ESCP ALUMNI MAGAZINE - #192 - NOVEMBRE/DÉCEMBRE 2020 - 40

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École

" To get ahead,
you have to get started: "
how a young entrepreneur
reimagined student feedback
During his bachelor's degree at ESCP Business School, Christoph Koenig was confronted with one of
the more tedious student requirements, the semester teaching evaluations. Rather than accept his fate,
Koenig made the choice to challenge the status quo by developing Clay, a feedback tool that promises
to deliver smart and effective feedback in education. Clay's mission is to empower students, professors
and schools, to build their optimal learning environment. Following graduation this year, thanks to the
feedback from students and professors, Koenig chose to focus on growing his business. This decision
has clearly paid off as he became the winner of the €24K 2020 Innovation Award from ESCP. We sat down
with Koenig to learn more about his path to entrepreneurship and the choices and challenges he has
confronted along the way.

Tell us more about Clay, where did
this idea come from?
During my first semester at university, I
had to fill out a questionnaire about the
teaching evaluations before I could access
my grades. The format felt outdated in a
world where we have an attention span
of one second, checking Instagram all the
time. First off, the timing is fairly suboptimal because it is at the end of the semester. As a result, you are less motivated to
provide real feedback because it won't
affect your experience. Even if teaching
evaluations are conducted earlier, the process is nontransparent. You don't get the
impression that your feedback matters.

Christoph KOENIG (19)

Did you always want to be
an entrepreneur or was this
something new for you?
I wouldn't say that I was always sure that
I wanted to become an entrepreneur. For
me, it is much less about being an entrepreneur than about looking at how things
work and thinking maybe this could be
done in a new, exciting and different way.
That's what I find particularly exciting.
I've always had a desire to try things out
myself.

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I often found myself discussing the
courses with other students so I knew
that a real opportunity for feedback was
being missed. The information is not
being passed from students to professors
and the university. So I started to build
an MVP. Because I unfortunately cannot code, and still cannot, I used an app
builder to create the first prototype that I
gave to students. The user experience was
bad. Despite that students still felt like the

app resonated with them. Flexible timing
allowed users to submit feedback at any
point during the semester. A more playful
approach clearly differentiated the app
from normal teaching evaluations.
I then took money that I had earned in
internships and developed an improved
version with an app development agency
from India. The following semester we
tested the updated app with students.
It worked a lot better. We got close to
6,000 responses in the span of four months. We realized that there was something
there.

Is there a team behind Clay or
are you working as a lone wolf?
So from the start, I basically decided that
I only wanted to work with people who
had complementary skills to mine. Hiring
is competitive though, especially for
engineers who have no shortage of opportunities. Luckily, I found two very bright
students through my coworking space.
I also contacted more than 1,000 people
through LinkedIn to find the right fit for
our company. Over the past year, the team

ESCP Alumni Magazine numéro 192 ❙ NOVEMBRE/DÉCEMBRE 2020

25/11/2020 09:24

ESCP ALUMNI MAGAZINE - #192 - NOVEMBRE/DÉCEMBRE 2020

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