Zubair Junjunia, Founder and CEO of ZNotes
Last month I met with Zubair Junjunia, the Founder & CEO of ZNotes; a revision platform and online community for school students studying international qualifications.
We had an amazing conversation, digging deep into the what and the why of ZNotes and into Zubair’s own background and university choices.
Undoubtedly one of the smartest people I’ve had the pleasure of meeting, Zubair is nevertheless humble, honest and open and is building something a bit special with ZNotes.
For anyone looking to learn about the importance of community, anyone thinking of setting up their own business, or anyone looking for inspiration about their own university choices, this is a fantastic read!
And of course, if you are looking to find out how ZNotes can help you, or your school, you’ll find it all here, and at znotes.org…
Let’s start with the obvious; what, in a nutshell, is ZNotes?
ZNotes is the world’s largest revision community of high school students.
We ensure that every student doing standardised exams at high school has an equal opportunity. And we do so by providing high-quality resources, peer support, and a community that allows students to get that support system that sometimes they lack.
We provide thousands of notes, videos and quizzes, and a community platform that gives them access to peers who are studying the same thing all over the world.
You actually started ZNotes at school, which is a brave thing to do, so how did that come about?
I was born and raised in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, to Pakistani parents, and had a British education. It was a real multicultural upbringing, fusing my Pakistani heritage with British schooling and Saudi’s remarkable culture and history.
And the thing about Jeddah was that we had a lot of expatriates, so international education was the only brand of education that would work across different geographies when parents move from one place to another.
I was very quickly aware that we had great schools that I was privileged to be part of, but also less privileged schools which had underqualified teachers and limited resources. There was an even greater disparity when looking at my cousins in Pakistan, where there was a huge disparity in the type of experience they got.
Two things were big blockers: the schools didn’t have the right resources e.g. textbooks, and many students didn’t have the extra tutor support that others did. It felt quite inequitable when the exams were supposed to be a level playing field for measuring your abilities. That was the starting point for the problem I noticed.
At school, I’d created these very precisenotes, well-formatted, front and back cover, and after the exams I didn’t want them to go to waste. So I created ZNotes on a Wordpress site and let it be discovered by students.
The idea really resonated with students, they found the resources very helpful, validated because they looked good and were aligned to the syllabus. And they had the relatability factor, because I was writing from the perspective that ‘hey, the syllabus points are addressed by this specific area, and we’ll make sure that you’ll address all of these points by the end of these notes’.
Finally the branding. You wouldn't think about it in the beginning, but because I’d spent so much time building this very visual identity, with the big Z across every watermarked page, it created a really strong word-of-mouth effect. Students would go to school with these notes printed out with the big Z, and their friends would say ‘What’s this?’ and they’d go, ‘Oh, it's ZNotes’ and that would result in more students discovering them. Right from the beginning we saw students from the same city discover ZNotes; one student, then three, then ten and so on.
The next step in the journey is 2017 when an email drops in my inbox. A student called Abhjit, from India, studying A-levels too, offered to support by adding more notes for new subjects. That was the moment that it went from a solo endeavor to something more collective, with many more students contributing that year.
It turned out that students not only wanted to benefit from the resources but also wanted to give back. And that's the mindset that we spend a lot of time cultivating at ZNotes. That reciprocity is critical.
Today we get over 1 million students (and teachers) using ZNotes each year, and over 1,000 students applying for volunteer positions.
How many students do you have adding materials and how does it work?
We very quickly realised that relatability is key to ZNotes success, and we couldn’t lose that, either at the content level, or at the operating level with the look and feel of the platform.
So we created three categories of volunteers.
Firstly we have contributors, who create notes, videos or quizzes. At any given moment we may have 20 to 50 individuals working with us for a six to eight week period. Selection and training is rigorous, and each subject has a single, canonical source, alongside a wiki-style updating process.
We also have interns, taking operational roles in the team, such as content development management, community management, social media, graphic designing, even well-being and recruitment officers.
The final role is ambassadors; students who lead the change, as a formal ambassador in schools, to talk about the platform, get students involved in volunteer opportunities, and get teachers involved in the review process.
All the roles are voluntary, and most are between 16 and 19 years old. We really focus on them being a fully fledged learning experience, giving the student a meaningful contribution to a specific area within the team.
And of course for the content creators, while helping others, the impact is reflected back on the student themselves; the student who creates content, understands the academic content better, and does better in the examinations.
So, what about the future of ZNotes; what can you tell me about where you are going next?
It's clear that ZNotes is a tech solution that works at scale, which is how we have managed to help and support such a large number of students. But the platform isn’t just about technology, it's about people. And so the community aspect is key. Young people get involved not just as users and beneficiaries, but they can learn and improve themselves through their involvement and they can start to shape education through their involvement.
So as we develop ZNotes we want to make sure it continues to serve those who need it the most, extending to support learners in local curricula and local languages too.
Beyond this, once we’ve taken students through this two, three or four year journey on the platform, they’ve developed social connections, a sense of belonging, and even a sense of purpose. So what can we do for them next?
We realise many of our users are thinking about university, so how can we empower them with the knowledge of the pathways that they can take to complete that?
At the same time we realise that university may not be the only way for them to achieve the experience and skills they’ll need, so how do we ensure that young people are provided with those skills, such as the green skills required in our ever fragile world; what are the alternatives to university, where are the different jobs that will come out in an increasingly AI-led world?
We have to see how ZNotes can be a part of that.
Now, what about your own experience of applying to university? What made you decide you wanted to go to the UK, to study in London?
I was very split about what to do in my degree, and that was probably the hardest part. When I finished my IGCSEs I was interested in all the sciences, and couldn’t really decide which direction to go. I had no clear future employment that I wanted to aim towards, but I knew I was good at maths.
Initially, I considered following a pure science, and heavily researched physics, cosmology and space science, but as I read and researched I realised that the backbone of physics is in fact mathematics. So I decided to go for maths: the most abstract subject possible in this area.
My dream was to study at Oxford, and so I really needed to do Maths and Further Maths at A-level. My school didn’t offer Further Maths at the time, and so I went to my teachers with a plan to do A-level Maths in a single year and Further Maths the following year, by self-study. I recruited three of my best friends into the endeavour, and the school permitted it! I don’t think most schools would even imagine giving permission for such a thing, so I was very grateful to the school to trust me! We all passed with an A or A*.
Unfortunately, when I took the Oxford Maths Admissions Test I did not do too well. I wasn't well prepared with what a test like that looked like or what I should know about it. I didn’t even get to the interview stage and felt defeated. But I still had the opportunity to visit the UK, as I had planned to be there for the interview.
I decided to go and visit three of my shortlisted universities. One was Durham, one was Imperial and the third was UCL. Up till then, I thought Durham was my first choice, but I realised pretty quickly how small it was, and with my upbringing in a large city, it wasn’t for me. So I went to London, and just fell in love with UCL; it’s slightly eclectic set of buildings and experiences and its sense of history. UCL won my heart as a university, and London won my heart as a place; it was really bubbling with energy.
Choosing to study Maths wasn’t a popular decision, either with my school or my family. The only support I had was a mentor, friend of my father and Oxford Physics graduate. He said to my dad “let him go and do this”, and he did! Coincidentally this mentor has now become a very big part of ZNotes, sitting on our advisory board, so has been a significant part of my journey!
I went out to do something I loved. It was a pure academic pursuit for me, not an easy pursuit, but I think what I ended up experiencing, and the skill sets I developed, would be really hard to match in any other pursuit.
So you studied a purely academic subject, but looking back, do you think your studies helped you as you continued as an entrepreneur with ZNotes?
Studying at UCL allowed me space to do other things, socially, in sports, and in entrepreneurship too.
I realised in second year that ZNotes was taking off and UCL put me through a number of support programmes through their new business incubator (“The Hatchery”), and along each pathway we learnt more and more. At this time I was focused on growing ZNotes as a community, but also growing myself as an entrepreneur. I was learning differential geometry in my lectures during the day and was coming back after to entrepreneurial lectures, learning about IP and company set-up.
In my third year, UCL sponsored me to stay in the UK and incorporate ZNotes here, so by the time I graduated I was able to pursue it full-time.
In terms of linking my maths with my choice of career, I would say that the tools that mathematics gives at an abstract level really play a big role in entrepreneurship in three ways.
Firstly, such a difficult degree requires a lot of resilience and a lot of cognitive application. I don’t think that my brain has ever sweated as much as it did in the final couple of years of my maths degree, and I don’t know if it ever will! Nothing has pushed it to that extent since. The impact was profound and played a big role in the resilience that I have.
Secondly, on problem solving. Maths is focused on how you take all these different ideas and theorems, and combine them into a singular proof. Entrepreneurship is very much like that; taking ideas and solutions and combining them into a single, cohesive product that a user can engage with. Mathematics is also very beautiful; there is an intuition behind the way a proof is written and delivered. And similarly, a great product has to be beautiful, it has to be intuitive, and have a great user experience. Maths really helped me understand how to build something that doesn't just work, but works beautifully and intuitively!
Thirdly, maths helps develop the skill of abstractification; the ability to abstract our thinking from one level, to another, and another. When you are working on things like multi-fractional dimensions, if you don’t have abstraction, you’re basically lost, because you cannot visualise these things. And with a business, you really need to be able to go from the layer where, for example, ‘this is what my team does on a day-to-day basis’, to ‘this is what my organisation does’, up to ‘this is what my industry does’. Interplaying in these layers is such an important skill, especially with things like AI. Where do you plug yourself into the bigger picture? Does your solution tie in, perhaps in a way that you cannot see through an operational lens, but you can see at a different level, through a different lens?
What do you wish you knew about making your university choices when you were at school?
I think I was very hung up about a specific university and a specific course. I know this sounds very reductionary, but to be honest, whichever course and whichever university you end up going to really makes a small part of the difference.
The big part is the people you spend your time with, the things you do within and outside the university, and the proactive steps you take to make the experience as meaningful as possible. You could go to the best university in the world, and the most ‘in demand’ degree, but could leave with nothing really. Or you could go to a not so top-ranked university, but put in all your efforts to do your best, experience the most from it and make a big difference.
I also didn’t realise how much things outside the university would have a role, so for example, being in London was a huge advantage for me. I could go to every single event around. I could meet people who were always passing through London with their different engagements, summits and conferences, just because I’d chosen a location that was accessible to that.
Finally, university is really the best time to experiment as well. Especially for me, that had a lot to do with sports and social activity, so I did a lot of running, figure skating, rock climbing and traveled all over the UK. You forget how quickly those three or four years go, so take advantage of them as much as possible!
And what advice would you give to any students considering starting their own business?
I have one that I always fall back on, but is probably the most important, and that’s be married to your problem, not your solution. If we’d stuck to PDFnotes on a Wordpress site, I think we’d have been out of business quite quickly, but we’ve evolved our solution every single day, and that makes a big difference.
The other thing is to start before you are ready. As a perfectionist, I spent a lot of time overthinking and over developing ideas before putting them out there. But when I started speaking about what I did, it made a big difference; and when people became part of the development journey with me, it made all the difference in the world.
These two things are not unique to me, but are the mantras that I live by. When I’m overwhelmed by everything and need to strip it back, that’s where I go back to.
And finally, if somebody wants to volunteer, they go to the website and it’ll all be obvious what they need to do?
Yeah! znotes.org/join shares the different pathways and opportunities they’ll be able to select and go through!
We realise that some students may be able to give lots of hours, whereas others may be very limited, so we have opportunities which range between intensive six-week one-off engagement to a long-term engagement, of say a full year, but doing something in just a few hours per month.
