We recently caught up with Simas Senavaitis, the co-founder of Dental Tutors to find out how the business has been going since their Big Idea Challenge Commercial category win in 2016.

Simas Senavaitis, a 3D Modelling & Design graduate from London Met started working with Aida Kromelyte, the co-founder and CEO of Dental Tutors after his graduation in 2014. His creativity, interest in new technologies, e-learning, vision and strategies is reflected in the success of the company. Simas turned his passion into a career in VFX but notes that it took a huge amount of hard work, dedication, and patience – but the rewards are hard to beat.

Aida Kromelyte is graduated from Vilnius academy of arts, London Metropolitan (BSc), Ravensbourne (MA), and Kansai Gaidai (Japan) (postgraduate) universities. She has always been fascinated by visual effects, animation and also dentistry. 

During her studies at Ravensbourne university, she came up with an idea to combine dental studies and visual effects. And so in 2014, Aida and Simas combined their skills to begin providing online video tutorials for medical and dental students. Since then the company has grown significantly which has developed and expanded into a full commercial enterprise medical visualisation platform.

Dental Tutors is now the UK’s leading NEBDN accredited online dental nurse course provider, based in London, UK. Studying online provides great flexibility, as students can choose the time to study whenever it is convenient for them. This allows them to combine the studies with any other commitments they may have.

Keep reading to hear about Simas’ experience in our recent checkup with Dental Tutors.

How did the idea for Dental Tutors come about?
Aida was a dental nurse previously and she had an idea to combine traditional learning methods (textbooks) with the innovative 3D animations, allowing students to learn by watching 3D visualisations rather than textbooks alone.

What have been your biggest achievements since launching Dental Tutors?
We reached our targets that we set out during the Accelerator programme (having over 100 students). We have reached a very high Google search appearance. We got amazing feedback/reviews from our students (all 5 stars).

How did it feel to win the Commercial category of Big Idea Challenge 2016?
Being awarded for hard work and excellent ideas is extremely motivational, so winning the Commercial category is no different. It helped us to kick start our business

You also took part in Launchpad, how was the experience?
Simon and Toby were amazing tutors, they helped us at every step, even after Launchpad was finished. Everything started from an idea, and neither of us had any knowledge or experience in running a business. London Met’s Accelerator was a great start for us.

Being part of the Launchpad cohort, a classroom with other candidates, was also very helpful, because we shared the ideas and everyone adapted their variations to their particular field.

What advice would you give to other London Met students and graduates who may be thinking about starting their own business?
Starting a business can be daunting, as people normally fear that “what if the business doesn’t work out?” Our advice is that if you have an idea, just try and realise it. It is better to try and fail than never try at all. If it doesn’t work out, then you will have extremely useful experience and will learn so much about how the business works which might be useful at a later stage of your life

Thanks for catching up with us, is there anything else you would like to add?
Starting and running any business required a lot of patience and determination. People should not expect instant results and rewards. If you have a business idea and it matches with what you love to do, then that is all that you need to start a business.