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In this Founder Spotlight, we chat with Edna Martinson, the inspiring co-founder of Boddle, an edtech company that uses gaming to engage students and improve learning outcomes. Edna shares her personal journey, the challenges of launching a tech company, and the strategies that have driven Boddle’s success. Let’s dive into her entrepreneurial insights that can inspire fellow founders.

1. What inspired you to start your own business?
   My journey into the world of edtech is deeply personal, shaped by my family’s own struggles and triumphs. Growing up with a mom from Uganda, who made it through middle school, and a Ghanaian dad who saw the military as his way out of being an orphan, education was always this bright beacon in our lives. They instilled in me the belief that education could open doors we never even knew existed. This belief wasn’t just theoretical for me; it was real. I managed to finish high school early, moved to the US at 16, and graduated college by 19, all because of the educational opportunities I was fortunate enough to have. But when I saw the educational challenges here, especially the disengagement and learning gaps, it hit home hard. It didn’t sit right with me that so many kids were being moved through the system without truly grasping the learning in front of them. I met my co-founder/husband, Clarence Tan, in 2016 and he had a long background in game design and similar passion for the intersection of gaming and education. This mutual passion is what drove us to create Boddle. We wanted to build something that not only reached kids where they were at but also sparked that same love for learning that I was lucky enough to experience.
   
   
2. What were some of the biggest challenges you faced when launching Boddle?
   We call the first two years of Boddle our “mom’s basement phase”, and I think those were some of the toughest years when we had a vision and dream but no actual product or funding to get things off the ground, as with games you need quite a bit of upfront capital. We spent those years doing pitch competitions and finding the cheapest ways to get an MVP out. The lack of funding definitely put a strain in our timeline and ability to deliver the type of AAA game quality we both truly wanted. Thankfully, years later, we’ve been able to secure the funding to build a platform that kids and educators love.

    

3. What strategies do you use to overcome setbacks and obstacles?
   We’ve surrounded ourselves with incredible mentors, advisors, and fellow founders that have spoken life into us during some hard moments and cheered us on as we experienced success. I think having this community around us has been one of the key strategies to helping us maintain our ‘founder sanity’ and keep going.
   
   
4. What advice would you give to someone just starting their own business?
   Spend as much time as possible talking to your desired customer/end user to understand how what you are building fits into their life and ensuring that you are building something that truly meets a need.
   
   
5. How has Plains Ventures contributed to your company’s growth and success?
   Justin Wilson at Plains Ventures has been such an amazing resource in connecting us to relevant people in our industry. We’ve been able to connect with a child psychologist who helped us get a better understanding of user behavior and helped inform some game design changes, as well as former District admin who’ve helped us get a better understanding of District decision making.
    
6. Looking back, is there anything you wish you had known before starting your entrepreneurial journey?
   I definitely wish I had a better understanding of how venture worked earlier on and the different goals of VCs at different stages. It would have saved us a lot of conversations with folks who were not the right fit for Boddle given their thesis, ownership targets, funding stage, etc.
   
   
7. Can you tell us more about the Boddle team?
   We have a team of 32 incredibly talented individuals spread across 7 countries. Our team is made up of game developers, engineers, educators, designers, and marketers and currently most of our team is remote, with a small cluster of folks in Tulsa and Pakistan.