
Sam, who grew up in Lagos, Nigeria, had moved to the UK the previous year. He told me about his Instagram addiction and plans to tackle it with startup Applatch, which locked down certain apps on your phone when you needed to focus.
Fast-forward three years and Applatch, now Applatch Kids, is a very different business.
“It was a free app and we had 3,000 users,” he tells me over coffee in our Founder Friday interview in Sheffield. “I asked a couple of my friends if they would be willing to pay for it, and they said ‘no’ – because they felt they had enough self-control [to manage their social media activity themselves].
“But they said they would pay for something which controlled the apps their children use.”
A dad himself, he also saw the value in that proposition. “After speaking with many more parents as well as children – in order to further understand the problem – I saw the gap,” he says.
“I realised that there’s a bigger problem here with the children: they actually can’t control when to stop using entertainment apps and focus on study.”
Sam, a former teacher, continues: “Sometimes, if you’re talking to maybe a seven-year-old and trying to teach them something, after two minutes they’re just looking around bored.
“Excessive entertainment screen time starts to build a low attention span. So when they’re in class they can’t focus on the teacher for long enough to understand what they are learning.”
Simply locking down these entertainment apps is not enough, the founder explains. “When they install a parental control app, the parent is hoping that by locking down Roblox, Minecraft, Netflix and the rest, the child will instead click on an educational app.
“But that is not the case. They just leave [the device].”
Screen time
Sam says that people mistake general screen time for the enemy, when in fact it is entertainment screen time. “If a child is learning on a tablet, that is educational screen time, and there’s nothing wrong with that. Everything is digitalised now.
“My realisation was that there is no motivation for a child to go to the educational apps on their device as children naturally want to have fun, not learn.”
Applatch Kids, which is built for children aged 3-11 – and available on both the Google Play Store and Apple App Store – counters this by rewarding educational app achievement with entertainment.
For example Sam’s daughter, who turns six this year, is granted an hour’s ‘play’ for every quiz she passes in each STEM discipline of English, maths and science. Parents can set this reward as low as 15 minutes, if they wish.
“We’re tackling the root cause of the problem, which is the learning behaviour: if a child builds up the habit of studying before they play, that will stay with them for the rest of their life.”
Indeed Applatch Kids, which was fourth on our recent EdTech 50 ranking, has the tagline: ‘Learn before play’.
With countries including Australia banning social media for under-16s – and the UK launching a public consultation on this – Sam has deliberately focused his business on infant and primary school children.
“Social media is not a problem at age five; it’s games and platforms like Disney, YouTube and Netflix,” he explains.
“But no government is ever going to ban primary school children from playing games.”
A baseline assessment decides the level of challenge to set a child in the early stages. It then adapts through machine learning to ensure they progress as far academically as possible.
Applatch Kids is being used by 7,000 families at present – purely organic word-of-mouth growth – ahead of a full launch in April.
Africa
Sam seems so at home in Sheffield that it is easy to forget he spent the first 30 years of his life in Africa. Indeed Applatch Kids employs staff in Nigeria as well as the UK, with four full-time and another six on a contractual basis.
He moved to Yorkshire with his wife, who was studying an MBA at Sheffield Hallam University, but there was more to his decision to set up the business there.
“When I did my research, I found that outside of London, Sheffield is actually the UK city that supports startup founders the most,” he tells me. ”So I think this is the perfect city.”
A technologist who studied computer science at university, he regrets choosing to play games himself at a young age.
“I got my first computer at the age of 10, but guess what? I was just playing Grand Theft Auto and Need for Speed.
“A friend also got a personal desktop computer at that age – but his dad taught him how to design flyers and he was making money straight away, designing flyers for small businesses!
“Right after secondary school, I studied how to repair computers, but the previous seven years I just wasted playing games. I didn’t learn anything.
“If a child has access to a computing device at an early age, why not show them how to use it to learn something brilliant, or improve generally in their educational performance?”
Label
Applatch isn’t his first rodeo: after university, Sam started a clothing fashion business as everyone in Lagos was wearing American brands.
He pivoted to B2B after realising he could generate more profit in one order than in 200 individual retail sales. The family business is now run by his mother.
After joining a digital marketing agency to learn how to build the brand, he enjoyed the work so much – running viral campaigns for brands like Pepsi, Intel and HP – that he decided to keep doing that.
“That’s how I got addicted to Instagram!” he laughs.
Now with Applatch Kids, he has an ambitious and laudable goal.
“In the UK right now, there are more than a million young people aged 16-24 who are NEET (Not in Education, Employment or Training) and disengaged from the education and workforce system,” he says.
“If we can train kids, when they are young, to learn every day, they will move that habit into secondary school.
“So when they own a smartphone, they will manage that effectively – and do well in their GCSEs and beyond.”