E-Paper
Startup Saturday: Edu-tech-ing the monolith of India’s competitive exam universe
Beyond study classes lies tech to enable every student to access what matters - info; here’s how it works
The statistics for educational sector in India, that too, only post-grad, beg the question of any smart entrepreneur. How do you hack it?
Are tuition teachers, schools, college, and extra classes enough? As Zishan Hayath, founder of Toppr puts it, “If you are a teacher you will think of how better teaching skills can help, but if you are techie you will see the ‘need gap’ and think of how you can use technology to solve the problem. Which is what we did.”
Three educational startups offer the tech solution to cracking India’s notoriously competitive exam universe.
Gradup, Shobit Bhatnagar, founder
- 15 million registered users
- 350 million minutes on GradeUp platform per month
- Daily average user (Dau) 4 lakh
- Monthly average user (Mau) 25 lakh
- Transactional user base 3.5 lakh
- Revenue (projection) - Rs 35 crore in 2019
- Money raised - $ 10 million
In the beginning
Understanding the impact competitive exams have on a student’s life, Shobhit Bhatnagar, a BTech and IIM graduate started Gradeup in 2015.
Gradeup is a preparatory platform for competitve exams, from SSC to JEE, NEET, GATE, Banking, Railways, UPSC, Defence and state-level exams.
Ideation
We found that the ed-tech space largely comprised of same offline content that was just being uploaded online. This was neither engaging, interactive, nor effective for aspirants preparing online.
Also, we observed that there was great demand for exam preparation with thousands of coaching centres in major cities, but not so much in small towns and remote areas. Technology could certainly solve this issue of accessibility. The existing ed-tech platforms in our opinion did not address the problem of effective preparation and engagement of the student.
Gradeup was developed as an app to help students with accessibility to coaching that was effective and engaging.
USP
Ou app helps students tackle the stiff competition with our specific tools. Our virtual classroom learning experience includes ‘live’ - interactive classes, quizzes, discussions, mock tests and mentorship. The teaching methodology is structured and every course comes with a day-wise study plan to help students prepare better. Our ‘live’ classes have proven to be 4X more engaging than recorded lessons. Apart from introducing a student-focused, tech-driven engaging method of learning, we are the first to launch a peer-to-peer learning community which helps solve 95% of doubts students may have. We also have also included parents in the educational journey. We have online parent-teacher meetings (PTM) and parents have access to report cards, attendance and so on. With the three pillars of technology, community learning and ‘live’ interactive classes, we have gained the trust of students and parents alike.
Challenges
Trust was the big challenge. Given our founders experience with products and technology we were able to build a strong app. Also working with the best teachers enabled us to understand content development and how to deliver it in the most effective way. Working with the right people was a key factor in making the enterprise what it is today. It took time and effort to find the right teachers and mentors and hire the best faculty. Additionally, building a platform of this scale required a strong focus on continuously improving and and building tech bandwidth. We did this by developing a robust framework based on artificial intelligence, machine learning and data that enabled us to gain valuable insights and make adjustments and improvements accordingly.
Strategy
For any online business today, companies splurge on ATL, celebrity endorsements, TV commercials, and social platforms, to gain eye-balls. All this adds to the costs of per-user acquisition, rendering operations ineffective.
We have been very mindful of ensuring that every buck spent is delivering value to the end user. GradeUp didn’t do any ATL spends in the first three years of operations, rather focussed on targeted performance marketing via SEO, YouTube, Facebook and Google ads. We have been utilising our resources in developing a strong technology and making the platform more effective. Availability of quality content and effective preparation through ‘live’ classes has helped students in cracking exams and the brand in building a positive word of mouth for Gradeup . The company has also invested in developing products and concepts on its platform catering to competitive exams across verticals, enabling them to acquire more customers, at fraction of the cost. With this strategic approach, Gradeup is also ensuring quality test preparation at a reasonable cost, thus making in-roads in to price sensitive tier-2, -3 and -4 markets.
Adda 24/7, Anil Nagar, founder-CEO
- 300,000 paid users
- FY19- revenue forecast Rs 51 crore
- FY18 growing at 100% y-o-y for last 3 years
In the beginning
I come from the small village of Dankaur, Uttar Pradesh, where people have almost no access to education. Despite this lack of access, IIT always intrigued me. This was when I decided to leave my village and come to Delhi. With the help of some friends and a coaching class I managed to crack the IIT entrance exam. With a degree in electronics I joined Cognizant USA. I realized that millions of students just like me who come from distant villages, tier 2 and 3 cities lack resources and have no access to higher education. This is when I decided to do something for this category of students. Saurabh Bansal and I began our entrepreneurial journey with Bank Power, which was focussed on coaching bank aspirants, offline. It turned successful and by 2016, we were able to spread our reach to almost every city. However, eventually we started failing to serve our basic purpose of coaching Tier 2 and 3 students. Soon, we realised that going online could turn out to be a game-changer in expanding our reach across India. This led to the creation of Adda247.
Ideation
Although we initially started with offline coaching classes that turned out to be a huge success, we gradually began experiencing a downfall in our mission. That’s how we realised the need of adding an online platform to our existing offerings. Hence, we came out with Adda247, which is now accessible throughout India and significantly helping aspirants to prepare and crack several government exams.
USP
Adda247’s USP is to provide comprehensive, last-mile learning through its suite of well-researched and qualified teachers via both offline and online platforms. What adds to its USP is the innovative approach to teaching pedagogies and techniques, aimed at simplifying learning for students across India. Today, we are one of the largest education-technology companies in India. Our mobile app is the second-largest ed-tech platform in terms of paid users, assisting a large number of students in various competitive exams across India. These are some of the key qualities that make us stand apart for online coaching to crack India’s most prestigious exams, including SSC, NDA and LIC, among others.
Challenges
The internet boom came as a significant blow to our successful offline operations. Although we were quite satisfied with our deliveries and student outcomes, it was time for us to go online, just like every other competitor. However, the technology integration at every step in digitalising classroom teaching to make learning more engaging, was difficult at first. It called for added efforts in addition to developing and delivering more personalised and customised offerings to the masses. However, we managed to deliver as per our mission with the help of our in-house team of researchers, teachers and content creators. Today, we have the second-highest number of paid users after Byju’s and our online platform, including the mobile app.
Strategy
We dig deep into gaining better understanding of the changing market trends by leveraging our large database. Moreover, we follow an inbound marketing strategy and amass it with the gathered information to create valuable and well-researched content while crafting tailor-made courses for the aspirants. Doing so, in turn, helps us create an organic pull in users and maintain a large-scale customer base across India.
We are planning to target all state-level exams by adding more courses - such as GMAT, CAT, CLAT, - to our existing product offerings. We are working towards launching video courses for banking and railway exams in nine regional languages, of which Tamil and Telugu have already been added to the platform.
Toppr, Zishaan Hayath, founder
- 9 million students have accessed Toppr
- 450 million questions attempted
- 8 million doubts answered
- Employee strength 1,000
- Money raised: $60 million over three funding rounds
In the beginning
After my graduation from IIT Bombay I worked with Opera Solutions on strategy and operations projects. Chaupaati Bazaar was my first venture as a co-founder, in April 2008. It was one of the early companies in the Indian e-commerce space, which was eventually acquired by Future Group in 2010. I became vice-president in the product category of the new entity. This is when the idea of using technology to solve student problems came into existence. I realised that students in India were spending enormous amounts of money on coaching classes. Following thorough research, Toppr.com was brought into existence in 2013.
Ideation
Board and entrance exams are very difficult to crack, especially because the number of applicants has grown at a much faster rate than the number of quality colleges. To bridge this gap, until a few years ago, students didn’t have any other option apart from coaching classes. Students are packed into large classrooms and teachers use the one-size-fits-all approach to teach. Every student is unique and performs better when learning is personalised to match their individual academic needs. This personalisation can only be achieved through technology. At Toppr, our mission is to make learning personalised. To achieve this, we have kept students at the centre of our universe and spent the last six years solving a wide range of student problems using advanced technology like artificial intelligence and machine learning.
USP
Toppr’s USP is that the app personalises learning while adopting a 360-degree learning approach. The app has ‘live’ classes, adaptive practice, mock tests, edu games, and video classes all on one platform. Since every module of the app is aimed at personalising learning, we have millions of data points to create a unique learning path that is perfect for every student. Toppr was never a coaching class. This is why we can keep a product-first mindset and focus on creating innovative technology to help a student learn better.
We focus on meeting the academic needs of our students. This is why Toppr has a freemium model where the basic features of the app are free for any child across India.
Challenges
Our biggest challenge was building a large amount of content in a short span of time, at a cost that a young startup can afford. Apart from this, we also focused on maintaining the quality of every content piece in terms of accuracy and pedagogy. To help us create this, we built a large community of over 30,000+ tutors who were experts at various content pieces, subjects, and boards. Our in-house team leverages their contributions to build high-quality learning content. Another challenge was scaling our ‘live’ doubts module. ‘Live’ doubts is a chat platform where students can ask questions to tutors and receive solutions instantly, 24x7. As the number of doubts increased, we noticed increasing pressure on our tutors. This is why we built an AI and natural language processing powered bot that scans these questions and suggests an answer to the student. If the student is still confused, they can chat with an expert and get it resolved.
Today, this bot solves about 25% of all student doubts and this number will keep growing.
Strategy
We believe in a product-first approach. Building a great product that solves student problems is our focus. We believe that giving students a great learning experience that makes a positive difference in their lives will bring more students on-board through word of mouth, genuine student testimonials, and other organic channels. We are look to constantly improve our product, identifying student problems and solving them. There are about 400 million school going children in India and we want them to have access to better learning via Toppr.
A matter of simple addition... with no subtraction
In 2019
400 million - students in school in India
15 lakh students registered for NEET
19 lakh registrations for JEE (both January and April)
Indian parents spend an average of Rs 2 lakh per child on coaching for IIT-JEE/NEET
Every year 12 lakh students appear for the UPSC exams; only 0.08% clear it.
