StartUp Lab Story: Tanya Irani and CuriAwesome

Building a lifetime love of STEM with CuriAwesome Learning’s Tanya Irani

Building a startup takes more than having a passion for solving problems. Founders spend countless hours researching their market and potential customers to ensure they have the right product for the right problem and, most importantly—a product or service that people are willing to pay for to solve the problem.

But even having all that information at hand, founders can often struggle to bring their idea to market. For CuriAwesome Learning founder Tanya Irani, the help to bring her idea to market came from joining StartUp Lab, Wilfrid Laurier University’s startup incubator in the Lazaridis School of Business and Economics.

Helping students with life sciences education

Irani came up with the idea for the interactive STEM learning platform by bringing her experiences as a student and a teacher together to assist parents looking for educational programming to help their children get an edge in their education.

Irani is no stranger to the Wilfrid Laurier University community. She completed her undergraduate and graduate degrees at Laurier, graduating with a Master’s in Biology in November 2021.

During her studies, Irani worked as a teacher at Crania Schools, a private after-school tutoring center, and also taught private piano lessons. It was at Crania where Irani started to think about a way to put her backgrounds in teaching and science together.

“I felt that there was nothing available to help kids who are interested in life sciences like chemistry, biology, and physics. I have all this teaching experience and the experience from my degrees—I thought, maybe I can create an after school program for kids that are really interested in science to help build and foster their curiosity,” Irani said.

While there are similar platforms on the market for children, most focus on engineering and coding rather than life sciences. Irani said one reason she found in her research is that online learning programs need to have interactive experiments that keep children interested and help them understand the skills or lessons being taught. She added that life sciences are prioritized behind math and English courses in many schools.

“Science gets left behind in schools. Students learn about science for an hour a week in elementary education, which is not enough. It’s changing a little bit, but there’s still a gap.”

The spark that ignited Irani’s entrepreneurial journey came from a conversation with her partner about the gaps in science education she was seeing.

“I was telling him about how kids aren’t interested in science anymore, but that there’s going to be a continued growth in science-related jobs—more than in any other field. How do you get them interested? What makes science fun?”

Irani knew from her personal experience that hands-on experiments make science engaging. She started to put together the various parts that would become the pitch for CuriAwesome Learning. Parents can find science experiment kits at local hobby and toy stores or online retailers, but the gap was in the delivery of the instruction. CuriAwesome combines science experiment kits with online education to help children develop core science concepts.

“There are places where you can buy kits, but parents either don’t have time to explain it to them or they don’t understand the concepts. With CuriAwesome, we send the kit to the kid and they get to do the experiment while learning about the science behind it,” Irani said.

Taking an idea and making it a reality with StartUp Lab Laurier

With the idea in mind, Irani came back to the Laurier community by applying to the StartUp Lab Laurier program. After being accepted into the program, Irani connected with mentor Richard Neidert to start defining what the first course offering would look like.

“Richard connected me with a friend of his who homeschools their children. She reached out to her network for other parents who I could test with to see if there was product-market fit—and it turned out that there was,” Irani said.

Next, Irani reached out to her network of piano students and their parents to further test her concept. She found the same level of interest in the product with that group and, from there, began to plan out what would become a 12-week session of classes that launched this past January.

In addition to initial customer interview introductions, Neidert also helped Irani increase her beta customer group through summer camps around Waterloo Region.

“He gave me a great suggestion to run a summer camp in conjunction with other summer camps as well in the area. We did one-day trials to help gauge interest,” Irani said. “He has been a major advocate for CuriAwesome.”

Sadaf Qayumi was another of Irani’s mentors in StartUp Lab Laurier and assisted with building out one of the most crucial parts of any startup—its marketing plan. Irani said she came to StartUp Lab Laurier without any previous marketing experience, and that was an area she knew she needed to master.

“Sadaf sat down with me and walked me through how to plan a marketing funnel. Her mentorship helped me think about who I should be marketing to and where best to do it,” Irani said.

Mentors Qayumi and Neidert also helped Irani create a plan for an updated website. Second to word of mouth, the CuriAwesome Learning website is where parents were learning about the STEM learning experiences.

“Sadaf went through the website and helped me identify areas I could fix and improve it. Jason and Adrian from StartUp Lab, and Richard, helped me on the technical side and with communication with parents,” Irani said.

Irani researched science experiment kits as she worked on the instructional components for the classes. She connected with another entrepreneur who made experiment kits and collaborated to create the correct kits for her classes.

“We came up with a lot of the kits together. I had the ideas of the experiments, but I knew it would be easier if someone else could put it together. Working together helped her grow her business too because she now has more insights on what kids are interested in,” Irani said.

Providing online courses with shipped experiments has two benefits. First, CuriAwesome can keep overhead low as they don’t require physical space for the sessions. Second, CuriAwesome can reach a wider audience, including children in communities where in-person after-school programming isn’t available.

“I found that a lot of the students live in neighborhoods where they don’t have access to all these after school activities and programming. The parents were excited too because they don’t have to drive their kids anywhere.”