Vlada Lotkina | Communication Is the Foundation of Success

Growing up in an entrepreneurial family, Vlada Lotkina, CEO and co-founder of ClassTag, saw firsthand the successes and failures that inevitably come with following your dreams. It was that inherited pioneering spirit that drove Vlada to emigrate from Ukraine to attend the University of Pennsylvania’s prestigious Wharton School for her MBA.

Vlada had a few different business ideas early on, but it wasn’t until her daughter began preschool that she fully dove into entrepreneurship. In fact, it was the overwhelming experience of teacher-parent communications that inspired Vlada to create ClassTag, a platform focused on better connecting parents with their students’ teachers.

“I was on the receiving end of various parent communications from her school,” Vlada says, describing how she spotted an opportunity. “And I really was overwhelmed and felt that there is a better way to connect parents and teachers in every child's success. … That was a problem that I felt is both needed and critical, as well as really a big market opportunity because education has just been lagging behind so many industries.”

Rather than marketing ClassTag directly to school districts, Vlada and her team took a backdoor approach. They focused on building the best in-class consumer product for those who would actively use it: teachers. 

“I'm just impressed every day with how tirelessly educators are working to meet the needs of families,” Vlada says. “And certainly I think innovation and technology is only there to support the sometimes really heroic efforts that they all make.”

ClassTag is currently used by 4 million parents and teachers across 25,000 schools, helping streamline communication and improve the relationship between teachers and parents. According to Vlada, building a partnership between these two parties is the foundation for student success.

##

👱‍♀️ Name: Vlada Lotkina

⚙️ What she does: Vlada is the co-founder and CEO of ClassTag, a simple and free parent-teacher communication system that just works — for everyone.

🎨 Company: ClassTag

💎 Words of wisdom: “The experience of growing up in an entrepreneurial family was really impactful for me and just seeing how many times my dad started and closed different companies and realizing that the only way to fail is not to try. ... Certainly that just removed the fear of not making it and really looking at the journey as a way to learn and to do the best you can and just have sometimes ungrounded belief in your own success.”

🔍 Where to find Vlada: LinkedIn | Twitter

🔍 Where to find ClassTag: Facebook | Instagram | Twitter | YouTube

##

💡 Entrepreneurial spirit: Vlada credits her father’s own ambitious and inventive energy with inspiring her to take risks and pursue new initiatives. 

💡 Ignorance is bliss: Without knowing its prestigious rank, Vlada applied and got into the Wharton School. She says sometimes not knowing certain things can help you lose that fear of rejection and go after what you want. 

💡 Everything is a learning experience: Aside from Wharton’s challenging curriculum, Vlada credits her classmates with teaching her just as much, if not more, about the way business works in the United States.

💡 Look for the right opportunity: Always looking for ways to start her own business, Vlada paid attention to everything around her. Such an opportunity emerged when her daughter started preschool — Vlada saw a need to improve the parent-teacher connection for student success.

💡 Appeal to the actual client, not the larger business: Vlada and her team targeted the teachers who would actually be using the product rather than entire districts at large. This yielded the best in-class consumer product inspired and influenced by teachers themselves.  

💡 Rather than reinvent the system, find areas for improvement: Instead of creating a new workflow, Vlada and her team looked closely at the existing system and found gaps in the line of communication that could benefit from changes.

💡 The only way to fail is to not try: Having grown up in an entrepreneurial family, Vlada saw the success and failure of starting new endeavors. Once accepting that the only true failure is not trying, Vlada was able to take fear out of the equation and pursue her dreams. 

Vlada Lotkina:

“I went through a number of corporate positions and finally started my own company, which is called ClassTag. And it's been the most challenging and rewarding part of my journey so far.” 

“When ClassTag came about, it was really from my personal experience, right? So my daughter started preschool at the time, and so I was on the receiving end of various parent communications from her school. And I really was overwhelmed and felt that there is a better way to connect parents and teachers in every child's success. And so that became the mission behind ClassTag.”

“We certainly strive to challenge the status quo and look at how things are done and understand the underlying goals of those workflows and then make them better. So I think one of the key lessons for us was not to try to invent a new workflow, but really try to go deep and understand: what is the current process, what are the breaking points in that process and how can we make it better? And so that meant a lot of big and small innovations along the way to ultimately improve the outcomes, which in this case is parent engagement and student success.” 

“I'm just impressed every day with how tirelessly educators are working to meet the needs of families. And certainly I think innovation and technology is only there to support sometimes really heroic efforts that they all make.”

“The experience of growing up in an entrepreneurial family was really impactful for me and just seeing how many times my dad started and closed different companies and realizing that the only way to fail is not to try. It was sort of a big early learning for me. And certainly that just removed the fear of not making it and really looking at the journey as a way to learn and to do the best you can and just have sometimes ungrounded belief in your own success.”