Founders: Matthew Martin, Eden Gibson
Typically you wouldn't expect two students who randomly met in orientation week to go on and build a study tool doing $50,000 in annual recurring revenue in a few months. That's exactly what happened with Derive, although it's a little less easy than it sounds. Matt Martin and Eden Gibson met on day one of their engineering degree at UQ. In their first meeting at the ‘Intro to Engineering’ class, two things stood out. The inspirational video of Steve Jobs the lecturer played was very unoriginal and they’d rather bond over online chess than lecture notes. That very first day, they exchanged Instagram handles instead of phone numbers, kept in touch and ended up attending the same hackathon together. One hackathon became two, and so on, building tools like a squat form tracking app, administrative apps for universities, and eventually Ori, the precursor to Derive.
Matt came from a pre-med degree after scoring a 99.95 ATAR, switching to engineering as he realised he loved mathematical and technical concepts more. He went on to build an Instagram following of 60,000 documenting his transition to an engineering degree. Eden started making businesses at 14, building scrapers in Minecraft servers, automating Reddit AMA videos and finally scaling a website development company to five figures, all while still in high school. After trying a few different ideas and not seeing the scale they wanted, Matt decided to create “the great lock-in”: 48 hours shut in one room, with the sole task to find the next scalable venture. Matt validated the best ideas through his social media account. Their final idea, an intelligent notebook for STEM students, attracted 150K views across two social posts. Coming out of the 48-hour window, they had an idea with a few hundred people on the waitlist and a problem they both had lived experience in.
Distribution has never been a difficult barrier to overcome for Derive. Matt's following has since doubled and attracting users to the app has required little effort. The main focus for Derive has always been dialling in the product. As users of their own product, it was pretty clear just how complicated engineering equations could get. It’s a mix of equations with both real and imaginary numbers, some 5-digit others 6-digit, line by line. With complicated mathematical equations like these it's difficult to ask for help you don't know you need. A student can't detect silent errors as they are solving the work. You could ask ChatGPT but that requires a finished solution and answer for the AI to compare with. You could check the solutions in the end and find out you're wrong, but once you do, you're wasting time rechecking every line to find your mistake. To help paint a picture, say you had 75,000 as one of those numbers in the line, and then on the next line you wrote 7,500 by mistake. That's not a learning error, but it will burn half an hour of your day every time for one single equation. Matt spent 500 hours as a tutor. If a kid gets something wrong, you're not going to sit there and watch them flounder for 40 minutes in an hour-long session. You need to be proactive. Derive understands every stroke on the page, finds errors inline at the moment they happen, and gives guided explanations on demand. No more losing hours to a wrong step you don't catch until the answer key. This is a tool built by people who lived with the pain point themselves and are solving a problem where competition is scarce.
In Matt's words, “it's simply inexcusable to not succeed”. There's an abundance of content, guides and learnings from founders who have built extraordinary businesses to learn from. This conviction led them to their massive growth over the last month. They booked a 25-day retreat in Bali to focus solely on Derive. Before heading in, they were only in Australia, less than $10,000 in annual recurring revenue with little growth. Since returning home, they're available in 71 countries, $50,000 in annual recurring revenue with $2,000 growth per week, and a full marketing campaign in place to kickstart their next phase of growth.
