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Building The Full Stack For Higher Education | Ruchir Arora @ CollegeDekho
435 Plays2 years ago
Higher education represents more than half of the Indian education industry, which has been estimated at the US $135 billion in FY20. India has more than 50,000 colleges and students often find themselves in utter confusion while choosing the right course and college. Ruchir Arora was working in the education division of Hindustan Times where he hit upon the idea of building a digital-first, content-led platform that would make it easier for students to research, shortlist and apply to the right course and college for them. This idea grew into a full-stack business that today has an admissions division, a learning division, and a study abroad division.
Know about:-
- Classifieds in education
- Buying the domain name
- Acquiring Scholarship Facilitation Services
- Revenue model
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to College Deco and Podcast
00:00:00
Speaker
Hey, hi everyone. This is Ruchit Arora. I am the CEO and co-founder for College Deco. Hi, I'm Akshay. Hi, this is Aurob. And you are listening to the Founder Thesis Podcast. We meet some of the most celebrated sort of founders in the country. And we want to learn how to build a unicorn.
Opportunities Beyond Top Colleges
00:00:31
Speaker
Opportunities lie everywhere. You just need to have the right perspective to spot them. If you take the example of the higher education space, there are multiple large unicorns like Baiju's, Uprat and Vedantu which are chasing the test preparation market. They help students to prepare for the entrance exams of the top 100 colleges in India.
00:00:53
Speaker
But did you know that India has more than 50,000 graduate and post-graduate colleges? And there is gold to be found by working with the 49,000 colleges that lie beyond the coveted first-year colleges.
Origin Story of College Deco
00:01:06
Speaker
This is the opportunity that College Dekho is tapping into. Ruchira Rora was working in the Education Division of Hindustan Times, basically the division that helps colleges to advertise themselves in order to attract students.
00:01:20
Speaker
That is where he hit upon the idea of building a digital-first content-led platform that would make it easier for students who are applying for remaining 49,000 colleges to research, shortlist, and apply to the right course and college for them. This idea grew into a full-stack business that today has an admissions division, a learning division, and a study abroad division. And investors love college deco, which helped them raise a massive $35 million in 2021.
00:01:50
Speaker
Here's Ruchir Arora telling Akshay Dutt about how it all began.
00:02:01
Speaker
We got a finance job. Hindustan Times at that time was starting this tech company on Firefly Ventures, which was very similar to what India Times did and Times of India did. And I was one of the first few employees. My role was very similar to not only do financial planning and all the finance work, but also to look for opportunity which we can acquire, invest, stuff like that. So we were working with the CFO very closely.
00:02:26
Speaker
So yeah, so that sort of really helped. And interestingly, so we used to go to the board meeting, present annual reports, quarterly reports, again, got to meet very senior and very sort of respected folks in the industry and learned a lot from them.
Education Classifieds and Digital Transition
00:02:40
Speaker
And then in one of the board meetings, we were trying to say, what can we do in education? And that's where they said, why can't obviously we had built jobs, which was shine.com. And we had plans to build other properties as well. And then.
00:02:51
Speaker
education came in and he said which you are closer to and we're trying to acquire an asset or let's say invest in an asset in education said you are close to that business my boss somewhere identified and I'm always very thankful that this guy can maybe do business and outside of finance so he said why don't you start something and we'll see how it goes in fact he also told me that
00:03:11
Speaker
If it works, I'll hire a CEO for the business, but you make it work. So that was very essentially very honest and humble of him. Like times of India, Hindustan times, essentially what they did in their online expansion was make classifieds online, like property listing or being job listing. So was it the same idea with education? Yes.
00:03:35
Speaker
So if you look at classifieds, there are typically five classifieds, jobs, property, marriage, auto, and education, right? So these are the five main, and every day you get a supplement of each one of them. Obviously, there are players in jobs, there were players in real estate, there were players in matrimony. Auto was an upcoming sector, it was not that big at that point. And education was something which was quite wide open at that time. So we started a classifieds portal, a very clean classifieds portal. We called it, we used to call it HT Campus.
00:04:02
Speaker
And then SD Campus grew in the eye bandit for about three, four years. What is a classifieds play in education? I'm not able to visualize. Is there any global example classifieds in education? What like listing? I'm offering tuition classes or I'm offering this course in BTEC. Is that what it is?
00:04:22
Speaker
Yeah. So the classifieds is a very established play in higher education. Okay. Typically what happens in a classified portal in the digital domain is you essentially get traffic by putting content, which is typically a classified website would do. And when you get traffic, you essentially, you are focusing education content. So you get education related content and then you sell either the branding on the website for eyeballs.
00:04:45
Speaker
or you also sell the inquiry that students make on your portal. So let's say I am with a student coming to website and saying, I find this course interesting. Can you help me find an engineering college? So you sell this data, you sell this data to colleges. And again, across the world, there are various examples wearing a very large classified portal. And this was about
00:05:04
Speaker
10 years back so at that time some of these things were very hot right that's the business had not matured to the transaction level it was still very focused on eyeballs and cpc's etc etc so we started this website called st campers at that time there was this one such portal from the house of info edge right called shiksha
00:05:23
Speaker
and that's Xixa. So Xixa is a classic example of a classified portal and we started and it grew very fast and when I left I was essentially trying to do this and also integrate print with it because obviously you can see that same customers overall put together globally. The news
00:05:41
Speaker
print was losing its, let's say, losing its flavor in a way. It's still, for example, I understand in Hindi vernacular bed, our print is rocking. It's one of the best places, but still it was losing its flavor, especially with a lot of audience because of people like you podcast and news channels. And Facebook 24 hours availability of news. News is all about. News online and more personalized.
00:06:06
Speaker
More personalized, more online. And then, so one challenge that people have globally faced is what should we print tomorrow morning?
Ruchit's Entrepreneurial Journey
00:06:14
Speaker
Because everything that you print has already been out there. And so we tried to combine print and digital selling in education. And that's what I was looking after. What made you want to leave?
00:06:26
Speaker
Yeah, I think overall, I think I had a great experience there. A lot that I learned was what I am today is thanks to people at Hindustan Dine and the senior management there. But I think one thing which I always had this that I want to do something on my own, right? Even in Hindustan Dine, the good part was that the ST campus business really incubated. So I did a lot of work there.
00:06:47
Speaker
But then I had some different idea of executing it and I always wanted to do something on my own. And I said, if I don't take this risk now, I'm like already about 32, 35. And if I don't take this risk now, then it's not happening. Okay. This is the last chance. At that time, there were three interesting things going on. One, somehow I.
00:07:07
Speaker
I could see that in this internet industry and investor domain, I really liked that part. So I could see that maybe ISP degree is not enough. So I was trying to go to US to do an additional MBA. Okay. That was one thing which was going on. Second, I had very advanced off-elected discussion with the really big daddy of internet. That was going on. And then this was going on.
00:07:30
Speaker
And then I finally said all the other two things can still happen after two years, but this can't. So if I wait and take something else, then I'm getting back to the rut. Okay. I still find jobs very exciting, but yeah, I don't, so I always thought that let's try and see if we can do something. Then I met someone which led me to meet through the.
00:07:50
Speaker
And this was in the planning stage and you already had an idea of what you want to do. Yeah, I had an idea as always had, but I didn't have the guts and the money. So let me tell you the macro fit and how I
Challenges in College Selection
00:08:03
Speaker
reached the idea. So India, there are about 10 to 11 million students who go to colleges every year.
00:08:09
Speaker
which is by far the largest. As of today, about 40 million, four crore students are studying in colleges. India is also a country where the number of colleges in a country is the largest. So we have 53,000 college degree-granting colleges in India. Just to give you a comparable, the US is roughly about
00:08:33
Speaker
20 million students studying in colleges. It has 4,000 colleges. India has 40 and 53,000. So it's crazy. Also, interestingly, 70% of all enrollment share went to private colleges. This is another distinct feature, which is the government decided that the country is large and we need private participation in that. And we'll get the framework to let the private parties run it.
00:09:00
Speaker
Now, interestingly, so this is on the macro side. Now, look at me as a student. I came from remote mirror and I could relate to a lot of this. So if I'm amongst the top five students in my school or class and loves me, okay. Everyone says that I want to help this guy. He will go to ID. I have my poster. Someone will write somewhere that this guy did great and he's a poster boy for the school.
00:09:22
Speaker
but from let's say there are 50 students in a class from number 6 to 50 nobody really cares and that's where the problem is right because that's where the confusion is this is the student who's coming from a small town he's probably not he will not get 99.99 percentile to make it to an SRCC and he's confused
00:09:44
Speaker
He or she is also unaware of what his or her capabilities are. And I used to get a lot of these calls from my friends and families and very consistent questions. You know what? I could not make it to IIT, yet I want to do engineering and it's an important decision in my life. How should I go about it? It's very difficult.
00:10:02
Speaker
And again, same thing, you can know almost everything about the top 100 colleges. The moment I asked you what is the 101 college, right? What's the infrastructure, right? What should you do to choose this college? You again go blank.
College Deco's Business Model
00:10:15
Speaker
So that was the problem statement that I want to solve. And the second thing that I felt that, and you always kept reading about unemployability and the people are not employable, etc.
00:10:25
Speaker
So I think that's, so what is the end result, right? First of all, the student probably should have never been an engineer, should have been maybe a journalist or a social media influencer. There are tons of new jobs, new career opportunities which kids don't even know. So that's, so it starts from there.
00:10:42
Speaker
I was a great journalist but my dad or my mom forced me to do engineering because that was the only thing that we knew. Then you go to a college which probably is also lagging between industry and academy and curriculum. Also, the higher up you go,
00:11:00
Speaker
The more complex subjects become, for example, getting a good engineering design professor in a small town will always be more difficult because you have people sitting in. So you are essentially saying the pipe itself is a bit of a problem. One, you didn't know which college to go to. Then you went to a college where the curriculum was
00:11:18
Speaker
not the best or a bit compromised. And that resulted into unemployment. So my take is that if you want to correct that, let's correct the pipe first. So we want to build a complete ecosystem where not only students can get discovery, but they can also get help while they're studying in college. So they can take classes, they can see subjects, doubt resolution, all of this. And I wanted to keep this portal free, of course, for students. That was my take. And we got great success. So we started in the first year.
00:11:48
Speaker
We made tons of videos of colleges, put in a lot of content, got amazing traffic. Did you spend on this content from your pocket? Was it bootstrapped? Yeah. So I was, initially we were bootstrapping it. And then I met Amit, who's the founder of Carveco. It's an interesting story. Amit and Ragh, founders of Carveco. So I wanted to start the company. He had a very different name. I had a different name in mind, but then Amit liked the idea because he was doing something similar with cars. He said, I love the idea. I think it can scale very well.
00:12:18
Speaker
would you want, if you are okay, I am happy to put in money from the group side. And he also said that you should take this name College Deco because Deco has been lucky for us. So I actually officially bought the domain name from him and he traded that and then we started, then we renamed the company to College Deco. And Amit had done a little bit of work on the colleges side already, so we got advantage of that.
00:12:40
Speaker
Like he had a database of quantities. Yeah. So he had some database, he had some content. So it did not take us a lot of time. Plus I was coming from a similar background. So I knew the, what all the was you need to pull this. So after leaving the job, working for a startup in between for three, four months, then I started college decor, obviously with sort of initial seed money. And that's because of that seed money, we could put in a lot of content. We could hire resources.
00:13:06
Speaker
good part was I knew how to monetize it. So I knew how to monetize it. So we created India's first common application form, where the student who comes to our platform, he wants to apply to colleges, they don't have to go to 10 places, they can just click up a button, add colleges courses and then apply it automatically goes to all colleges side.
00:13:26
Speaker
between integration. Everything. There's a whole nine yards. So you can shortlist, you can apply, you can pay, you get a receipt from the college, you can also get an offer later. So the entire thing was happening on the platform when the students would essentially use this application and show to colleges that we have already applied. So they don't have to go to... This sounds a bit unfamiliar now, but at that time, colleges were still accepting demand drafts. April 1st.
00:13:54
Speaker
Yeah, paper forms and 2000, this is not 2000, this is like 2015-16, right? Even 2016-17, I knew colleges were sending paper forms, send a demand drop and they will send you a paper form, you fill it and you are that. So all of that was still happening. And this sort of came as a fresh share to a lot of students. So we got a lot of traffic, the common application form. When did you last this? 2016. Yeah. Like within a year of floods? Yeah, within a year of months.
00:14:24
Speaker
And the content which you put up, how did you monetize that? Was it like ads? Yeah, mostly ads. We also started selling some inquiries of students, etc. over a period of time. But then we pivoted our model completely to applications and admissions. So our model was that students can find it convenient.
00:14:42
Speaker
to apply through us and we will get paid for that application and obviously if someone from that application ends up taking admission then you know we make a transaction money out. So basically we move the entire classified model to a transaction model. When you move to transaction model like 16 you started the application form.
00:15:01
Speaker
Yeah, I think that itself, the starting of transaction model was from when we launched a common application. That's when we did that. What is the economics of that model? Like you charge a convenience fees, like how say I would use book my show to book a ticket in a cinema hall and I pay a convenience fees or something like that. Yeah. So in this case, we don't charge anything from the student for every application in the college business.
00:15:26
Speaker
Okay. Okay. Yeah. So students is free. It is in fact cheaper for them to apply through our platform than it is for them to apply to college. Sometimes because we have aggregated payment gateways, so there are payment gateway, there are offers and we aggregate all the offers which the students can get, which a standalone college cannot do. A lot of times it is actually cheaper for them to use our platform and convenient than use that. So first year, I think only about 50 colleges agreed to this and we did a thousand applications.
00:15:55
Speaker
And these were private colleges, essentially. Yes, mostly on our platform we have private and semi-government colleges. You still don't work with any fully-edited, let's say, government colleges because government colleges have their own processes, etc. So we became a channel for these private colleges to get more applications in a more convenient way and then in a more sort of the same way.
00:16:16
Speaker
So this is how the journey started 50 colleges on one side about a thousand applications and it's kept scaling and last year till December last year we did about 125,000 applications on the platform and roughly close to 25,000 admissions out of
Scaling and Revenue Generation
00:16:33
Speaker
that. How many colleges now accept the common application form?
00:16:37
Speaker
1500 colleges in India and we are scaling this number as we go. My take is that we should very close soon reach about 8 to 10,000 colleges. That's when the choice for the student will be complete. Right now we have we work with again just the tip of the iceberg right only about
00:16:55
Speaker
1500 out of the 50,000 colleges that we can work with. So I want to reach the 10,000 mark very soon. But obviously, we are growing as we speak. Till then, the company was actually very bootstrapped, right? So before this, we did raise a lot of money. We were essentially mostly healthy, EBITDA-profitable sort of a company. Was the revenue only an application? You said on admission also you got a revenue.
00:17:18
Speaker
So, let us say you applied and then so one we will make money on the application and then you ended up taking admission in the college. So, we acted like a admissions channel for the admission for the college. So, we got paid X amount on application and then Y amount on admission.
00:17:34
Speaker
And that admission amount would be much bigger because the college is earning quite a good amount. I think there is this whole industry of admission consultants, people who go and get students for colleges and drive their enrollments. So essentially you made that into a digital process.
00:17:52
Speaker
Yeah, and that's an amazing point. I think very few people in the country are actually aware that how big that industry is. It's of the last count that I know there are about 10,000 such people doing up to 25% of all Indian admissions. So 25 to 30% of all Indian admissions means they're doing 30 lakh admissions a year.
00:18:15
Speaker
30 lakh, so higher education is roughly a $70 billion fees market. So these people are essentially contributing to almost 30% of that fees. So that's the kind of scale and these are in again small towns. So you will not find such people in Delhi. These are in places like go 100 kilometres from Patna, go 100 kilometres from Guwahati.
00:18:38
Speaker
Yeah, Meerat had one. So I remember a couple of my friends and there was one person who used to help with admissions in Maharashtra College. That time, Meerat used to take another outstation candidate and this was this person who used to help us fill the application and we were paying him not knowing that he's getting paid from the college as well. So Meerat had tons of them and I had seen this firsthand and unfortunately,
00:19:01
Speaker
People don't realize that how big the impact of this is, right? Because end of the day, a consultant would typically work with either one or two colleges or three colleges. When he goes to the student, he will essentially only tell him about these two, three colleges. And sometimes the knowledge is very compromised. It's all about relationship, going to a Bhagalpur and then trying to do this with students nearby.
00:19:24
Speaker
It's like selling insurance. Correct. And whereas what we want to do is that we want to actually put the worldwide open to the students and say, okay, here is the list of colleges, right? Which you can do research. However, if you want to apply, there's a small segment of colleges, which we work with and you can apply with them directly. So on my college, we have information about 20,000 colleges. We have videos of thousands of colleges, right?
00:19:50
Speaker
All of them may or may not be our partner. But if you want to have an ease in journey, here are a bunch of people or bunch of colleges where you can essentially apply through us and make it very easy for you to take admission. So we are trying to target that category. We are trying to target the consultant. We are trying to say that the impact of this can be very big. So the impact of the fact that the students are now
00:20:16
Speaker
especially tier 2, tier 3 kids who are not able to make it to the top 100 colleges. They now have the choice to select and with the knowledge of whether they want to go to this college or not. So that's one thing that we're very passionate about. So we started with discovery and that went on for some time. Then we did a small acquisition in the study abroad space. I think typically what colleges pay about 10% of first year fees or something like that for the admission consultant.
00:20:44
Speaker
Yeah, somewhere in that range, right? Up to about 25%. So it depends on the course. Every course carries a different this thing, but you can, on an average, it's about 25% of the first year fee.
00:20:56
Speaker
okay okay and this would help you to find the content like video you were making videos which how did you scale up making videos because these are colleges spread across the country and we just travel city by city and colleges gave you permissions and all that like you were able to
00:21:15
Speaker
Yeah, because see the end of the day, the colleges are also on the same side of the problem because they also don't want consultants representing them in the wrong way. They also don't, they also want to showcase that this is why we've invested 100 crores, 200 crores in creating such a large campus. This is our placement. This is our faculty, etc. So they also want to be out there and talk about themselves. So we didn't get any, in fact, they were more than welcoming when we went to shoot these videos, talk to students, etc. So that was not a problem at all.
00:21:45
Speaker
And do you have like user generated reviews and rating and stuff like that to help students get a crowdsourced opinion or feedback on the college?
00:21:58
Speaker
Yeah, we have, and there are sections where the students can do that. But what we also witnessed is that you'll have to create an ecosystem which is away from bias, right? And education on a scale is a very different, and let me give you an anecdote on that, right? Why we are not very active in doing this. So we did a study where we tried to find out about information about the college in the, let's say, 200, 500, and they said that aspiration is to go to IMs because they are studying in a smaller college, etc.
00:22:28
Speaker
And we did the same thing and spoke to some of the college students in IAM. This was an independent study. And they said, we are not very happy. We want to go to Stanford. So education is very, you realize very soon in life that this is what sort of where you stand. This is what would be best for you. Unfortunately, the societal pressures
00:22:48
Speaker
create a lot of problems, right? It's not the individual. I always, for example, I realized and a lot of my friends went to do bio and stuff. And my realize I can't do bio. It's not in my, and a lot of my friends wanted to do commerce because they realize science is not their cup of tea. They just can't understand differential equation, but I love that. So it's, so you, as a student, you realize this very quickly. There are tools to make you realize this, but however, the societal pressure, they tend to make a big dent there.
00:23:19
Speaker
Okay, okay. And do you also serve vernacular content?
Unbiased College Information
00:23:24
Speaker
Because if you're targeting tier 2, tier 3, then maybe English would not serve their purpose when they're researching, or because it's video, so you don't need to do vernacular.
00:23:33
Speaker
So there is a lot of written content also. Right now, we are not doing vernacular because again, it's higher education, right? So higher education, you are probably most of the courses are running in English. So you have that kind of issue. So yeah, in primary education vernacular will make more sense, but in higher education, I think you're still limiting ourselves in English.
00:23:52
Speaker
Okay. Do you give a judgment on a college like this rating, this is the college's rating, or do you just present information without judgment? Say like Wikipedia, for example. We just present information without judgment. But the fact that the college, which is right for you, might not be right for me. Again, as I said, someone studying in Theodu College, I am was an aspiration for I am. They said, we are stuck at the wrong place. We need to go to Stanford.
00:24:18
Speaker
So for us to do that, the judgment is very difficult and we don't want to go there. Any sort of judgment, good or bad, will essentially bias the decision, whereas for you, we will essentially present the information, we just tell the students what questions they have and we try and present this in as fair and neutral manner as we can. And the student can then take a call, right?
00:24:39
Speaker
they know what they're getting into. They can see four, five, six choices before they can essentially make that decision.
Improving Student Employability
00:24:45
Speaker
Instead of just one choice, it's just really available to them with a consultant.
00:24:52
Speaker
If you like to hear stories of founders then we have tons of great stories from entrepreneurs who have built billion dollar businesses. Just search for the founder thesis podcast on any audio streaming app like Spotify, Ghana, Apple Podcasts and subscribe to the show.
00:25:13
Speaker
You told me that there were like two, three things which were motivating you to start. One was that process of discovery. Second one is to fix the pipe and improve employability. So how does this fix the pipe? Like it's the college quality of education to improve employability. So first is.
00:25:31
Speaker
You are good at design, so go to a design college. Don't go for engineering. That's the first problem to be solved. The second problem is now you are in a engineering college, or a design college, which is essentially not at the best of the, not in Delhi, let's say, or not in Jaipur, slightly interior. There are lots of students who choose that because of various reasons, personal professors, lots of reasons why they would want to study in a local college and not go outside the city.
00:25:58
Speaker
So we started something called College de Colon, which was essentially a very simple in curriculum subjects, right? So we are not teaching, we are not fancy AI, data sciences, or machine learning. We don't do all of that. We are saying, okay, you're studying in BCom first year. Can we help you with financial accounting? Can we help you with audit courses? Can we help you with taxes, courses with taxes, income tax courses?
00:26:24
Speaker
So that you are able to get the best of the faculty from across the world, across the India, despite you being in a smaller town to learn, right? And again, we are teaching you in curriculum. So unless you, because that's where the foundation is being formed. If I'm not good at plus eight decimals or class fifth decimals, I become very difficult
Learning Initiatives and Support
00:26:43
Speaker
for me to get. So where your professional foundation is being formed is there. And so we have, we've started that college at Kulin.
00:26:50
Speaker
about six months back. Right now we are doing courses like communication skills, income tax, financial management, engineering design, and lots of these host of courses through both passive and active learning. So there is self-paced videos which students can come and watch.
00:27:05
Speaker
free of course. We post a video on YouTube every day where they can just go and take the lecture. And then there is assisted learning where someone will teach them if they want access to that faculty, doubt resolution sessions, etc, etc. Again, very rudimentary, very basic, very first principle. I'm not trying to take a tier 2 student and then try to teach him machine learning. So, unfortunately, whether we like it or not, everyone promotes to a parent that your kid can go to IIT, but that's
00:27:35
Speaker
and that's what people think that maybe if i'm missing something maybe he can maybe as a parent it's not possible it's difficult someone has academically behaved in a certain way throughout his or her life now in class 10th or 11th if you put him to regal he may or may not and it only lead to only send him to a quota or something it only lead to some
00:27:58
Speaker
So we are not making that claim. We are saying that before this kid to be ready to do machine learning, let him understand fundamentals of computing or what is taught in his class because curriculum has been designed in a certain way. Lots of people have put in huge things, the people in the education government have put a lot of mind behind what curriculum should be. It might be lagging the industry, which can be the opinion, but at least it makes your foundation strong and that's where you can go.
00:28:27
Speaker
I think there are a lot of companies chasing that coding education space, but there are not too many who would, for example, be looking at helping a become student. So that space is pretty wide open. I think we are the only ones if I haven't come across anyone yet, but I'm sure there must be. But at this scale, we are the only ones and we are getting, I must tell you, we are getting amazing response. We are even starting, we are teaching 1000 plus students now within a month or so. So we're getting amazing response because we are again,
00:28:55
Speaker
first principle, very basic fundamental need of a student. I helped me first, let me graduate. Okay. First, let me pass with the decent marks and I will go to a AID. So that's second part of the pipe. And part of the pipe is obviously we are now also when we see the student. So it starts with how are we helping students take admission, right? And then we know so much about the student that he's studying in college X in second year,
00:29:21
Speaker
and data structure is a problem so let me teach him data structure or give him online classes or let him come and take it on himself. Second, once I know that this guy knows data structure then I have partnered with some of the coding companies etc where we are saying okay here are students who are essentially now right in their fundamentals and now in finally are looking for jobs so can you either help them with jobs or see if they need more further skilling.
00:29:46
Speaker
That is something that we are not doing. We are just partnering with companies and helping them connect with the student. But that's how I see the problem to get fixed. And if we still think that they need a coding intervention or a skilling intervention, or they can find I would be
00:30:03
Speaker
very happy if we can put the foundation in place and then they can find a job themselves so if i can if we can keep them tally and they can find an accounting job or if we can at least help them make discovery that okay that you can do an MBA or a M.com or stats or you can go abroad but the take is that we want to live with the student around across his journey we want to be in a place where not only the
00:30:28
Speaker
There is realization in the parents' mind that this is a science, not a hunt on where your kid should go or which course you should take. And then also help the kid along the path, wherever he or she faces a challenge. If they think that my physics professor is amazing, I don't want to talk to him. But please study with your physics professor. However, if you think your chemistry professor is not that great, there is college day where you can come and take these three lectures and get your doubts cleared, etc.
00:30:58
Speaker
Similar to that, yeah. I think we'll be very close to a check or what seek does in Australia. Very similar to that. Okay. Okay. And this is like free to use or I'm guessing that there would be like a freemium model. Yeah. It's like a freemium model. So if you just want to understand some concepts, you can just log in and start watching videos. Not a problem. But if you want assisted learning, one-to-one learning, you need, then you have to pay.
00:31:22
Speaker
That's how the one that's like a marketplace money. You are like this is content. Unfortunately, we couldn't find anyone. So we are creating it. We could find a lot of people with this skilling courses, data sciences courses and other tally courses. But when it came to foundation of how students study, we couldn't find anyone. So we are creating a lot of this content on our own.
00:31:43
Speaker
So you would be like finding people, training them, making sure comp skills are in place and then letting them earn through those. So like they are able to earn an interest. What a tutor would earn, generally they can replace that offline tutoring with this. Yeah, typically, see offline tutoring is actually cheaper, right? So typically if a student is studying, let's say
00:32:06
Speaker
Delhi University accounting. That's a big course that happens in Delhi University or economics. There are hundreds of people who teach and study economics and accounting in Delhi University. So they would typically pay about 1000 rupees to 1500 rupees a month and it's a 2-3 month course. So they end up paying 4-5,000. But they teach 20 people in a batch or 15 people in a batch.
00:32:26
Speaker
online, obviously, they make for early, right? So they end up making more money. Sometimes the tune of 1500 to 2500 depends on the complexity of the course, but they can teach for a long period of time and then make that money also. So online, so far from a teacher perspective, I think online is just a boon, right? Because now you don't have to be in Delhi. You don't have to rent that expensive place. Yeah. Yeah.
00:32:49
Speaker
A lot of our teachers come from here to cities where there are great colleges and there are teachers into the Central Teach and make a living which is more than also I think one thing which is very important right is
00:33:01
Speaker
And I'm not trivializing the problem, but I'm saying that concept teaching from class nursery to class 8 or 9 is very different from concept teaching for an engineering student. It becomes very complex, right? So you are talking about higher order mathematics, higher order physics, etc. So the number of people who can actually teach also reduces.
00:33:23
Speaker
Yeah. And as you go more complex, it'll keep reducing because not everyone can teach some of the specialized subjects. So what we need, we do a lot of effort in getting this and standardizing this and the more complex it becomes the better sort of reception it gets from the student for the lack of better work.
00:33:38
Speaker
So engineering drawing, I know when I was in first year, I had a problem. I had a big problem with engineering drawing. So we had to request our professor and he was great guy in engineering drawing. So we had to request, can we come home and you can help us. So this is when we went to the top notch college, right? The amongst the eight category college, it was the top 20 in the country or 15 in the country. And you had amazing professors, huge facility, 400 acre campus.
00:34:03
Speaker
Imagine the same kids doing engineering drawing in a small campus in a mirror. It becomes difficult. Let's say go further away. But really it becomes even more difficult. So that is the problem. That's the problem that I want to solve. The consistency in quality education for higher education. Somehow we happen to stumble upon that problem while everyone is busy on sending kids to IIT. So we are trying to do that.
00:34:26
Speaker
What is the pricing model for the student here? Oh, this is the full course will cost you something like four or five thousand. Very similar to an offline coach. This is mostly, this is all personal hours, up to 20 hours or 30 hours of learning. And you can actually go back, check videos, do assessments, all of that also. But the, see again, I have
00:34:47
Speaker
My take is that I want to reach the Bharat. That's the attempt that we are trying to do. Whether we are successful or not, we'll come to know. But for now, that's what we are trying to do. And even at this, we are able to maintain good profitability. So the fun is when we'll teach 200,000 students at one. That will be the fun. Right now, we're teaching about 1,000.
00:35:07
Speaker
Okay. And so this you will go like subject by subject, degree by degree, state by state. Each state would have a different course, each degree in it would have a different requirement.
00:35:18
Speaker
But it's very, that's another interesting point. So UGC has a model curriculum for almost everything, right? So everything ends up being a subset of that. And frankly, some of these institutes, like smaller institutes, they try and omit courses, then add. So if you teach a model, because let's say, again, all respect to this sort of institute, but let's say if there is a
00:35:37
Speaker
very tough subject. So they'll omit some sort of thing that, okay. So it's actually not very different. So if you take a country across the country, it's the same. It's just that some concept might be taught in first month of the some concept, but it's very
00:35:59
Speaker
Yeah. So that's something that we witnessed that almost 90% overlap in all courses. Yeah. There's a 10% difference, but we have a model to solve that also. When we do one-on-one doubt resolution sessions, et cetera, then some of these problems are taken care of. Yeah. But the idea is go degree by degree, subject by subject. So right now we are catering to engineering and our approach has been, I know it's a bit convoluted, but what we do is we talk to students and say, you don't tell us which you like, which you hate.
00:36:29
Speaker
And this sort of survey of a hundred students and wherever there's an overlap, typically there's a 90% agreement. I hate engineering drawing. So they pick up engineering drawing and then help. So our take is that we want to approach it from a different sort of angle. We're saying that let's solve the problem with the student in terms of where they find the most difficulty. And then obviously you can create a big business on top of it.
00:36:53
Speaker
And this is like an exam-oriented course. The goal is to help them get a decent score. A foundation. Again, exam is a... I know we are obsessed. We are Indian, right? Just their offline tuition is totally exam-oriented. Yeah, so we do exam also, but we do a lot of foundation level assessments also. We put some gamification that if you do this, you cross a path. If you do this, you cross a path. But a lot of foundation
00:37:20
Speaker
because as you grow and I'm for example in engineering we did maths 1 then we did maths 2 then we did maths 3 then we did financial so this all grows on you unless you have clarity of class 12th maths you get so if you don't know how to do in calculus you will never level how to do engineering maths see if you focus on that you understand the foundation and then obviously everything can be built on top of it
00:37:44
Speaker
And you would have a proper LMS with a journey for the student with chapter two, chapter three and assessment of the traditional course. Correct. Unfortunately, nobody builds an LMS. There are so many companies nowadays. So we have an LMS which we partnered with someone again. And we use that LMS with the journey of recorded lectures and all of that.
00:38:08
Speaker
And we are putting up, as of today, we are working with a lot of professors to record a lot of lectures. We are also actively looking for hire, acquire a few companies in this
Core Business Areas and Digital Expansion
00:38:18
Speaker
domain. Unfortunately, we're not finding many, but yeah, but the idea is that we will next few months, there's going to be a lot of focus on this. While our admission business is growing, we did 25,000 admissions on practice, about 50,000. So that business will keep growing. It's a.
00:38:32
Speaker
We are an established player, people know us, call these know us, students know us, etc. But this is the next part of the pipe that we are trying to solve. And I think once we do this, then it's very similar to cheque or a seek in Australia. And what about discovering what is the right course for you? Do you do that psychometric assessment, career counseling, the
00:38:55
Speaker
So we have a free psychometric test for students, which they can take with a small psychometric test, but it will give them an indicator of where they want to be. And plus we have a set of counselors who also help students in some of these discovery questions. And there's a lot of technology automation that we've done.
00:39:14
Speaker
Because it's a complex, again, higher education makes it, people have the habit of making things very complex in higher education. So for example, in Delhi University, every year there's a different cutoff, every year there's six cutoffs, right? And then just an example, if you are a Kashmiri Pandey, then you have an extra credit. If you are a state player of cricket, you have an extra credit. If you're athletics, you have a different way of credit. So what we've done is we've put a lot of these rule engines in our system.
00:39:44
Speaker
where our counselors or students can essentially just go and query the system and get answers. That has been our sort of endeavor for the last four or five years as how do we take this very limited knowledge, very personal knowledge and create a knowledge graph out of it, right? Where some of these questions can keep getting answered themselves because one very important characteristics of our space is that parents keep changing, teachers keep changing, students keep changing, questions don't change, okay? Questions are the same.
00:40:12
Speaker
my kid has 90% should I go to XYZ college. Then the next year the same parent will ask, the different parent will ask the same question. My kid has 92% should I go to XYZ. So what we've done last week is we put a lot of knowledge graph, a lot of these conversations on our databases where some of this can be automatically answered and catered. So like it's self-service for the student, there'd be some sort of wizard which would ask them what did you score and your subjects and
00:40:39
Speaker
It's self-service also and they can call our helpline also and we have people who can help them. A lot of times, again, this is what you've seen in our country, people want to hear a voice, want to have that reassurance, right? So they can just call our counselors and they can help them with the college answer. So we run helplines in COVID. We ran a helpline helping students.
00:41:00
Speaker
with depression cases, et cetera. In around need, IAD exams, 12 exams results, we start these health lines because people feel very depressed. We have a counseling desk which can help student discover, take a psychometric test, et cetera, et cetera. So the idea is that you are talking about a 16, 17 year old and suddenly a lot of pressure has come on his or her head. So how can we just help them ease through that process? This helpline and this counseling, is this a paid feature or is this free?
00:41:32
Speaker
This would lead to admissions. Correct. So it's like top of the funnel expense for you. For students, till now I've been successful in keeping everything free. So hopefully we will keep it free.
00:41:47
Speaker
Except the learn. In learn also, for example, I said there are tons of YouTube videos if you go, if you want to learn fundamentals of computing, taxation, etc. There are lots of videos which you can go and revisit and learn or self-paced and they are free. They're out on YouTube. We don't have to come to our website. But yeah, if you want an assisted learning, then there is this need to pay. Okay. And are you also into recruitment space once they finish their need?
00:42:13
Speaker
No, no, not right now. We have our hands full. We have our hands full. What about the study abroad product? Like you were just starting to talk about that. Yeah, no study abroad. So I think if you look at our company, there are three pillars. One is the domestic business, which is the admissions business and where we help colleges and students with discovery. Then there is this learn, which is getting established, but has already started playing a big role in the company. And the third is the entire study abroad.
00:42:41
Speaker
So study abroad actually was very incidental to us. So we got a lot of students who said, can you give us options going abroad? And till about two, three years back, the cost of education in India was rising, especially the private education and the costings of education abroad was actually coming down. Okay. Or at least very stable. And then there were avenues like Germany opened up education and after Brexit, UK opened up certain things and things were very positive. In fact, Canada became a very big destination.
00:43:09
Speaker
And a lot of students started asking us, can you help us? India needs Anna. We can pay. Can you help us go abroad? So we said, yeah, why not? But we didn't have the skills. So we did a small acquisition in that space. We got the founders to work with us. Which college did you acquire? It was called Scholarship Facilitation Services.
00:43:27
Speaker
Okay. And this is like a digital confusion. This was like a traditional shop, study abroad shop. Our strength was we understood digital. Their strength was they understood the market well. So we came together. I think today, colleges that are there were trying to recruit students from India. That's what they call.
00:43:46
Speaker
you will find them through direct or indirect channels. So it's not necessarily the moat anymore. That I have so many diagonals. It's not the moat anymore. You have likes of Applyboard for Canada, Adventist for Australia, through platforms you can use, or let's say... What are these platforms, Applyboard, Adventist? They are like aggregators. They are like aggregators. So Applyboard is an aggregator for Canada, which means that they work with a lot of Canadian colleges, they have integration and they have...
00:44:16
Speaker
helping a Canadian college streamline their admission process because these guys are used to working with lots of agents in Indian, Southeast Indian market. So lots of agents and people like us use it. So they keep a part of that commission. So our take has always been that even in domestic, we could have set up a business where we could have passed on this data and lead like a classified business to the college and the college would have done this, but we don't sell data. Okay.
00:44:42
Speaker
We don't sell data, we don't put advertising, we try and control the journey of the student because that's how we can control the experience of the student. And that's how we can control this for a longer term, higher LTV because then when we know the student has taken an admission in a particular college with a particular course, then you can essentially go and help him with that course in future.
Study Abroad Sector Challenges
00:45:03
Speaker
But if you just pass it on to someone, so it doesn't make sense. So study abroad also, we started with the same logic that we want to work very closely with the students and control this journey and not work with agents. A lot of people work with agents. So we don't work with any agents. And till two years back, it was essentially doing amazing. We were growing very rapidly, but after COVID, that business has taken a little bit of a bump.
00:45:24
Speaker
What was the peak? Like how many enrollments happened? There were 1000 enrollments that we did. We are back to that number. Now we are, I think, close to doing over 1000 applications a month. But again, from application to final admission funnel in study abroad is very steeply, right? So you have applications and then
00:45:40
Speaker
Only a few people will qualify IELTS and then a few people will get, then finally only a few will get visa. So the drop is failed, but we are doing about 1000 applications and we are still one of the largest in that space. This is a pretty high touch business. So it's a very high touch business. It's a very long sales cycle, about six months. It's from the day that student is interested to the day you get actual, it's almost one and a half year. It is high touch business.
00:46:08
Speaker
The given the find the opportunity is also very large. There is no way the reason that we keep running is because we find the opportunity to be large, right? India is the second largest exporter of students after China, we all of us know, and it's very chaotic, right? A lot of these, so there are two distinct reasons why students would go abroad. One is very immigration focus. I want to go correct from Seattle abroad. So just a lot of people from Telangana, Punjab,
00:46:35
Speaker
you find both people everywhere so you'll find people with for immigration focus people for studying focus but that's it these states have slightly higher immigration focus than education focus so that you have that kind of people and then you have general sort of students want to really go abroad and study so it's still out and
00:46:52
Speaker
That leads to a lot of the smaller local agents who are essentially helping these agents. It's very chaotic because again, they will try and find a route for you to go abroad. The opportunity is to consolidate that chaos at the end of the day and that's where we find it's very similar to domestic business. We are trying to put a lot of automation on top of it so that some of these things become more automated and self-paced than high touch.
00:47:17
Speaker
And that's our aim, right? Otherwise, we don't want to open 10 offices in every city and then behave. That's not our DNA. I'm again not saying that's a good or a bad strategy, but it's not in our DNA. Our DNA is automation, tag, solving the problem through minimal intervention.
00:47:36
Speaker
Yeah, I think it's hard to productify this because of the visa thing. You need to check each person's documents and you need an expert doing that. And you do visa support in-house or you work with an agent? No, we outsource. It's again not something that we are an expert, so we just have a vendor. Whenever we get an admission, we give it to the vendor and they manage it. So it's outsourced. It's better to be outsourced. It's a very document-heavy. Each person has a different way to manage it. So we don't want to go there.
00:48:04
Speaker
And the student pays the vendor directly for that visa. Yeah, the student pays the vendor directly. We've covered Agron, we've covered Nerd, we've covered domestic admissions.
00:48:14
Speaker
Yeah, I think if you look at domestic learn and admissions, there is one horizontal product line that we work on, which is our finance business, where we are helping these kids with financing options. So we are not an NVFC, but we are working with a lot of NVFC aggregating them. And because we have the students, because we know that the student will need loan,
00:48:36
Speaker
for going in india for going abroad or maybe studying some courses so there's a horizontal function that you're building which is around financing helping the students with financing so that's and we i think we started last year we've done about close to work two three thousand something or two thousand five hundred loans till now but it's taking a very fast because again because we are able to control this journey of the student we are able to understand the need etc.
00:49:03
Speaker
What we are working very hard is with some of these NBFC companies to improve their underwriting framework to write, underwrite the real Bharat. It's easy to give loan to someone who's earning from a corporate, but when it comes to a shopkeeper, et cetera, and I think there's great work happening there, right? There are lots of companies who are trying to do that. So we get a lot of students who want to become BA from a Jaipur and then
00:49:26
Speaker
in these parents have shops and how do you underwrite the right education loan for them. So that's the work that we are doing. But I think in this sector, per se, there's amazing amount of work happening. So we just want to write that tight. You know, a lot of lending is the flavor of the season and a lot of investor money flowing into that space and each startup targeting a different space. So I'm sure they would be like education focused lending companies who would be trying to unlock the pie.
00:49:54
Speaker
And what is typically the amount of loan that these people take? So India is 60,000 average. Abroad is very subjective on the country. But India's average semester fee is 60,000. So you take semester by semester loan on an average of about 60,000. So they're essentially like a BNPL. They need to pay 60,000 upfront and then they pay it monthly. Something like a BNPL. Yeah. So we are essentially taking the BNPL concept and took it to education.
00:50:22
Speaker
Got it, got it. Okay. And how do you earn from this? What, if someone is taking a 60,000 loan, what will be your contribution to your bottom line? Very minimal, but our main purpose is actually that this enables us to do more admission. So while in this, in this direct way, we might not earn a lot, but suddenly the distribution increase, it helps in distribution. So the, suddenly the distribution helps us earn more.
00:50:52
Speaker
Yeah, most BNPL costs are bought by the seller because it helps him increase sales. So it's the same thing here. So while we make a little bit of money, but not exciting, but the main part is that because of this, we are able to increase the distribution quite a lot.
Growth Strategies and Acquisitions
00:51:08
Speaker
Got it. So what's your revenue number? What are you expecting to close this year at?
00:51:13
Speaker
So last year the publicly available number is up to about 50 crores. Right now we are trending almost 4x of that. How did you get that 4x increase and especially 50 crores is already a big base. How did you get such a big boost?
00:51:29
Speaker
Okay, let me tell you two things. One, in terms of GMV, right? The value of admission that we will be doing, we did last year, that was 2000 crores, right? Because we just keep a percentage of that and our percentage is only our revenue. Roughly about 1500 crores is what the value of admission. And this year we'll end up doing roughly 3000 crores worth of sales when it comes to admissions.
00:51:54
Speaker
I think the main thing is always right that we just realized that this is a very large market. We were limiting ourselves by own growth, making it bootstrap, not raising capital, et cetera. But then we went out in the market in this capital and that just helped us put more money. And the fact that our businesses also, because we get a lot of these traffic free, sort of word of mouth. So our cost of acquisition was very low.
00:52:19
Speaker
Even today, our business is about 80% gross margin. So we make 80% gross profit on every admission that we do. So the more we could invest, the more we could grow, the healthier the pain will become. And in fact, on this run rate, we are a bit positive. So yeah, so all this capital is going through growth. We have also done a couple of acquisitions. We did one acquisition. We acquired a digital marketing agency. We also acquired this company, which was very similar to ours.
00:52:46
Speaker
called Get My Uni, and they are also a discovery portal. They also run a website called IELTS material. They are amongst, I think, the top five IELTS exam preparation websites in the world. And IELTS is going to feed into a study board, Get My Uni, just consolidation for our domestic business. So between Get My Uni and College Day Go, we have almost 50% organic traffic of all college-going students in India. Last year, we did close to
00:53:13
Speaker
5 million inquiries together and there were 10 million students who go to colleges, right? So between Get My Uni and us, we are already at a very decent pace and all of this keeps our cost of acquisition low. So now Get My Uni will also have common application form and we'll work together while they will keep serving their clients independently because they're more classifieds and we are more transaction, but this sort of coming together just helps us consolidate the market.
00:53:38
Speaker
Yeah, I think we were just, we kept on doing the right thing. Actually, I don't have a magic formula. We kept on doing the right things and it shaped Abhinav. So we were lucky that... How much did you raise? Like when you decided to stop bootstrapping?
00:53:54
Speaker
So till now, we have raised about 40 million in two rounds and the last round was about 33 million which was just about three months back. Till then, other than some seed capital etc, I am not going to count that.
00:54:10
Speaker
But about 4 years in the business when we were rotating at about 50, 60 crores, 100 crores, we didn't raise capital. So we raised that. In December, we raised sort of 32 million. And now from there to this, we've been able to double the growth to almost like 4x or 4.
00:54:28
Speaker
And so these funds are essentially for one is acquisition, second is spending on customer acquisition. Yes, acquisition is a big part of this thing. And I think we are done. We are in talks to do one more. And after that, we'll just consolidate and put the pipe together. That one more that you're requiring.
00:54:49
Speaker
Yeah, some someone who does classes for students in the learning space and we are also getting them for the platform and all of that. So we'll essentially one is for that customer acquisition is not such a big deal for us because students are we are essentially generating more inquiries than what we can actually cater to. We are short on the.
00:55:08
Speaker
But yeah, we want to have more colleges on the platform because that sort of helps us complete the marketplace. So right now the marketplace is only one fifth of the colleges you want to have. So the every student that comes to our platform gets an option. So you want to spend on that and all the money that would be.
00:55:25
Speaker
Yeah, so some creation. Correct. And then this continuous tussle of making the product better and evolving the product and investing in technology and resources like that. So all of that. But the main thing is that we want to put all of this sort of money towards growth because fundamentally the business is at a position where we don't need money for sustenance. We just need to keep pumping the growth. Yeah.
00:55:47
Speaker
Got it, got it. Okay. And you acquired a digital marketing agency that was essentially like for the talent of it or what was it? Yeah, so there was more like an equity hire. So for the talent of it, and also they had some, so there are also some clients who would, who want to help. So this was at that time, very opportunistic, but it worked out very well for us. Around when the COVID first wave happened, if you look at the 53,000 colleges, only about 15,000 colleges have their website.
00:56:15
Speaker
OK, this is that bad. So we saw an opportunity where essentially we can cater to a lot of these colleges by creating the digital presence. And that was a rush at that time, because suddenly there was no other way for them to communicate. And we found this company where we can get the talent and then create that ecosystem.
00:56:32
Speaker
And we can actually target these long-term colleges and create a digital presence. Again, we are focused, very focused on higher education, not this thing. And obviously the talent was great. They could help us optimize our course of acquisition even further. So yeah, that was for, that's what's called Unipro education. And now they're fully integrated. I think the founders are working with us. That's like a services business.
00:56:54
Speaker
That's like a services business. But again, they're very focused on getting the first clients introduced to the system. Yeah. So colleges in our system. And then can we get them to convert into common application form so that we can do transactions, et cetera. It's a very different sort of client. So typically we work with the middle tier today, which is from a hundred, if 60, 50, 60 ranking colleges to about 500, to over 1,000 ranking colleges. And then there's a huge universe of thousand, right? 50,000.
00:57:21
Speaker
where there's a big opportunity to create digital presence to help them with the website etc services business but more leading into our core business that's how we look at these it's a better way than feet on street to acquire knowledge absolutely so i want to discuss some ideas with you based on our conversation
00:57:41
Speaker
Would you look at an offline presence through franchisees? So you said Pajab, a lot of folks want to study abroad and Pajab is one of these small consulting companies who have one room offices where students come in. These could get co-branded as college deco centers where the franchisee could take a share of the revenue and you handle the back end. Like they become a point of acquisition for you and they share the revenue.
00:58:05
Speaker
Yeah, no, my team actually came back with a very similar proposal last year, last week. And as long as we can control the student experience and it's just a student acquisition channel and the high touch point, then why not? But the idea is that the experience has to happen digitally. This is just an experience center in a way. And then franchise is an easy route to go. Yeah, why not? We can look at, we are actually, the team is evaluating something similar.
00:58:35
Speaker
Okay. It's something you are bullish on as a way to expand. Yeah. I think, okay. So as I said, right, out of 10 million students, only about 25,000 to get mission from us. So there is still a big headroom on the digital side before we start experimenting with the idea. But yeah, for study abroad, maybe this is an interesting way to go than completely digital, given the five years, very high touch, et cetera. For domestic, I'm not so sure.
00:59:02
Speaker
Are you looking to acquire offline tutoring companies? I'm sure there might be a tutoring player who's doing tutoring for college students focused on that space who could be an acquisition target.
00:59:19
Speaker
Yes, that we are looking at. Okay, because like you already know digital and they would know content and how to teach, so it would be like a good marriage. Correct, that we are looking at. That's an area where we, again, you know, as I said, the more specialized you get, the difficult it is for you to find features, but yeah, that's something that we are looking at.
00:59:39
Speaker
Got it. And this is just a thought which I have had for a while now. Colleges, when they are reaching out to corporates for getting the students placed, that is a process which is pretty broken. Each college sends a PDF with some pages. And there are photos and profiles of 150 students in that. There could be a product idea here for a college where they can invite recruiters to log on to their
01:00:07
Speaker
recruitment portal of that college and all students can create the profiles on the recruitment portal and offer management process like that whole campus recruitment is a complex workflow which could be productized. Yeah, you are right and there are companies who are essentially trying to do that and I think we will also look at it interestingly once we have released a certain level of maturity in the learning part. However, there's a
01:00:33
Speaker
How do I put it? So there is a big demand supply mismatch there right now. Some companies get. So it's the productization idea is amazing, but unless the pipe is working well, the standalone idea is something that a lot of companies have tried because you'll hear the same opinion. I interviewed 20 people. They are not employable. So unless you are able to.
01:00:54
Speaker
track and trace and track the progress and the sort of knowledge of a student over the period of two, three years. That is when this idea will essentially work well. So yeah, you are right. We have that idea in coming time, but it has to start from where I came from.
Scalable Business Model and Future Projections
01:01:11
Speaker
Would you want to actually
01:01:13
Speaker
colleges. For example, there's this company called Sunstone, which has an asset-light model of offering degrees. They take over the management of the college and run the whole curriculum. Is that something you would look at?
01:01:32
Speaker
I don't find it acid light. But no, I don't think that's acid light. Management of colleges and deploying faculty, etc. is a pretty sort of tedious affair and you can go college by college. I think we are in a very
01:01:48
Speaker
let's say slightly overlapping spaces, but in a way too distinct place. In case of college, they will have to still find new students and then tease them. We are where we already are doing 25,000 admissions. And we know where they're studying, what kind of courses they are doing. So our approach to this is very different. So our distribution for someone who does this model through offline will take years to reach a 25,000 scale. We are sitting at a
01:02:16
Speaker
We are sitting at last year, we did 120,000 applications. This year, we are trending to about 3,000 applications. 300,000, 3,000 applications. Till now, we have serviced about 100,000 students. So I know so much about these students that I don't have to go to the college to know or recruit. I can all just have a communication or a dialogue with them or email or phone call, etc., where we say, okay, are you studying in? I know you are studying in second year law or third year law and family law is a tough subject. Let me help you.
01:02:46
Speaker
So our approach is very different. They will have to go to a college and then acquire students, put marketing dollars, et cetera. For us, we have already done all of that. So we have just now. The other way to look at it is currently you get 25% of first year fees, which is maybe of the total pie you're getting. If it's a four year course, so that like maybe 5% compared to that, there is that 95% extra which you get.
01:03:12
Speaker
Yeah, but then we don't spend, if you look at a college P&L, right, you will seldom come across a college P&L which is profitable. It will be very thinly, very thinly margin. If, then you have to do full, that's why I said it's not asset like, because you need to have faculty, you need to have content, you need to have distribution channels for content, you will need to have placements, you will need to have building management and tons of other stuff. And then obviously the college will take its own share because they're giving you facilities. So,
01:03:38
Speaker
other than that we are saying here is a student we are sending it to you but if he finds any subject difficult we are there to teach him and we are making a 80% loss margin here another zero CAC this second sale is zero CAC and from first year to first semester to sixth semester hopefully he will take at least one course from us not all courses
01:03:59
Speaker
So you have a very longish calculation. It's insane. It goes up to like 18, 20. Is that insane? And that's why the business becomes so profitable. The key is as our sort of admission business grows, everything else feeds through that and we keep going. And that's completely asset. We don't need to teach anyone. We don't need to have faculty. We don't have to go to them. So for that model, we have to go to one college, set it up, then go to next college, set it up, go to third college, set it up. We are here in Gurgaon and we are able to manage like 100,000 students out of here.
01:04:28
Speaker
So definitely more asset lightens and I find more scalable. And currently, I guess 80% of your revenue must be through domestic admissions or maybe 90% 90% 90%. Okay. Okay. And what do you see the mix, the revenue mix by say 2025?
01:04:47
Speaker
Yeah, I think our domestic business will still be the 40 odd percent contributor. I think our learning business should be almost 40% contribution. You don't have to go far. In March itself, learning is about 20% of our business. March 1.
01:05:03
Speaker
So that trajectory is amazing, right? So in March itself, we are about 20% of our revenue is coming from learning. And this over a period and the way it is growing, and obviously the admission business is also growing a hundred percent, but learning is just crazy. And I think by 2025, 40, 40 and give 15 or 20% either on study abroad or on finance and other verticals. So that's how I think this will shape up.
01:05:30
Speaker
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