This Startup Helps Senior Citizens Stay Connected and Updated

As people start aging, staying they become irrelevant to contemporary times and its needs become tedious. Elderly people mostly do not possess a skill set and rely on others for doing minuscule work such as learning tech apps. GetSetUp, which is an eighteen-month-old startup, is addressing this problem amongst senior citizens. The company administers an older adult learning platform for people over 55 years of age. 

The platform has various guides, who teach lessons to aged people, and learners that are also over 55 years. It covers an array of topics that help elderly people gain skills, and cope up with the current times. Online classes that are conducted on the social community platform are essentially divided into four types-- Technology Classes such as helping older adults in filing IT returns, using Gmail and other apps; Health and Wellness Classes, which is further divided into physical and mental health classes, such as how to deal with loneliness, how to cope up with anxiety and loss of someone; Enrichment Classes that are primarily hobby classes; Social Hours are classes wherein learners can teach anything such as knitting classes, DIY craft making and poetry etc.

"Our goal is to reduce isolation or loneliness amongst older adults and build the largest virtual community for older adults in the world," Deval Delivala, Co-founder and SVP at GetSetUp, informed BusinessEx

The company aims to start with the pace of skilling senior citizens by employing other seniors to teach them those skills. These skills will help elderly people land jobs in contemporary times. 

Business Approach for the Indian Market 

GetSetUp was initially launched by Lawrence Kosick, Neil DSouza, and Deval Delivala in the American market to connect elderly people with each other. The company forayed in India in October 2020 and also bagged funding during that time. According to its official statement, it secured $10 million. ReThink Education led the company’s round. Other investors, who participated in the round, are AME Cloud Ventures (Jerry Yang), Work Play Ventures (Mark Pincus), and Sweat Equity Ventures (Reid Hoffman), among others.

While entering the Indian market, the company altered its strategy and has developed different approaches for its growth. It firmly believes in WOM (Word of Mouth) marketing and thus, delivers a diverse range of knowledge to the senior community from financial literacy to using a debit card. 

Besides this, the tech platform has partnered with employee benefit providers. It is working along with other organizations to bolster itself and gain recognition in the Indian market. Under this approach, it is demonstrating the platform as an elder care benefit. 

“Older millennials between the 30-40 age group have parents and children at home, and they are working from home during the pandemic. They are seen as a sandwiched generation as they have to take care of both sides. Eldercare benefits help such people as it keeps their parents engaged especially if they are living alone,” Delivala shared with BusinessEx  

Lastly, the online platform focuses on class designing. It organizes demo days and annual days every month wherein users can showcase any talent they would like to. Learners perform on these special days and also, invite their family members to view the performance. In addition to that, the platform has added various regional languages for users’ convenience. 

Overcoming Problems 

While operating in the Indian market, the company has to ensure making senior citizens accustomed to the platform. This comes as a huge challenge for the company and to counter this, it has introduced teaching assistance in every class. The company renders a support person who helps onboarding older adults in the classes. In addition, it holds two classes for new persons’ orientation daily. 

Older adults often find it difficult to adapt to continuously changing technology, and as a result suffer from loneliness in today’s hyper connected world. Loneliness leads to severe deterioration of one’s quality of life. GetSetUp  The company seeks to reduce the woes of older adults and become a second friend to them by creating a safe space for them, enabling peer to peer learning.