Mark Hughes, co-founder of education technology startup Chalkie, is driven by a simple principle: build something useful.

“Although I’m running a business, what really interests me is making things that people use,” he says. With a background in mechanical engineering, Mark’s interest in seeing how iterative changes impact the fuller picture prompted a change in direction, he explains: “I quickly found out that most engineers are working on a very small part of a much larger thing, and so became more interested in coding, where you can literally see what you’re building take shape in real time.”

Mark is no stranger to startups. Chalkie is his second venture, following the success of Tutorful, a tutoring marketplace that he saw scale to a significant size. It was at Tutorful that he met Pete, now Chalkie’s second co-founder. “Pete was one of our earliest hires at Tutorful, and ended up leading the design team,” Mark explains.

Giving the founding team an extra boost, Phil Daneshyar joined after meeting Mark and Pete through the Y Combinator Co-founder Matching Platform. Phil, another experienced entrepreneur, co-founded Kanda - the“Klarna for Home Improvements” - which has brokered over £60m of loans since inception. He left his role as CEO after six years ready for a new venture and realised upon meeting Mark and Pete, that Chalkie was it.

“Initially just bouncing ideas around we realised how much we enjoyed working together,” he says. “So I came on board to help drive sales and marketing for the incredible product the guys have built.”

Together, the trio are building and launching Chalkie - a tool designed to help teachers create lessons and classroom resources with ease. “In essence, Chalkie is a way for teachers to quickly create lessons and resources,” says Mark. “You give it a topic, a few key details (year group, learning objectives etc.) and it creates slides that include images, activities and worksheets that a teacher can use to deliver a class.”

Another feature of Chalkie is its AI-enabled slide editor, giving teachers the flexibility to refine lessons to their exact needs. The inspiration for the product actually came from Mark’s earlier experience at Tutorful. “One idea we had there was that it would be great to give our tutors a bank of lesson materials,” he says. “However, we always ruled it out as the sheer number of materials we would have to create would be overwhelming. As AI improved, we began to think that now there might be a way to make this idea a reality.”

The founders have set out to solve a problem they believe thwarts many teachers worldwide. “Both my parents were teachers, and it always amazed me how much time outside the classroom they would spend marking and doing lesson planning,” Mark recalls. “When we came up with the idea for Chalkie, we wanted to validate that this was a real problem, and so spoke to about a dozen teachers to understand what their biggest problems were. Overwhelmingly teachers cited a huge workload outside the classroom, with teachers routinely spending 10–15 hours on lesson planning each week.”

Initially targeting individual teachers - particularly in primary education - Chalkie is gaining traction in several countries. “From day one we built our product to be global,” says Mark. “Our largest three markets are the UK, US and Australia.” Now, they’re beginning to explore the school market, giving them a B2B focus. This shift is one of the reasons that led them to the Cooper Project.

“We liked the idea of having a startup community,” Mark says of the decision to join. “Both Pete and I largely work from home, and we missed being around other people, particularly ambitious people working on interesting ideas.”

“The B2B marketing is a different skill set from B2C, which we’re more experienced at,” Mark admits. “So we’re also hoping to tap into some of the mentorship available to help us crack that market, with the added help and expertise from Phil.”

Their goals for the programme are both strategic and personal. “The business is still small, and not bringing in enough revenue to support us yet. We’d like to get it to the point where it’s able to do that.”

And while the team is still in the early stages of their startup, some milestones have already brought validation. “Our first sale,” Mark says, when asked about the most rewarding moment so far. “We knew there was a real problem, but really weren’t sure whether teachers would actually pay for what we’d built. It was great to get that validation.”

Mark advises other founders not to wait for perfection. “It’s a bit of a cliché but just try and get something out there that someone can buy or use. It doesn’t matter if it’s rough around the edges to start. The sooner you can put something in front of customers, the easier the next steps become - even if the feedback is bad!”

As Chalkie grows, Mark hopes its impact will be felt directly in classrooms. “Our hope over the long term is that if we’re successful, teachers will spend more time teaching, and less time planning, and that they’ll start to enjoy their jobs more and stay within the profession. We’ve got a long way to go to make that a reality!”

Learn more about Chalkie on the website: chalkie.ai and stay up to date with the co-founders on LinkedIn - Mark Hughes, Pete Sanderson and Phil Daneshyar.