864: LIVE From Ellucian Live 2024 - with Thomas Jelle, CEO, MazeMap

Dr. Joseph Sallustio: Welcome back, everybody. It's your time at The EdUp Experience podcast where we make education your business. Dr. Joseph Sallustio here at Ellucian Live 2024. Only on one cup of coffee, but I'm talking fast. Jess Weston, our colleague, is out to try to grab me something to keep me fueled for the day. But I've got somebody with me who I have no excuses for because he had a 25-hour flight to get here, which was an absolute nightmare. He still got here and today he looks fresh. So I don't know how you could get through a day like that and then come looking fresh the next day.

The last time that happened to my colleague, Elvin Freitas, who of course is the co-founder of The EdUp Experience podcast. We had gone from New York to Doha, Qatar, and I got there in the morning at 8:30 AM in whatever time zone is there. And I set up and I'm starting a podcast and Elvin doesn't show up. There's no Elvin. Where is Elvin? I get a call from him at 11:30, 12 o'clock in the morning in Doha and he says, "Joe, dude, I slept in, man. I didn't even hear my alarm go off." Meanwhile, I'm slaving away in Doha, Qatar, interviewing people.

So no excuses. We're going to keep it rolling today and keep the energy going. I've got a great CEO in front of me today of a tech company that's doing amazing visual work for us. What does that mean? We're going to tell you in a second. Ladies and gentlemen, here he is. He is Thomas Jelle, CEO at MazeMap. Thomas, what's going on?

Thomas Jelle: Thanks for that introduction. All good, all good, all good.

Dr. Joseph Sallustio: 25-hour flight, man. This is not good.

Thomas Jelle: Well, there were a few delays, right? So normally it would be more like 16, 17 hours.

Dr. Joseph Sallustio: And where'd you come from?

Thomas Jelle: Trondheim, Norway.

Dr. Joseph Sallustio: From Norway. How many delays did you have?

Thomas Jelle: Just one delay, but it was a big one.

Dr. Joseph Sallustio: Yikes! We don't like delays around here, and we're not going to delay talking about MazeMap. Level set for us, Thomas. Talk to us about MazeMap. What is MazeMap? How long has it been around? Where did the company start? Tell us the story.

Thomas Jelle: Yes, so it all actually started 10 years ago. What we were doing is that we wanted to see how we could increase the student experience for new students at the university. So what better way is there than to follow a new student around, right?

Dr. Joseph Sallustio: Yes.

Thomas Jelle: So that's what we did. We followed a student for her first entire week. This girl was called Signe. And at the end of the day, what we wanted to do was kind of like, okay, what is causing a negative student experience? She was new to the town. She was new to the university. So basically, she had a lot of uncertainties, frustrations. And there was a list of problems that came out. But one of the top things was actually that Signe was going to visit 50, so that's five-zero different places just in her first week.

Dr. Joseph Sallustio: 50 in the first week? Outrageous! That's a lot of places.

Thomas Jelle: That's a lot of places. And then a lot of the time actually she couldn't find her way around. She was stressed, frustrated, and lost a lot of time trying to find her way around. And we kind of said, okay, we think we can solve this problem. And basically, that's how we started off. And then we kind of went and said, okay, is there a market for this? Is Signe the only one in the world having this problem?

Dr. Joseph Sallustio: Hard to believe.

Thomas Jelle: Hard to believe. And we're just at this first university where there were 8,000 students. And then we started counting. Okay, in the Western world, there are 80 million having the same challenges every single year.

Dr. Joseph Sallustio: Can't find where I'm going. I've got to go to all these places in a very short period of time and I can't. I lose. I can't find where I'm going, I get frustrated and maybe leave. Who knows, right? I mean, that's what happens.

Thomas Jelle: That can also happen. Yes.

Dr. Joseph Sallustio: So how does it work, MazeMap? Tell me a little bit about the technology. Is it some kind of dynamic mapping system of some kind where I can search for something? Can it give me different layouts of maps? Maybe I'm an athlete. Can it give me a map to my game that day and leave other things out? How does it visually work?

Thomas Jelle: Yeah, good question. So where do I start? There's a lot...

Dr. Joseph Sallustio: Well, wherever you want. You're the CEO. You can start wherever you want.

Thomas Jelle: Bullseye. You can definitely search for any points of interest on the campus, right? And that's the point. And you can see where it is. Also, be taken there and to show the route how to get there, right? And we do enable different content for different users. So if you are logged in versus someone who's not logged in, you will be able to have access to different content and also see different parts where you can walk.

Dr. Joseph Sallustio: Right. So you can map walking paths. That's interesting.

Thomas Jelle: Yes. So think of it like Google Maps, just not only outdoors, but also indoors and where you have interactive content, and where the content is managed by the university and not by a third party like Google.

Dr. Joseph Sallustio: Okay, so I'm a university and I say in this building on the third floor in this classroom, this course is going to be happening as a student. Can I see into the building almost and see the floors of where I need to go with stairs and so on?

Thomas Jelle: Yes, you can.

Dr. Joseph Sallustio: How do you do this? How do you map these buildings? Like what do you do? Go take pictures of everything? How does it work?

Thomas Jelle: So taking pictures would be one opportunity to do it. You probably have a more advanced way of doing this, right? I'm guessing.

Dr. Joseph Sallustio: Yeah, so taking pictures would take way too long. It doesn't scale too well.

Thomas Jelle: What we do is that normally with a university, they have CAD files of their buildings. And what we do is that we take those CAD files, which contain a lot of information, a lot of information we don't need. So we pull that through our AI engine that kind of pulls out the things we need, like the doors, stairs, walls.

Dr. Joseph Sallustio: Fire escape. You need all the fire routes and all that stuff too, right?

Thomas Jelle: Yep, all those things. And then we keep those building a data model, a 3D model of that. And then we kind of disregard the rest of the information.

Dr. Joseph Sallustio: Amazing. How do you do? Are you an engineer? Like, did you just come up with the idea and have to go hire a bunch of engineers to make it work? Did you sit in a garage somewhere and start mapping things? How did this work?

Thomas Jelle: Yeah. So yes, I am an engineer from the start, but I had been fortunate to start four companies before MazeMap. So I've done this before. But at the end of the day, I told you, we started off with this first university, right? And wanted to help this user. And then we kind of went to the market and said, okay, we want the solution to do a couple of things. We wanted you to be able to search for a new room and say where it is. We want you to see your own position and we want you to get directions of where to go.

Then we went to market and said, okay, what is there already? What can we buy from third parties? Because when you start, you don't want to do everything yourself. You don't have a budget to do all these things. And at that point in time, there were a few companies doing indoor mapping. I remember we were bold and we said, okay, we'll launch this for the fall semester start. So we had six months runway to complete this, the first version of it.

And then we kind of went to one of the mapping vendors back then and asked, okay, how long will it take us and what will it cost? And they said, it will take us six months to create maps for you. And I was kind of like, that's no way. This is lunacy.

Dr. Joseph Sallustio: Yes, indeed.

Thomas Jelle: So because they did it manually, they sent the drawings to India and designers were editing and doing that. So we kind of thought there needs to be a better way. So then we started designing the first AI engine already ten years ago and that was before AI was super popular like it is now, right?

Dr. Joseph Sallustio: Yeah. When people say AI it's the last couple of years you're going... We've been doing it.

Thomas Jelle: Yes.

Dr. Joseph Sallustio: So the company is growing. I know this because I am hearing it more and more. You know, I interview a lot of people so I'll hear them talk about different technologies and I'll interview a school and then randomly I'll hear something, MazeMap or other companies out there. So I know that you're going to talk about the trajectory of your company, how you're helping higher education. What are you doing here at the conference?

Thomas Jelle: Okay, okay, okay. I got a lot of questions. So what we said when we set out, I told you that there's 8,000 students arriving at this first university and 80 million globally, right? So we set a kind of ambitious goal. We wanted to see if we can help a billion users.

Dr. Joseph Sallustio: One billion. With a B.

Thomas Jelle: With a B. One billion users.

Dr. Joseph Sallustio: That's great. Keep going.

Thomas Jelle: We are not on one billion yet, right? But we're growing quite rapidly. So I think it was two weeks ago for the first time we passed one million users just in one week.

Dr. Joseph Sallustio: In one week.

Thomas Jelle: In one week. In February and March, we were at approximately 3.5 million users.

Dr. Joseph Sallustio: Wow. You must be a happy CEO or you're getting happier by the week, it sounds like.

Thomas Jelle: It is. We're hoping to reach the 5 million milestone this year. That's still far from the billion, right? But then we have 10 million the next year, 20 and so forth.

Dr. Joseph Sallustio: What's the, as you talk to institutions, what's the hesitancy for bringing in a company like MazeMap? Is it budgetary? Typically? It's, "Well, we have a map, it's on PDF." Don't you? Because that's typical. I see. We have a PDF map, we don't need an interactive map. Maybe I don't have a sense that students are getting lost and you have to prove that somehow to me and then you go, okay, how are you gonna prove that to me?

There has to be an ROI. Your ROI for MazeMap is, this is me just making this up, but it's probably around retention where if I know students are finding where they're supposed to go, I literally don't have a student that can't find where they're supposed to go that gets in their car and drives away from campus, doesn't pay their bill or doesn't go to class. They don't go to class this one time, they don't go to class the next time, and all of a sudden I have a withdrawal on my hands. So the ROI has to be in retention and keeping more students on campus if they know where to go. Tell me what I'm missing.

Thomas Jelle: Yeah, so the ROI is linked to student experience, and making sure that those students that are there are happy users, right? Happy students. So we see from surveys that many universities have done is that MazeMap ranks quite high on the most important services in their daily lives.

Dr. Joseph Sallustio: Like eating and sleep, finding their dorms, finding their friends. I mean, there are really important parts of it.

Thomas Jelle: Yeah. You can think, if you remember Google, they have this toothbrush test, right? You use it every day. And MazeMap is like that, right?

Dr. Joseph Sallustio: Yeah.

Thomas Jelle: And that's also why we have quite a high adoption and a high number of users, right?

Dr. Joseph Sallustio: Right. Yeah.

Thomas Jelle: So that's that part of it. The retention is quite important. And there is an ROI link to that. It's also actually not only for students, but also for employees. So we see that many of our universities, they've done surveys with employees. And every time there is a use of MazeMap, an employee saves an average three minutes. So that also adds up, right? Because employees' time is also valuable.

Dr. Joseph Sallustio: Right.

Thomas Jelle: So and what's hesitancy? Well, I guess sometimes this can be a budget, right?

Dr. Joseph Sallustio: Right.

Thomas Jelle: But other times it can be other priorities. They are implementing other projects. They're doing other stuff. And sometimes it's still "we have maps, right? We have those PDF maps."

Dr. Joseph Sallustio: So you have to convince them that, okay, you have to kind of... we're in 2024 now. Kids on a campus, if you're talking about people who are on a campus, there's an expectation that they can get on their phone and use the technology to find what they're doing. Is one of the hesitancies, "Why don't they just use Google Maps?" Well, Google Maps will get you around the campus maybe, but it won't get you inside the buildings and into where you need to, where the student needs to go, right? Is that one of the biggest value propositions for MazeMap?

Thomas Jelle: Correct. You're spot on. It is, right? So because if an average university maybe has 25,000 rooms or 20,000 rooms, right? And being able to search for those and see where they are, that's kind of the key.

Dr. Joseph Sallustio: Yeah. And that you can't get with Google. So you have happy students that are using MazeMap. Do you get feedback loops? Do you have a feedback way for students to say whether they like MazeMap or what they want to see from MazeMap? Or the institution even?

Thomas Jelle: Yes, of course. So we mostly have happy users, right? And that's why we see that the majority of our users are returning users, right? We measure the number of users we had last week or this week, right? So returning users. So the users are in general very happy and in general our customers as well, and that's why we're able to grow quite rapidly as well. Because we're product-focused.

Dr. Joseph Sallustio: Yeah, what are you looking for out of this conference? Connections, networking, helping understand the problems of higher education, how MazeMap can fill the gap. What are you doing here? What do you hope to take away?

Thomas Jelle: Yeah, so for this conference, we're a partner with Ellucian, and we are integrating into Ellucian's products and services and especially one now is called Experience. And what we want to do is, well the reason why I'm at this conference is of course meeting more customers but also speaking a lot to different stakeholders in Ellucian and see how we together can elevate the user experience.

Dr. Joseph Sallustio: Epic! It is all about the student experience, isn't it? The student is paying, they have to have a good experience to do it. You have to have the right technology because the student's going to expect some level of technology. But they've got to know where to go. Like they have to know where to go. I can't overstate the importance of students who do get lost on campus. And then they don't end up where they're supposed to be. Their grade declines.

You know, I think about a student who goes to pay their bill. They can't find where to actually pay their bill, who doesn't pay their bill. And the amount of time I have to spend now chasing that student down, trying to get them to pay their bill, and it becomes an accounts receivable problem when if they just knew where to go to pay, it wouldn't have been an issue. There's so much ROI in getting people to where they're supposed to be.

Thomas Jelle: I agree.

Dr. Joseph Sallustio: What else do you want to say about MazeMap and your time here at the conference, about the company in general? Open microphone for you.

Thomas Jelle: Wow. I think for us, it's really important to learn more from the universities and our customers and see how we can increase our value proposition for our customers. So we started off with helping people find rooms, but now we also set out to help them find resources. So one of the things we're doing is, as an example, we're visualizing whether there are study rooms or meeting rooms for students at any point in time, right? Like visually in the map. And you can do a search where you can search and find the closest study room or desk or meeting room. So we're kind of innovating in terms of trying to make that information available, right? But it's not always easily available to a student, so that's what we're trying to do. We're trying to give the students a better overview of what type of resources are there. And when they do find that room on the map, just with one click being able to book that room.

Dr. Joseph Sallustio: You know, I have to tell you at the university I work for, one of the most common pieces of feedback I get - and my role at my university is chief experience officer. So I get "We don't have enough study spaces on campus." And I go, "Here, it's here, there's here, it's here, it's here, it's here. Did you know this space?" "No, I didn't know any of those." And I go, you know, that is a real issue. Students expect space. It used to be that you would stay in your dorm if you were a residential student. But I hear students don't stay in their dorms much anymore. They like to go to public places on campus to study. They like the library or study areas. That's going to be a huge innovation that I would encourage universities to take a good look at. It's been an honor to have you here, Thomas, and thanks for coming on, even though you probably have some serious jet lag right now, my friend. Did you enjoy it?

Thomas Jelle: I absolutely enjoyed it, and thanks for having me.

Dr. Joseph Sallustio: Remember, everyone. Be excellent to each other. You've just ed-uped.