First, let me try to summarise the story of Prendea: how it started, its highlights and how it ended.
First, the background on how we started Prendea. We started working in Prendea on April 20th, 2020. We had gone out of business with our previous company (Check) where we sold Math textbook replacements for schools in Mexico and Peru. We had very little cash in the bank and had to start something. In retrospect, we were guided by a survival instinct: we wanted to exist and that was our way out.[1] Freddy Vega gave an invaluable piece of advise to Gonzalo: your only job is to not run out of money.
We were in a hurry and after exchanging some ideas we decided we were trying to run something similar to what Outschool was doing, but for Latam. We started out giving five classes per week: one was taught by Gonzalo (on Growth Mindset), one was taught by me (on App Design using Figma, something I started learning a couple of months ago), the other three were taught by friends who were teachers at schools in Lima and had some spare time. We started charging the equivalent of 10 dollars for each 1 hour class per student. The teacher got 7 and we kept 3.
We set the goal of growing our revenue 10% each week for the next weeks and we achieved that until August. In the meanwhile we were able to figure out payments, videocalls, reminders for parents,
[1] More than a year later, Gonzalo would tell me a very illustrative metaphor of how he lived the beginnings of Prendea. I think I lived it in a very similar way. It was as if we were being chased by lions in the wild, trying to survive. We kept running from those lions for a long period of time. At one point, after several months we were safe. We were safe but we had blood coming out of our knee, we had a very severe injury. Startups are in a certain way a race, or at least an adventure where you are constantly running. You will be injured several times but you have to keep running while taking care of your injury and hope it will be healed. At one point, I think we were over the “survival mindset” and we were able to be much more creative.