A Changing Education Imperative: Edsoma, a Texas-Based Children’s Educational and Communications Platform, is on the Cusp of Revolutionizing the Future of Education

“If we’re going to ask parents to teach at home during the pandemic, we need to ensure that these parents are confident in what they teach. That’s what our live follow-along technology is.”

Edsoma is a children’s education communication platform, designed to bring family quality time back together through reading. With its live follow-along technology, the platform is all set to revolutionize the education sector. It operates across the United States.

Edsoma is based in Weatherford, Texas.

To highlight and further understand what Edsoma plans to explore in this segment, I sat down with Kyle Wallgren (founder), who serves as the company’s Chief Executive Officer. Below is an excerpt.

Head to Head with Kyle Wallgren, Founder & CEO of Edsoma

Q. Setbacks are a part of every growing business. Can you tell us about a few roadblocks and learning lessons that have helped the company grow over the years?

I like to consider setbacks as learning lessons instead of roadblocks because we learned early that using third-party developers wasn’t the best option for us. For example, we were working with a company out of India; a great to work with, but there were still some conversational gaps that we were experiencing just with the way that we interpret something or the definition of how somebody might define one thing over the other. So yes, there were a few setbacks early on as we were learning how to bridge two different cultures. That said, our major setback was hiring a third party to do our development at the start. Once we got everything in-house, we saw a lot more progress.

Q. From your perspective, how is the industry you service is currently evolving? What are the trends in different categories?

Well, in America, we’re seeing schools shutdown again. People fear another Covid-19 variant outbreak might take shape. However, I am expecting to see the trend in education technology continue to grow. Predictions for this to take off, for this to be the next hottest thing in the tech industry are fairly visible. For us, the biggest goal is to make sure that we have the ability to teach the kids that are learning from home. This isn’t about trends or even a financial position, but about changing the direction in children’s lives as the setbacks that the pandemic has caused the need to be addressed with utmost precision.

Q. Given the current COVID situation and the uncertain economy, I see that your company has launched its services recently. So among the already established platform, what is your approach and making the app more interactive and preferable?

We have added some really neat features that will be coming out in versions two and three, some live interaction features with a platform we call Live Library, where we will be able to engage with different content creators. This will allow our users, the children, on our platform to create their content in different spaces. As content creation is a modern-world necessity, Edsoma remains at the forefront to serve its users during these tough times. In addition to this, things are fast-moving to the metaverse and we want to grow with that market, especially in the education sector. On this front, we surely seek to improve our reading technology.

Q. What motivated you to focus on the family quality time and how do you work to improve it?

Covid-19 hit me personally as I was unable to see my kids who live with their mother in Canada for almost a year. The borders between Canada and the US were closed during the first lockdown. Around this time, my six-year-old at the time came and asked me to read her bedtime stories. Although there were great products available to interact and entertain with, there wasn’t a product that I found where you could interact and educate at the same time. Therefore, we wanted to ensure that not just the children who are missing that quality time with their family members could have that time back, but they could also learn from it as well and grow from those opportunities.

Q. ‘With our live follow-along technology, we ensure that children’s learning will no longer be incorrect’. Splendid. Would you like to elaborate on this a bit more?

Yes. We offer a voice recognition, word identification technology that allows parents to engage with the content and alerts them if they have problems involving content. The program is going to assist them with learning as well as it’s not solely focused on the child. Although the child is the main objective that we want to interact with and grow with, we do offer the opportunity for the parent to learn with the child. If we’re going to ask parents to teach at home during the pandemic, we need to ensure that these parents are confident in what they teach. That’s what our live follow-along technology is.

Q. What are your other focus areas?

Currently, we’re solely focused on reading. We will be growing into the other areas of education, math, and everything else that follows on learning games, gamifying, learning process to make it more appealing for children or more entertaining for children. We also have an avatar feature that we’re going to be growing into where if the parents are unavailable, the child can interact with an avatar feature on our platform that will pick up the mannerisms of the parent so that’s something that we will be moving into relatively soon after launching.

Q. Given how frequently circumstances change, what plans for transformation are you pursuing right now?

We have a million different directions that we would love to go in, but we’re currently still raising capital, so we have to stay focused on the industry or the areas that we picked up or picked to start with. In other words, our reading technology is our main focus. Although we would like to go down different trails and different opportunities with the education sector, we are staying focused to avoid any financial creep on developing in other areas that we’d like to grow into eventually.

Q. What can you tell us about your product roadmap?

We are looking to launch early this year. I am not sure we are still going to achieve the ‘early this year’ launch date, but definitely in the first quarter. We are beta-testing everything right now, but when it comes to children’s learning, we only get one chance. Therefore, we need to ensure that everything is perfect before we pass it out to the general public and ask them to trust us with their children.

Q. Is there anything else you want us to highlight which you think we might have missed?

I would love to share the link (https://wefunder.com/edsomainc) of our Wefunder crowdfunding campaign. If people want to get involved, they should know how to proceed.

For more information, please visit our Facebook (edsomareads) and Instagram (edsoma_reads).

Kyle Wallgren | In His Own Words

Kyle Wallgren is an award-winning serial entrepreneur and the CEO and Founder of Edsoma.

“I started my entrepreneur journey at the age of 23 in the concrete industry. I was able to build and sell the company in three years and moved into the oilfield Industry. Five years later I was building another company with 34 employees, generating over $14 million a year in revenue, and yet this journey also taught me about how to navigate through unexpected downs. Eventually, I decided to sell and moved from Canada to America, a country that always inspired me due to its pioneer spirit. Since living in the United States, I have built several companies and partnerships, strongly driven by the desire to build a better life for my son and daughter plus a unique legacy as an entrepreneur. As mentioned during the interview, when my six-year-old daughter came to me asking for me to read her bedtime stories the answer was always going to be yes, and geography should not throw a wrench into that commitment. No matter where my business travels would take me. Another motivating factor: after doing some research my team found that 50 percent of Americans read at a grade-8 reading level and 54 million adult Americans can’t read at all. From this, we formed Edsoma, an app that unites and guides early readers....”

“Currently, we’re solely focused on reading. We will be growing into the other areas of education, math, and everything else that follows on learning games, gamifying, and learning process to make it more appealing for children or more entertaining for children.”