Why We Started LausnaNet

I spent years working in education in Iceland. I worked with schools, kindergartens, after-school programs. And across all of them, I kept running into the same problem: there was almost no software built for the people who needed it most.

Teachers were tracking attendance on paper. Schedules were pinned to walls. Communication with parents happened through printed letters stuffed into backpacks. Reports were written by hand, photocopied, and filed into cabinets that nobody ever opened again.

It was not that people did not want better tools. They simply did not have them.

Education is one of the most underserved sectors in IT

When you think about industries that technology has transformed, you think about finance, healthcare, logistics, retail. Education rarely makes that list, especially at the primary and secondary level. And in smaller communities like ours in Iceland, the gap is even wider.

Most of the software available is either built for large universities, priced for big budgets, or designed in English for markets that look nothing like ours. Schools here need tools that are simple, affordable, and available in Icelandic. What they get instead is a choice between expensive enterprise platforms and spreadsheets.

So they stick with paper.

The hidden cost of paper-based systems

Paper might feel simple, but it comes with real costs. Not just the obvious ones like printing and storage, but the time it takes to fill out forms, the errors that creep in when data is copied by hand, and the information that gets lost between desks and filing cabinets.

A teacher who spends 30 minutes a day on paperwork loses over 90 hours a year. That is 90 hours that could be spent teaching, mentoring, or preparing better lessons. Multiply that across every teacher in a school, and you start to see how much time the system wastes.

And then there is the environmental side. Schools go through enormous amounts of paper. Forms, reports, newsletters, permission slips, attendance sheets. All of it printed, distributed, and eventually thrown away. At a time when we are asking students to think about sustainability, the systems we give them to learn in are anything but sustainable.

Digital illiteracy is a bigger problem than we admit

There is another side to this that people do not talk about enough: digital literacy.

We assume that because young people grow up with phones and tablets, they know how to use technology. But there is a big difference between scrolling through social media and knowing how to use a computer for real work. Many students, even at advanced ages, struggle with basic tasks. Writing a document. Organizing files. Sending a proper email. Using a search engine effectively.

This is not their fault. If the systems around them are all paper-based, when would they learn? If their teachers are not using digital tools in the classroom, how would students pick up those skills?

The same applies to many teachers. Not because they lack intelligence or motivation, but because nobody gave them the right tools or the training to use them. Digital illiteracy in education is not a personal failure. It is a systemic one.

The moment I decided to do something about it

I remember sitting in a meeting room in a school, watching a group of staff spend an entire afternoon manually compiling attendance data from paper sheets so they could write a report that the municipality had requested. The report took days to put together. It would have taken minutes with the right software.

That was not a unique moment. It happened everywhere I worked. But that particular afternoon, I thought: someone has to build this. Not a complicated enterprise system. Not something that requires an IT department to maintain. Just simple, practical tools that solve the problems these people face every day.

That idea eventually became LausnaNet.

What we are building

Together with Soukaïna Mahboub, my co-founder, we started LausnaNet in Selfoss with a clear mission: to make technology solutions accessible and affordable for small businesses and organizations that have been left behind by the IT industry.

Our first product, Stadvaki, is a real-time attendance and location tracking system built specifically for schools and educational organizations. It replaces paper attendance sheets with a simple digital system that works across multiple locations. Teachers save time. Administrators get instant overviews. And nobody has to manually compile data for reports anymore.

But LausnaNet is not just about education. The same problems exist across many industries in Iceland. Small businesses running on spreadsheets and paper notebooks. Restaurants managing orders on notepads. Companies tracking employee hours with manual sign-in sheets.

We are building tools for all of them. StimplApp for employee attendance. PantApp for restaurant management. Mikla for local events and promotions. Each one designed to be simple, affordable, and built for the way people actually work.

Why this matters

Every hour a teacher spends on paperwork is an hour not spent with students. Every form printed and filed is a small environmental cost that adds up. Every student who goes through school without learning to use digital tools is less prepared for the world they are about to enter.

Technology alone does not solve these problems. But the right technology, built for the right people, can make a real difference. That is what we are trying to do at LausnaNet. Not to disrupt anything. Just to help.

If you work in education, run a small business, or know someone who is still buried in paper, we would love to hear from you. We are a small team, but we are building something that matters.