May 12, 2025
I started eMatura during my Bachelor's with a simple goal: build a platform to help students in Slovenia prep for their final exams.
Within three years, it became the country's leading EdTech platform for exam preparation serving over 40,000 students annually through online courses (videos, quizzes, notes).
I thought it might generate some passive income while I pursued my real career abroad.
I had just gotten into LBS for my Masters in Management.
Later, I landed a high-paying offer in Dubai — Strategy Consulting.
So, I hired a CEO to run eMatura, and mentally filed it away as a side hustle.
But then, things took a sharp turn and I knew I had to make a choice.
I turned down the consulting job. Left Singapore where I was doing my exchange. Came back to Europe.
And chose to go all-in on entrepreneurship — both on my new AI venture and, to my surprise, on eMatura.
Everyone around me had the same assumption:
"This can't scale abroad."
"You don't know the local education systems."
"You'll never find tutors in other countries."
"It's too operationally complex."
And I agreed with them.
But then I realised the only thing holding us back wasn't our business model. It was my own limited imagination.
When I reframed my mindset, things started to shift.
Instead of asking, "Can we scale this?"
I asked, "What would need to change in order to be able to scale this?"
What would it take to:
That simple mindset shift is what unlocked everything that followed next.
Once I committed to the idea that eMatura could be more, we got to work.
Here's how we went from a Slovenian exam prep tool to a pan-European ed-tech platform in less than a year:
Between March and May 2024, we ran lean tests in multiple countries, launching lightweight landing pages under different brand names to track demand.
After tracking engagement and conversion data, three countries stood out:
Now, it was time to go all in.
We knew we needed local content. However, hiring six tutors per country upfront was inefficient.
We decided to find one exceptional country manager per market instead.
We sourced them via LinkedIn and ran a structured interview process, including a real assignment: research their local education system, do competitor analysis, and validate market demand.
Once onboarded, these country managers became our local operators. They recruited tutors, reviewed content, and helped manage day-to-day execution.
We built our recruitment funnel entirely in Notion. Every tutor had to:
We then shipped laptops, microphones, and cameras to their homes so they could record content remotely.
Over just 2.5 months, 18 tutors produced:
All in local languages, customised to each country's curriculum.
This level of output would've been impossible without tech.
We used AI tools to:
AI handled the bulk work. Humans handled the quality. Together, this hybrid model let us move incredibly fast on a tight budget.
While content production happened, our product team templated the entire platform infrastructure, including WooCommerce integration, Stripe payments, and full language localisation.
Then came one of my favorite parts:
In the middle of summer, me, Tilen (CEO), and Maj (Video Director) went on a 10-day sprint across all three countries.
We met our local teams, filmed marketing materials, did TikToks and promo shoots, and captured behind-the-scenes content. It was very exhausting but equally rewarding.
We launched all three platforms in October. But the growth didn't come right away — it was a process.
October – December: slow growth with weak bottom line (flirting with profitability)
January: 10x+ revenue growth
February: The growth trend continues
It took time and faith to see the payoff.
By April 2025, we:
None of this came easy.
We were fully bootstrapped, and the whole expansion was funded through a small loan & internal resources.
We were always short on cash flow. Had immense budgeting challenges. Tight delivery deadlines.
At our peak, we had 40+ people on Slack, managing content, AI ops, design, product, marketing, and QA.
So, why did we decide to keep going in spite of all these odds?
A belief that if we solved the right problems, the results would start showing up at some point.
And they did.
In January 2025, we launched 8 more soft-launch markets: Greece, Bulgaria, Croatia, Vietnam, Ireland, Latvia, Albania, Cyprus.
We're running the same pilot process; testing demand, tutor speed, and ops scalability.
And we plan to scale even more aggressively this summer.
What I learned from this journey is simple but powerful:
If you believe something can't scale, you won't even try.
But if you believe there might be a path, even if it's hard, that's when you start solving problems instead of avoiding them.
Remember, it's not where you start from; it's where you end up.
eMatura was never meant to become what it is now.
But the moment we allowed ourselves to think bigger — everything changed.
We have a great team. Let's see how big are the boundaries that can be pushed.