Shammika Munugoda built PebbleYard around parent-approved learning
Shammika Munugoda is the founder of PebbleYard, a subscription website for practising school subjects at home or in the classroom. This conversation looks at how parent approval shapes its learning activities, why school-focused pricing changed the product, and what Munugoda learned about reaching customers before adding features.
Work out how to reach customers before you finish building, and let real users guide what comes next. For PebbleYard, parent approval and school requirements have shaped both the product and its route to market.
What’s the short story of how your business started, and what makes it genuinely different from the other options your customers have?
I built PebbleYard in March 2026 to help my own two kids, then 6 and 8, with maths and English. I watched my son rush through learning activities just to reach the games at the end. The apps were rewarding speed, not understanding. PebbleYard is a learning platform for ages 5 to 11 with Australian Curriculum v9.0 maths and English built in. The difference is that parents and teachers can type in any topic their child cares about, from volcanoes to the solar system, and get a matching lesson, quiz and spelling set. Every generated topic goes to the parent first and only goes live once they approve it. There are no ads, no chat, no in-app purchases and no reward games pulling attention away from the learning.
How did you win your first customers, and where does most of your new business come from today?
We’re early, so the honest answer is that we’re winning them now. The first doors that opened were through partnerships rather than ads. In September 2026 PebbleYard was certified by the Educational App Store with a 5-star rating, and we partnered with the Home Education Association to offer its members 40% off. Since then we’ve added homeschool communities like Hearth Life Homeschool. Right now most of our effort goes into community partnerships, primary school outreach and free resources, such as Book Week quiz packs that need no signup.
What’s one decision that changed the direction of your business, and one mistake that taught you the most?
The decision was to treat schools as the main revenue line and parents as the way we build volume and word of mouth. That changed what we built: per-centre pricing, 20-minute onboarding and privacy controls that pass school scrutiny.
The mistake was launching with “founding member” pricing. I thought cheap early pricing would pull people in. It mostly signalled “new and untested”. I dropped it, set full prices as the public anchor, and now give each partner community its own discount code instead.
What has changed in your industry or in what your customers expect over the last couple of years, and how have you adapted?
Two things. First, AI can now generate learning content in seconds, so content is no longer scarce. Trust is. Parents want to know what their child is seeing, which is why nothing generated in PebbleYard reaches a child without an adult approving it first. Second, parents and schools have become much more sceptical of gamified apps that keep kids hooked with points and prizes. We built PebbleYard without ads, messaging or in-app purchases, kept leaderboards private by default with aliases only, and went through independent review to prove it.
If you were advising someone starting out in your industry today, what would you tell them to do first, and what would you tell them to ignore?
Do first: work out how you’ll reach parents and schools before you finish building. In edtech the product is the easy part. Getting in front of a principal or a parent community takes months of emails, forms and follow-ups.
Ignore: the urge to keep adding features before anyone is using the ones you have. Every feature request from a real school is worth more than ten ideas you had on your own.
Thank you to Shammika Munugoda and the team at PebbleYard for sharing what actually worked with Leaders Perception readers.
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