Estimated reading time: 4 minutes

• Just like people are spending much for children’s education, they should prioritize their parents’ and grandparents’ well-being and education as well.

• A large % of over-55 population in the Kathmandu valley is very lonely
• Big chunk of the middle- to upper-middle class
• Their (grand) children have left to study/work abroad, or are living their own happy lives. No space for the elderly.
• Opportunity: create an elderly school, where they can practice basic physical exercises, have friends to walk with, get to talk to people, learn new skills, artistic explorations, singing, drinking tea out in the Sun, travel groups, hiking, etc. Poker competitions etc? Dancing mothers and grandmas in China?
• Sales pitch: The grandparents go to school with the grandchildren, and learn just like them! To avoid the negative connotations associated with ‘old peoples homes’

• It’s an elderly wellbeing business, providing intellectual, social and fitness opportunities

• students have complete physical mobility and general mental agility, and aren’t very needy because it’s harder to cater to their needs. opportunity to expand into elderly care business later

• TAM (total addressable market size)? Total number of potential students we have is in the order of hundreds of thousands, if not millions.

• Potential profits? Not a bumper money-making initiative, but lotta value in providing a space for the elderly to grow intellectually, socially, and physically, and find a space for similar-minded people like themselves. Needed more and more, will gain popularity.

• not affordable for everybody, but it’s a bit of a compliment because they are saying, “We really want your product, but we can’t afford it.”
• you can’t afford our product right now, but if we made it cheaper, we wouldn’t be able to afford keeping our lights on and supporting you
• If many need to be served, there should be other businesses who might be able to cater to them or the govt should subsidize them.

• How much could we charge? Rs 10K a month? 20K?

• Potential collaboration with local and provincial governments. give them the framework and training for a charge and help them run similar schools all across the country.
• Govts will take care of budgeting and marketing and so forth.

• Won’t be to our standards and won’t strictly follow our program rigor and quality, but they will fill a much-needed gap in the market, in the demographics, in the social space, which is the need of a community, a need of a physical workout group, and an intellectually challenging opportunity, a growth space where folks can learn new things and topics that they never had the chance to explore.

• Potential challenge around class and caste. Might be segregating themselves by caste and class even though they’re paying around the same money.
• Opportunity for our parents and grandparents to be pleasantly surprised when they intermingle with people from different socio-economic groups.

• Our teachers used to force us to sit next to people we were not our friends so we wouldn’t make noise. We’ll making our students sit with people they don’t know, so they make more noise, so they’re more social, interacting with everybody.

• The other challenge is the financial.
• Tight margins
• Elderly wellbeing is expensive
• If you want to provide quality service, you have to pay good money for it.
• employees expect decent wages
• Can’t say “I’m going to start paying you less money, and as a result of that, you need to start optimizing how you live your life.”
• want to give people good, decent, reliable jobs that they can be happy and satisfied in, but that also fulfills their economic need.
• Because of NGOs and INGOs, we think anything that’s socially good should come for free, and money shouldn’t be playing a part in it.
• Push back on that. If you want to serve your community, you need something in return unless you are otherwise very wealthy.
• It doesn’t matter where it comes from: it can come from customer pocket, it can come from the government’s pocket, or it can come from a wealthy person’s pocket, but there needs to be money coming in.
• Just like people are spending much for children’s education, they should prioritize their parents’ and grandparents’ well-being and education as well.