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Building NextGen Marketeers | Varun Satia @ Kraftshala
188 Plays3 years ago
MBA is the go-to postgraduate degree in India. But there are two major issues students face. On one hand, where a minor chunk gets selected to the top institutes, the irrelevant curriculum fails to prepare students for what lies ahead in corporate life.
In this edition of Founder Thesis, Akshay Datt speaks with Varun Satia, Founder and CEO of Kraftshala, India's largest online learning platform for marketing and sales.
Varun is an alumnus of FMS, Delhi and has worked at Nestle before starting his entrepreneurial journey. He started Kraftshala as a project in 2016 to help students understand what real-world sales and marketing look like. And today Kraftshala has collaborated with numerous sales and marketing professionals and students from top B-Schools in the country and has helped them to build careers in this field.
Tune in to this episode to hear Varun speak about how Kraftshala is challenging the traditional higher education ecosystem in India.
What you must not miss!
- Varun’s experience of working as a brand manager
- The Kraftshala model of learning
- The road for the future
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to Founder Thesis Podcast
00:00:10
Speaker
Hi, I'm Akshay Hi, this is Aurabh 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
Is MBA Education Outdated?
00:00:28
Speaker
The whole business of MBA education is ripe for disruption. On the one hand, there is a problem of access. Maybe 10% of MBA aspirants in any given year actually land up in good quality institutes where the education is worth what they are spending.
00:00:49
Speaker
On the other hand, there is a problem of relevance. An MBA education does not exactly make you ready to hit the ground running.
Kraftshala: Revolutionizing Marketing Education
00:00:58
Speaker
A lot of stuff which you learn even in a top-tier MBA Institute is quite academic and not something which will help you in your day-to-day job. And this is the market opportunity that Kraft Shala is chasing.
00:01:14
Speaker
Craftshala is a startup operating in the space of marketing education. They prepare kids to build careers in the space of marketing, and they're disrupting this market in two ways. On the one hand, their courses are extremely industry-oriented, hands-on, and which makes the student ready to hit the ground running.
00:01:37
Speaker
And on the other hand, their success is aligned with the student success because they only get paid once the student gets a job and their payout is based on the salary which the student gets.
Limitations of Traditional MBA Programs
00:01:49
Speaker
So here's Varun Satya, the founder of this extremely innovative company called Craftshala, talking about how his journey began.
00:01:57
Speaker
I used to think that the reason you should do an MBA is to learn business. In reality, I found out that MBA doesn't teach you much about business. There are a few things that you pick up which are useful for short, but it's more about training you to work in large organization. That's the purpose of an MBA, right? You go to an MBA, large organizations become interested in you and they train you to sort of succeed in those organizations. You learn to work with people basically.
00:02:22
Speaker
You learn to work with people and only in the large company context.
Corporate vs. Startup Culture
00:02:28
Speaker
I'll give you an example of it. The thing is that one of the first things I learned at FMS was no matter what happens, if you're supposed to present at 9am in the morning, you better get your deck ready. You better make sure that deck looks decent.
00:02:43
Speaker
It should sound smart even if it is completely full of shit. That was what I learned in business school day in and day out from the first week. Yeah, absolutely. In my life, if I do that, that only works in the corporate environment. If I bring that to a startup environment, for example, I am doing a lot of big disservice because if it is full of shit, it better come out as full of shit. And there's nothing wrong in that, you know, like most of you know, I often tell my team that, you know, you know,
00:03:11
Speaker
four out of five ideas I give them are terrible and it's their job to figure out which is the, you know, which is the actually useful idea amongst all the terrible ones that I'm giving it. But the reality is that, you know, like a lot of things you say aren't full of, you know, they're not accurate versions and, but they're, they're a process. You start someplace and then you get better at, but some, but if you dress it up too nicely, then people don't realize and they have to spend time and effort in decoding it and undressing a bad idea, which, which is,
Unlearning Corporate Habits for Startups
00:03:40
Speaker
Which is not a great thing to sort of do. So it does teach you how to succeed in from a large organization context. And that really works well for a large number of people. But also other people who have to go ahead and work in smaller companies, they have to sort of, you know, unlearn some of these things. If you're not ready, then you're not ready. Of course, it would have been much better if you were ready.
00:04:05
Speaker
You just sometimes have to go to a meeting and say whatever I have doesn't seem to make any sense, right? And then start from there. If you like to hear stories of founders, then we have tons of great stories from entrepreneurs who have built billion dollar businesses.
Varun's Journey at Nestle
00:04:22
Speaker
Just search for the founder thesis podcast on any audio streaming app like Spotify, Ghana, Apple Podcasts and subscribe to the show.
00:04:35
Speaker
Nice, okay. So from FMS, where did you go? Like you got placed through campus?
00:04:43
Speaker
Yeah, so I got placed at Nestle. And then I went to work there in sales and marketing. I started in the marketing team at KitKat, spent a few months there. So why did you choose sales or marketing as a specialization? Typically, engineers tend to not go into marketing, but they are going to finance or operations or IT.
00:05:08
Speaker
Yeah, so basically I was a method of elimination. So finance didn't interest me because money without context didn't interest me. You know, money as something to do with that money is helpful. But money as a business never interested me. IT was not something that was interesting at that point. Consulting was interesting partially, but I think marketing was a little more interesting because a little more people forward.
00:05:38
Speaker
enjoyed that aspect of it. And to do marketing from an, I mean, most MBA guys get placed in sales and then they go into marketing. So that was the path there. So it was a little bit of a deduction piece that this one may seems to make the most sense because it's much more people. I might've considered actually HR. I'm glad I didn't, but because I would have been also people forward, but at that point in my campus, not enough people were interested in HR. So they didn't offer an HR specialization. So you, so that was, that was it. So what was the next list in click?
00:06:09
Speaker
So I worked largely in marketing. I just did a few months of sales. I worked on
Role of a Brand Manager in FMCG
00:06:15
Speaker
KitKat, worked on Maggi sources, and then went ahead and worked on Maggi Noodles. Like a brand manager. Like a brand manager, exactly. What exactly does a brand manager do in a large corporate? Help me understand the role of a brand manager.
00:06:32
Speaker
Great, so in a company like Nestle, which is a fast, smooth consumer, good FMCG company, the role of the brand manager is essentially the role of a business manager in that you're responsible for the entire business. In addition to that, you are solely responsible for marketing, whereas other parts of business, you coordinate with other stakeholders.
00:06:56
Speaker
The reason that the marketing team is at the center of it is because product differentiation is not high in FMCG. So if you look at a packet of biscuits, it's not hard to manufacture. Anyone else can also manufacture it. The hard part is actually getting people to prefer yours over other people, especially if you can get them to pay a little bit more for your product. So that's really where the magic is. That happens in marketing as a job of marketing. And because brand matters so much, therefore then every
00:07:24
Speaker
Everything else gets determined by brand. So which products to launch in, what pricing to hit, you know, like what, and so on, so forth. So you sit there and you coordinate with sales, you coordinate with supply chain and R&D and so on, so forth. And you also set the strategy of the business. So, you know, every August, September, we would present to our CEO what it is that we wanted to do for the business in the coming year, and sometimes for the next few years as well.
00:07:52
Speaker
So that's the role of the brand team. And obviously marketing is a subset of that. You'd work on that. Not so much on the creative aspects of marketing. So as a brand manager for Maggie Noodles, I did not create ads. I did not go to Amitavachand. I sat there and I thought about what is going to push the needle in terms of people consuming more Maggie noodles.
Competing in the Sauces Market: Maggi vs Ching's
00:08:12
Speaker
And then I would work with the relevant partners who would then come up with creative ideas. And if you tell this kind of a story, then it might make sense and so on and so forth.
00:08:22
Speaker
for. So essentially, as a brand manager, you are responsible for decisions around where to spend the marketing budget, what, what should be the product pipeline like in the coming years, what new variants to launch, what should be the packaging, like what should be the pricing, like stuff like that, basically, essentially, it's about optimizing these decisions. Absolutely. That's the right way. Got it. Okay.
00:08:46
Speaker
And it sounds like a lot of fun. Managing Maggie as a brand must have been a good sense of achievement.
00:08:58
Speaker
Yes, it was. It was also was true that I was the junior most member in a team.
Trade-Driven Strategies in FMCG
00:09:05
Speaker
So, so I, in fact, you know, Maggie sources was, you know, at that point, Maggie sources used to be the largest source brand in India. But, but not a lot of people paid attention to it, even within Nestle, right? Because there was Maggie noodles next door. So, so you could do a lot more things. And, you know, I could get away with a lot more things without anyone really noticing. And like what?
00:09:26
Speaker
Give me some examples of stuff. You know, like, I mean, for example, you know, you wanted to, so, so sources was a very trade driven product. What that means essentially is there isn't a high preference that the consumer has between multiple brands. So our biggest competitor was Fisan.
00:09:47
Speaker
And people were okay, you buy a chisan, you buy magi, it's fine. You know, like the hot and sweet was a subvident which had a lot of loyalty, but outside of that, right? So in that sense, you know, like a lot of it came down to trade and you never have enough money to spend in trade. You always
From Nestle to Entrepreneurship: Varun's Transition
00:10:03
Speaker
have competitors who are spending a lot more, right?
00:10:05
Speaker
But we could do a lot of things in strategic areas. You'd go to one account, or you'd go to one geography. You'd sit them down. For example, demand. Demand was an incredible business. Still is an incredible business. It's just amazing how they succeed. You go to that office, you would not think that they're going to succeed. It looks like a Sartari office. And the people who work there seem to have very traditional ideas, and so on and so forth. But foundationally, they understand how retail is supposed to happen.
00:10:31
Speaker
It's one of the best things I learned about business, that what looks from the outside as fancy business is generally not a good description of what is going to work in. So you would walk with people and you would try out these little ideas, like, all right, let's give you a little bit more here. But is there a way that you could get us a little more visibility, a little bit more over our competitor, and so on and so forth?
00:10:56
Speaker
And you had these interesting insights that, for example, one of the great insights that we had is that when someone goes to a store, typically they assume that the best, the promotional offer that is best displayed is usually the best offer.
00:11:15
Speaker
right that you just assume that so you didn't really have to give the best offer you just had to make it the most visible offer right so therefore if you spend your money creatively you can you can get that thing right and then you sometimes incentivize their own uh you know their own sort of merchandisers to do really well with us and so on so forth so it was it was in the gray area a little bit and i had a lot of fun with it because
00:11:40
Speaker
These were the kinds of things that were not easy to decode and easy to execute and we had very limited monies. I couldn't advertise on TV at that point for a large period of time. So this was it. So maintaining market share at that point was an absolute win because our closest competitor was spending 10 times
00:12:00
Speaker
on TV. So we were like, okay, this year, make sure we don't lose share. So it was literally, you know, like that battle, state by state, okay, we're gonna lose one state, but can we protect Gujarat and Maharashtra? You know, can we go and do something around Ramzan that would be interesting? Can we, you know, hit Durga, Gujarat in a special way? So it was like a
00:12:20
Speaker
it was a battle within a battle. And even within Nestle, the sales team wouldn't put a lot of effort in traditionally, but we had these set of things that were happening in which would get them in their view. So sales team would really spend their time with wholesalers and so on and so forth to make sure that our products. So we sort of changed the direction of the business a little bit. Nestle is great at consumer driven businesses, you know, Maggi, Kripkat, Nescafe, large brands, everyone knows them.
00:12:48
Speaker
Maggie's house is, you know, hard and sweet, but you don't know the classical tomato ketchup all that much. So it wasn't a business that traditionally we were very good at succeeding at. So it was almost as if you were sort of laying down a playbook differently. And a lot of that work was, to be honest, done by my manager and the guy who worked previously in me. So when I got that business in, they had already set it on that path. And my job was to make sure that I learned that playbook and applied in
Founding of Craftshala and Its Educational Approach
00:13:13
Speaker
an interesting fashion.
00:13:14
Speaker
And that playbook worked like a charm for it was a short term playbook, because we knew that at some point, if you don't invest behind brand, it's gonna, you know, it's gonna tank at some point, but you had to do it at that point, because that was not the year to to invest for us. So that was fun. I go to Maggie noodles, you know, suddenly the budgets become like 100x of what they were. But the problems are 1000x.
00:13:37
Speaker
So 100X doesn't really cut it. Now you can't do these things because eventually you need to find a way to get people to consume more Maggie noodles and the different challenges in different areas that it was a competitor coming up who was also doing quite well.
00:13:52
Speaker
The ITC was doing well. So in that sense, you know, like, and you were the junior most person in the team, which means that, you know, the CEOs number delivery, depending on your one SKU, you know, like 25% of the businesses that so you go and say, I want to do X, they are not going to buy that very easily. So it was very hard to sort of move things that in that sense, as opposed to the other, you know, business, which was easier to sort of move the needle on.
00:14:23
Speaker
So is that what kind of made you want to move out? Like, what made you want to, like, move out?
00:14:31
Speaker
I think that was definitely a big part of it. I think that when you work in a large company and work on their largest brand, that's kind of the pinnacle. And so it's supposed to be the best work there is, except that I found that I found the work I was doing on sources a little more interesting. And that sort of started triggering in thoughts that there's something else I want to be doing it.
00:14:56
Speaker
And the entrepreneurship dream was always there. So I wanted to drill the startup and all of that. So it was just like that there were a confluence of factors which were there. I discovered an idea that I thought was good enough to be working on. And I started working on it.
00:15:17
Speaker
Um, and I think that the one thing which, which sort of didn't exact, I, you know, I didn't exactly work in my favor was that I had gone a little more confident in my diamond Nestle, like four years, you know, different numbers, getting your, your stuff done. There was a little bit of complacency, which was there. So when I started my first company, it was a company in education. It was not craft shawl. I was something else that I was building in. What was the idea that you were working on?
00:15:45
Speaker
So I was building a smart marketplace for courses. And it was, I mean, simply because it was another way for people to discover, create courses in the competitive exam space. So this is 2015. This is pre an Academy and all of that. And these, these were like online courses or offline courses, online courses. And, and in fact, there was a company called imbibe. This is still quite big. That was doing excellent work in that space working on
00:16:12
Speaker
So it was sort of, it was in the similar space, you know, using data to help people figure out where they're weak at, then figure out what the best courses for them are and then get them working on it. And the reason I picked up, you know, the competitive exam space was because it was the largest space in education.
00:16:28
Speaker
And that's what MPA teaches you. You go after the largest opportunity, assuming that everything else is equal, but everything else is not equal. That's the reality of it. When I started working on that product, I had to interview consumers. Consumers were 11th class students and 12th class students. And I went back to my own time and the misery I had going through these IIT coaching classes. And the product didn't resonate with me at all. It's just that I didn't feel any joy working on that product at all.
00:16:58
Speaker
And so the first time the product sort of started and we launched a pilot, the first time sort of struggling and I was doing that business alone, I was quite happy to
Project-Based Learning at Craftshala
00:17:07
Speaker
shut it down. I mean, happy is perhaps an exaggeration, but I was quite relieved that I was shutting it down because it didn't give me any joy working on it and starting a company alone in particular, I think is quite stressful. And you know, so I went through, you know, I went through a phase where I just sort of sat at home and
00:17:28
Speaker
didn't think about the future at all because I thought this was some must have been late 20s 28 29 something like that and you know at that point Netflix was not in India otherwise I would definitely visited Netflix sort of you can spend your day on YouTube for weeks apparently even at that point so
00:17:54
Speaker
And you know, staying with your parents, they must have been like, really, like, making you feel guilty, sitting at home, having quit a job at Nestle. Yes. So, you know, every, I think that everyone in life is blessed with certain things. I'm, I'm blessed.
00:18:12
Speaker
my Super Bowl is my parents. I'm blessed with an amazingly understanding set of parents. The first time I came up with the idea that didn't work out, I thought my father was going to say no, and recommend that I stick with it, and so on and so forth. And I presented the idea to him, and I had a million objections planned for me to handle it. And he was like, oh, it sounds like a good idea. And I was so awestruck. I was like, oh, now I have to launch it.
00:18:40
Speaker
I didn't think that it would be here. I thought this was going to take weeks for me to sort of know it. But, you know, like they were, they were fine with it. Like, I mean, then they knew that that I figured my way around it. So, so they were fine with it. And I took some time. And I think eventually I figured out that all the things I wanted to learn, all the things I wanted to do when they would happen if I stayed on that path.
00:19:03
Speaker
And the reason I'm mentioning this is because that was around the time that, you know, one of my former managers came, you know, I met him and he said, you know, why don't you come back? The old role at Maggie is sort of available. And I asked him, oh, what happened to that really smart girl who had, you know, who had taken over from me? And he was like, oh, she's, she's quit to start her own company. So, so the role is available.
00:19:31
Speaker
And so that temptation was there. But I thought that let me just keep going on the path that I'm in. There's a lot that I've yet to learn. And I probably won't learn it back in a large corporate career. Of course, I went to FMS. So I think that's another big advantage.
00:19:46
Speaker
didn't really pay for my MBA. Most people have to spend 20-30 lakh rupees to do it. I got very lucky in that I didn't have to spend that money. So in that sense, I lost money in the first venture, but it wasn't the kind that would sort of push me off. And I was smart enough to not invest in property, even though there's a lot of good advice that I was getting from my family. No, you should be buying this particular plot and so on and so forth.
00:20:16
Speaker
So that sort of allowed me to sort of have a little bit of money left in the bank to start another company, little bit of enthusiasm left as well. But one of the great things I sort of figured in is that
00:20:30
Speaker
that when you're starting a company initially, starting any project initially, there are going to be days, multiple days where it doesn't seem to have any way that it's going to work in. And at that moment of time, there are some people who are blessed with incredible confidence that they can just shrug it off and say, no, it will work out. Most people actually struggle to see that piece.
00:20:56
Speaker
And then you need something to keep you going. Sometimes it's a co-founder or a friend or something like that, who's seeing the light that you can't at that moment of time.
Scaling Challenges for Craftshala
00:21:05
Speaker
In my case, I think it was the fact that what I was doing, I think I enjoyed it. So when I started Craftshala, I was teaching students, unlike the first venture where I was just sort of doing the online piece. And there would be days when I would be teaching. So you were sitting at home doing nothing, watching YouTube. How did that lead to Craftshala?
00:21:26
Speaker
One of the things that people who don't realize is that the education that you get even in the best institutes in India
00:21:42
Speaker
with some exceptions is pretty average, it's sub-optimal, right? And that's not to say that the students aren't smart, the students are really smart and you know like some of the faculty members are inspirational and so on so forth. But if I look at it as a general
00:21:58
Speaker
as an average of it. The learning isn't great and a lot of the best professors are actually quite old because they got into the system a lot early. So in that sense, like me, most people learn their craft at work. They don't really learn their craft sitting in an MBA campus and so on and so forth.
00:22:19
Speaker
And that's not necessarily the case. I mean, it's not as if globally all MB institutions are of that kind. It's just an Indian phenomenon where people who are teaching are those who generally don't have any great real world experience. And those who do have great real world experience themselves are not
00:22:36
Speaker
center of the institution. They're at the periphery. So in that sense, it's a culture that just perpetuates. People from the outside don't notice it because the placement salaries keep rising up. Right now, all the MPI institutes have released summer placement salaries of 2 lakhs and 3 lakhs and so on and so forth. It seems as if everything is fine. Why would anyone pay summer internship stipends of 2 lakh rupees unless
00:23:05
Speaker
you know something great has been taught in there but it's not really that right i mean it's just that companies don't have a lot of choice they need to hire smart people you get smart people in there they have to compete amongst each other doesn't mean that what those students have been taught is in any way you know magical or or something that sort of justifies that kind of thing
00:23:23
Speaker
So, in that sense, I started Craftshala largely as a project and as a way for people to learn real-world marketing and sales so that A, they'd be better prepared once they join the organization, B, they would know what real-world marketing and sales is, right? I mean, most people don't know what a brand manager does in a very meaningful way.
00:23:45
Speaker
And if you're starting, if you're choosing a career in marketing or sales, then you should know what it is and should be able to have a reasonable shot at cracking some of the best companies. And this was for college kids or working professionals? Yes, I started for the programs of business school students.
00:24:05
Speaker
So, you know, like the first program that we launched in was for 12 campuses only. There was the six IMs and ISB, FMS, SPG, MDI, IFP, etc. So we started it in a space that we understood where we knew that what students are really looking for. I knew a little bit of marketing at that point and Eshoo knew some of it.
Pay-After-Placement Model: A Game Changer?
00:24:32
Speaker
Eshoo was my co-founder, is my co-founder.
00:24:34
Speaker
So, both of us together had some marketing knowledge, but absolutely no experience in training. So, what we thought was let's not pick too many difficult problems in at the start. Let's just teach what we know and learn how to teach in the first degree. So, we started a program in brand building and we built it on a very simple idea that people are not going to learn marketing
00:24:57
Speaker
by listening to me or anyone else, they're going to learn marketing by doing marketing and ideally doing it other than the guidance of practitioners. So the way we designed that program was that there'll be a project, the project would be at the heart of it, right? So instead of like, let's say you want to teach someone podcasting, you can learn a post for them, or you can say yours, your first product.
00:25:18
Speaker
And now once you're building it, let me teach you a few things. So that learning process is much faster and the practitioner really brings in a lot more value. So that's the construct that we created it on. And yeah, the first course, it was basically me and some friends and friends of friends who were sort of teaching marketing. A lot of people did incredibly generous things for us to be able to build that.
00:25:47
Speaker
like a part of the curriculum like you convince the college that let me run this course on campus or was it like a off-campus thing like
00:25:56
Speaker
So we partnered with companies and specifically, you know, Nestle was one company which I'd already worked in and they were the first partners and companies like that. And what we said was that it would help you to sort of build your brand with these students in. So you would be a brand building exercise.
00:26:20
Speaker
And we would also be able, because we're training these students, we'll be able to assess these students, which means that we'll be able to give you good insights on which candidates you really should be looking at. So in that sense, we partnered with the companies and then we offered it straight to the students. So we didn't sort of collab with the universities. That's usually how educational companies die, right? Because they wait for institutions to respond and that will not, that won't really happen.
00:26:44
Speaker
And that also brought us a lot of credibility because Kraftshala was unknown, but the companies that we partnered with were quite known. These campuses which you're talking about are all in different cities now. So how did you run it?
00:27:00
Speaker
Yeah, so the course was online, but we had to visit the campus to launch them. So a typical launch cycle for me in those 12 campuses was, I mean, I'll describe it. I mean, we started shooting for the program. The first program was recorded videos largely. We didn't do a lot of live sessions.
00:27:20
Speaker
So we started recording in in November and early December. And then that finished up by Jan, January I started sort of visiting the campuses and we hadn't edited the course. So January we started visiting the campuses and the issue used to manage the launches from from here. And and then essentially you give a talk on a campus and tell them why they should do that course. Because I think what happens is that
00:27:48
Speaker
the first time we launched it, students didn't realize why they should be sort of participating in the program, right? You're already sitting in FMS, you're in IMM the bar. Yeah, you're learning marketing as part of your course. Course, so what exactly value add can you bring in that we're not getting in here? And we didn't want to tell them that, so we thought we're just going to show it to you. So what we're going to do is I'm going to do a free workshop for you sitting in your campus and I'm going to teach you things that
00:28:16
Speaker
that are interesting. And if you want to learn more of that, that's when you go ahead and apply to the program. But the other thing we did was we restricted the number of people. So we didn't say that we're going to pick in like 50. We said we're going to pick in five. That's it. So from these 10, 12 campuses, we'd pick in 54 students.
00:28:33
Speaker
That's about it. So, so that's how we sort of launched it. And we had a, we had a terrible time editing the program and all. I mean, recording is nothing. Editing will take in a week. It took us like eight weeks. Like literally every time people were finishing up their modules, we were not done with our editing. And it was just, it was just a mess, but we survived it.
00:29:03
Speaker
But why didn't you do live classes? Why didn't you choose video like recorded video?
00:29:11
Speaker
Yeah, I think that in business schools, because the calendars are so tight, it's impossible to run a live session for 12 campuses. True. True. True. True. True. True. True. True. True. True. True. True. True. True. True. True. True. True. True. True. True. True. True. True. True. True. True. True. True. True. True. True. True. True. True. True. True. True. True. True. True. True. True. True. True. True. True. True. True. True. True. True. True. True. True. True. True. True. True. True. True. True. True. True. True. True. True. True. True. True. True. True. True. True. True. True. True. True. True. True. True. True. True. True. True. True. True. True. True. True. True. True. True. True. True. True. True. True.
00:29:34
Speaker
So first time we launched it, the program was about eight and a half thousand rupees. So the first course was ironically our cheapest course ever, I think. It was eight and a half thousand rupees. But eight and a half thousand is pretty good for like a recorded course.
00:29:57
Speaker
Yeah, because it also had projects, it had interviews, it had a little bit of coaching, and so on and so forth. And what we were teaching, we wouldn't be able to find it elsewhere. Most marketing cases are global in nature. So if someone would ask you, how did Maruti become a brand in India, you would find cases of 80s and 90s. You'll not find something that was happening in 2015, for example.
00:30:22
Speaker
In that sense, what we were building was fresh off the shelf and people had a shot at getting hired in good companies. So what would happen is that people were doing well in these courses. We would capture them. We would share their names with all of our collaborating companies. And so that would mean that some of them could get a direct offer on the back of the program and so on and so forth.
Craftshala's Course Offerings and Focus Areas
00:30:50
Speaker
So eventually, the pricing of the program got corrected pretty quickly. So today, for example, that program that we launched in for 8,500 rupees is 21,000 rupees, that program. But it's still quite cheap compared to every other program that we run in. So how did this scale up then? So you did one program and you earned maybe a lakh and a half or so from it. What did you decide to do next then?
00:31:18
Speaker
Yeah, so the way we looked at the business at that point was that we will start building programs of business schools, we'll expand it to more business schools, then we'll go to working professionals and we'll build relevant programs there, and then we'll take it from there. So that was the strat.
00:31:37
Speaker
If I remove the obvious ups and downs that happen in, largely that strat seemed to work well for a little bit of time. So when we went to 50 campuses, the programs worked well, the numbers worked well, and so on. What did you launch next? We are marketing. Yeah. So we focused on marketing and sales only. So we launched a program in digital and launched a program in sales. And we just sort of stayed in that territory.
00:32:06
Speaker
Did people buy sales training? I mean you know, NIS is a case study of the fact that nobody wants to pay for sales training.
00:32:16
Speaker
Yeah, so we were able to sell that sales course. We have never launched a sales course after that. That's the reality of it, because most people don't consider investing in getting into a great sales program. The way they think about it is that sales is something to get out of. Very few people actually want to build a career in sales, which is quite ironic, because in reality, while sales is hard, it's actually not
00:32:47
Speaker
It's the kind of career that actually works for a large number of people because it pays well, it gives you a lot of freedom and so on and so forth. It's fairly recession proof. It's fairly recession proof, right? So in Google, for example, the people who are paid the most are the techies and the sales guys. It's not the marketing guys who are paid any money because it's a valuable skill. And it's also something which forces you to be
00:33:15
Speaker
Because it's hard, it forces you to dig deep within. And when you dig deep within, it's not as if you're just improving a professional career, you're also improving a personal career. So one of the things you learn in sales is conflict management. And the best way to solve a conflict is to never get into one. Now, if you learn conflict management,
00:33:32
Speaker
You're going to apply it to your personal life, right? You're with your spouse or your partner. You will see when things are going to go off. You're not going to wait for a bad day. You're going to intervene right then, right? So actually, in reality, sales is a fantastic career to pursue for many people, not for everyone, of course, but for many people, it's an amazing career.
Craftshala's Growth and Campus Expansion
00:33:51
Speaker
But like you said, very few people want to offer it. But the other piece is that in MBA, a lot of people are also realistic, thankfully. So they know that the career that they were going to have after MBA is going to be sales and not marketing.
00:34:01
Speaker
So that realism also seeps in and so that audience was there for a sales course.
00:34:09
Speaker
And like, so this is more about 2015. You must have done your first course. No, 17. So yeah. Yeah. So 15 and early 16 was the first mentioned in workout 16. You know, like I spent it in sort of discovery. So 16, I was doing the project. I was, uh, uh, I was doing the craft Shala sort of sessions, not as a business, but just as, uh, you know, as, as going to different campuses, I think faculty.
00:34:37
Speaker
That's a reasonable way to put it. Although there would be little workshops, right? Because I was also part of the placement team at FMS when I was a student. So there was a lot of insights that I could share from that point of view as well. So more like a visiting senior.
00:34:54
Speaker
Like my insights, I think, were a little more in that space than a typical faculty member. But each one, I started building the program towards the end of 2016. And how did you meet issue?
00:35:08
Speaker
So I met him through a common friend. I sort of reached out with the Kaafchala idea to a few people and I was asking them who's interested in marketing, you know, would like to sort of do this and one of our common friends from Nestle had sort of connected in. So Eshoo was four years my junior from FMS and he had
00:35:32
Speaker
he had worked at Unilever and for a year and at that point he was looking for something interesting to sort of figure in as well. Okay, so like tell me the like the growth trajectory from 17 onwards like you know so you went from these tier one eight campuses to 50 campuses you launched two other courses and what kind of
00:35:56
Speaker
admissions were you doing or you know what kind of revenue were you making and how did that move from 17 to 18 18 to 19
00:36:04
Speaker
Yeah, so I think, like I said, the strat worked like a charm in the first 50 campuses. So in the year 18 to 19, we had done about 1.3 crore revenue. And this was largely through these courses that I had mentioned in where we were rejecting a lot of applications. We were only available in 50 campuses and so on and so forth.
00:36:31
Speaker
And the goal for 1920 was to expand it to more campuses, maybe pick on more students, launch a working professional program, and so on and so forth. And to enable us to do that, we also raised a small amount of money from a couple of angels to help facilitate that piece.
00:36:53
Speaker
that inflection point is where things started to go wrong for us because one of the things like after you raised the funds after immediately after right and the thing was that while I didn't sort of realize it at that point I think the pressure
00:37:08
Speaker
to grow quickly that was there. That should be there, by the way. Speed is an essential component of business.
Targeting Working Professionals: Strategic Pivot
00:37:18
Speaker
But the way it got constructed was, let's do multiple things and let's try and get those projects going in so that even if one project fails in, the other would take off and it would give you that cushion and so therefore things would walk out.
00:37:33
Speaker
But when you have money to burn, you don't look at it things the way that you should. When we were building it for the first time, if I didn't get it right, I would be out of business in long time. So in that sense, you would agonize over a lot of things and so on and so forth. Here in the attempt to go to speed, there wasn't enough
00:37:51
Speaker
there wasn't enough scrutiny over some of the others. So we started doing multiple things in order to grow beyond these campuses and get in more students, launch in more programs and so on and so forth. And that strategy started to falter pretty quickly. So what the products that we were building in, they were not working out. When we went in and- Like you were not getting enrollments?
00:38:13
Speaker
So we were not getting enrollments. Where we were getting enrollments, we were not getting nearly enough. We built a consumer product beyond online program. We had this app where people could go in and learn marketing on the go and so on and so forth, which is a free thing. And it was meant to encourage more people to come in. That wasn't taking off well.
00:38:39
Speaker
And when we were going to more campuses, we weren't being able to go the same way. Because what happens in India is that there are 50, 60 campuses where there is something that happens in an MBA school. Beyond that, it's a dire situation. There are 5,000 business schools in this country.
00:39:04
Speaker
out of those 50 or 60 business schools the rest are good enough to help you from an arranged marriage prospect not so much from a career prospect you know like there's something else that happens in those campuses that has very little to do with helping your career so in that sense our programs were not that in-depth right we could teach you something in you know in an online program but we couldn't we couldn't replace the MBA right we were a short
00:39:28
Speaker
Like you could polish up somebody who's already good, but you couldn't help somebody who's basically. Yeah. Yeah. And foundationally, you know, like I can't, we want teaching Excel. We want teaching basic communication and so on and so forth.
00:39:43
Speaker
We weren't bringing companies to campuses. So, if the right companies are not coming in, the students are not motivated, they don't have seniors to help them and so on and so forth. So, it was a different environment out there and we saw that our programs had basically no relevance there. So, we didn't stop at 50-60. We were forced to stop at 50 or 60 because there was really no, you know, there was nothing for us to really go there.
00:40:07
Speaker
By the end of 2019, we had to sort of take a hard look at where we were at. And we essentially went back to the core and we said, look, I know we want to grow at speed, but the way to grow at speed is not by doing these multiple things that we were doing here. The way to grow at speed is to have one hypothesis and make sure that hypothesis is right. And then you execute very, very quickly on that hypothesis. So our hypothesis was that
00:40:36
Speaker
at that point, end of 2019, was that the business school program, business that we built in, this was it. We were not going to grow beyond a point. Now we could do 20% every year, but that's still a very small business. Imagine a one crore business doing 20% every year is nothing, right? So we're trying to hit a 100 crore revenue. It's not going to happen with that. So we needed to build a program for the other audiences, which we had in mind at the start, we needed to accelerate that process.
Introduction to the Marketing Launchpad
00:41:04
Speaker
So at that point, we launched the working professional programs, but we also started building something called the Marketing Launchpad, which is today called the Marketing Launchpad. And the Marketing Launchpad essentially was this program which would solve for the issues that we saw in these campuses beyond the 60 campuses, where we said,
00:41:25
Speaker
Okay, we need you to train foundationally, we'll train you foundationally. But for us to do that, you need to train full time with us. We couldn't train you, you know, eight hours a week. We had to spend, you know, like 50 hours a week with you, which is basically, you know, everyday 10 a.m. to 8 p.m.
00:41:42
Speaker
And we will teach you everything that you need to do in order to build your marketing career. And that is the program that we started building towards the end of 2019. So this would be like an online certification with a placement at the end of it, like an alternative to doing an MBA.
00:42:02
Speaker
Yeah. So it started as an, it started, it is absolutely that, but it's not necessarily an alternative MBA. So for example, some of our students from the marketing launchpad could then probably will do an MBA later on as well. But it's certainly a much better alternative to the MBAs that is offered by a tier two or a tier three Institute. And the reason for that is it's just built for jobs of today, right?
00:42:30
Speaker
What happens is that it's a misconception that there aren't enough great roles in the country, even during the pandemic beyond that lockdown period of let's say four months.
00:42:45
Speaker
After that, there will be a tremendous number of marketing jobs that have been there. It's just that those jobs require you to understand ad platforms, require you to understand SEO, requires you to understand content and so on and so forth.
Success of the Marketing Launchpad
00:43:00
Speaker
Now, with that, you need to also know things like how to communicate your idea well, how to work well on Excel, how to decode a problem.
00:43:10
Speaker
Just to give you an example there, there would be times when you would be looking at your numbers, viewership numbers, and thinking, oh, these viewership numbers aren't growing. Is that a problem? That's a symptom. The numbers aren't growing is a symptom. What's the problem there? Is it that you don't have the right guess? Are they not talking about the right
00:43:27
Speaker
things are we not going and marketing into the right way and so on and so forth. So just that ability to decode what the situation is, look at a hypothesis, test it out and then go about it. That's not something that even was being taught in the best envy institutes. Forget, you know, the anyone else.
00:43:45
Speaker
So, we said we wanted to build and we wanted to rethink our program from that lens, which means that people have to invest their time full-time with us. Now, the moment a student has to do that, they have to invest a lot more trust in us. And we knew that in order for them to invest their trust in us, there were only two things that would come with them. One is we go ahead and partner with an I am Ahmedabad and we say, all right, that's the way to do it.
00:44:09
Speaker
Well, that doesn't really, that wasn't going to work out, right? So in that sense, we went the other way and we said, what we will do is we will make sure that these people get placed and obviously we can't guarantee jobs. So what we will do is we will at least guarantee that we won't charge you if you don't get placed. So we will place you, we will place you in a marketing role. We will place you in a marketing role above four and a half lakh rupees a year, hopefully a bit more.
00:44:34
Speaker
And we will not charge you money until this happens. So that gave people a lot of confidence that what they were going to learn in here is going to be relevant for them. And that sort of triggered in a very good student pool in for us. And that allowed us to run our training program and then partner with them. And this was like live classes. This was not recorded.
00:44:56
Speaker
Yes, so this was largely live classes that we still do a few recorded lessons in, but every day, you know, the typical day would be something like students start in at 10 a.m., they attend a few sessions, then they work on problems, then they get coached by those practitioners that we were speaking about a little bit earlier, then, you know, they sort of go in and learn certain human skills, you know, communication, Excel and so on. Essentially like a campus experience, but online.
00:45:24
Speaker
campus experience, but online. Yeah, absolutely. And quite intense, you know, like MBAs is known for being intense. And that's one of the things that picked up from there that you want, you want to make sure that that students get pushed in during this training period so that the work doesn't sort of, you know, get the worst out of them and actually gets the best out of them.
Real-World Skills and Career Impact
00:45:45
Speaker
So, 12 weeks of that and then eight weeks of an internship. And if the students do well, they get conformed in that same internship. Otherwise they get placed again. So that was the 20 week sort of program that we built in. We launched, we wanted to launch it in May, but obviously there was a pandemic in 2020. So we weren't sure of what would happen in terms of a job thing. So we waited it out. We launched it in November.
00:46:09
Speaker
And we started with a batch of 21 students and all 21 students confirmed their internships into full-time job offers in the same organization, which is amazing because we thought maybe two, three, four students would be left, but it didn't really happen.
00:46:22
Speaker
And from 21 students in November 20 in May, we started our second batch. That was a batch of 31 students of this year. And then from that point, we've been doing a batch every 10 weeks. So from May, we went into July. July was 55 students. From July, we went into September. This year, that was 110 students.
00:46:44
Speaker
we're hoping to go 150 students next month so it's from that point it's sort of going in quickly and obviously because students pay after placement for them it becomes a great piece because you know it's the fact that they will definitely get placed in it's the fact that it will be a function of
00:47:05
Speaker
they have to pay a function of their salary. So they, for example, you know, soul store came in in the third, uh, in the third batch, they gave an office of about six and a half, seven lakh rupees. But now you don't mind paying a little bit more because you've already sort of gotten that kind of a salary. Whereas if you just want four and a half lakh rupees, that would have been a different story. So the fees is not fixed. It's a percentage of salary. It's a, it's a, it's three months of your salary. So it's a percentage of your, of your, uh, salary and, uh,
00:47:35
Speaker
And that ensures that everyone is trying to make sure that you get the best jobs that you could get. That's amazing. And what is your acceptance ratio?
00:47:47
Speaker
So we typically select about one out of 10 students who sit for the skinning test. So currently it's at one out of 10 students. It's like, I mean, the application for the last couple of batches have been quite high and as the program becomes mainstream, I think that will happen. And so the ratios actually come down a little bit in the last two batches, but that's where we were average that.
00:48:18
Speaker
What is the screening test? What do you check in there? We look for basic aptitude from a mathematical point of view because a lot of jobs require that. We look at the aptitude from a marketing point of view and then what we do is we teach concepts to people through these recorded videos that we had
00:48:39
Speaker
which are created and we ask them to apply it to a marketing problem to see how they look at it. We look at their ambition that comes out through an SOP and through an interaction that they do with the admissions team. We look at their writing capability and then we extend an offer to them.
Tech-Enhanced Learning at Craftshala
00:49:00
Speaker
One of the things that we learned and that we did differently from a traditional test, like a cat, for example, is that it's not a straight score. If you have 95 percentile, then we look at everything else. Here it's a little bit like, it doesn't matter if you have less percentile. Are you a great writer?
00:49:17
Speaker
Okay, now let me teach you a little bit of marketing and see what you can make out of it. Because right, I mean, and that's one of the big misconceptions in marketing in that there's only one kind of great marketer. I mean, people who are good at numbers can be great at marketing, people who are good at aesthetics can be great at marketing, people who are good with people can be great at marketing. So, you know, there's a lot of
00:49:36
Speaker
shades of being a good marketer. So we try and sort of bring that out in the screen test. It doesn't matter what you are excelling at. Whatever you're excelling at, if we find that, then we sort of build upon that in the program. Interesting. So this is your flagship program now, or is it still the one that you're doing with those MBA colleges?
00:49:58
Speaker
No, this is the flagship program. We're sort of going very quickly on this. So it will already contribute more to our revenues than all other programs put together this year. And there are some new programs that we're building of this kind to come forward as well. So there is a program that
00:50:15
Speaker
that we will launch it pretty soon which is focused on organic marketing essentially because right now this one is a little more paid media and SEO focused. So not happening on that fund.
00:50:30
Speaker
Typically, the folks who finish these programs get hired as campaign managers or search engine marketing managers, those kind of roles. Growth roles are quite common. Performance marketing roles, campaign managers, SEO managers, a lot of them end up working with agencies as well. Just to give context to people who are listening in.
00:50:56
Speaker
For example, when Cred runs a campaign with Kapil Dev, Cred is not the one which is working with YouTube, generally speaking. What they do is they contract an agency, let's say a performance. Performance figures out, all right, they've created an ad, where do I place it? Do I place it on YouTube? Do I place it on Google? Do I place it on Twitter? How much money do I spend in and so on and so forth based on the data and the installs I'm getting at?
00:51:21
Speaker
In that sense, the decisions that are being taken in are being taken by people in the agency and, obviously, strategically being sent by a thread. So, a lot of these guys who have worked in agencies and have worked on very large brands, like our students are working on brands like Microsoft and, you know, Calpre in lots of other well-known places. Amazing. So, how much revenue are you expecting this to contribute this year, like this program, the marketing launch plan?
00:51:49
Speaker
So, I mean, the last batch that we've enrolled is, like I said, it's about 110 students. For each student, we would be making in about a lakh and 35,000 rupees and everyone gets placed. So, we haven't yet had a scenario where the candidate will not get placed in.
00:52:12
Speaker
So from that batch, we'd be doing about 1.4 crores upwards of that. And we do a batch every 10 weeks. So that's where we're at right now. Amazing. And so besides this, what are the other programs you have now outside of the campus one?
00:52:30
Speaker
So outside of this, we run our business food programs and we run a program for working professionals called brand management in the digital age. So those are the two programs that we run in. That working professional program would not be as intense because they would not have the time. That would be more like a comparable to a course from Udemy or LinkedIn or something like that.
Craftshala's Vision for Future Expansion
00:52:56
Speaker
So you're right in the sense that it's not as intense. It's great for working professionals and these people have maybe eight to ten hours to spend in a week in order to upskill. And so it's with that mindset, but it still is based on foundational ideas of Kravshala, which is people will learn by doing. So what we've done there is we've figured out interesting projects for people to work on.
00:53:18
Speaker
and then they get coached on it and so on and so forth. So it's still 20 weeks, but it moves at a slower pace than, let's say, the marketing launchpad. And the ideas are also different. That's a little more strategic in nature. It's meant to teach you slightly different things than, let's say, the classical program act. So, yeah. Okay, got it. And what are those programs that I said, the working professional program?
00:53:43
Speaker
So what commercial program is at 85,000 rupees and the business school program is between, like I said, it ranges between 20 to 25,000 rupees. Essentially like a one-line summary of Craftshala would be like say like an upgrade but for marketing.
00:54:03
Speaker
One line summary would be a program that helps people launch their careers in marketing and sales. I think that an upgrade and great learning and all of these companies are essentially degree programs. And you can use a degree for many things, including to get a job, but not necessarily to only to get a job. A lot of their things is about accelerating their career and so on and so forth. They're more on the tech side, like product and tech and analytics. Exactly.
00:54:33
Speaker
Whereas what we do is we stay focused on the marketing space and we make sure that anyone who comes into the program, they pretty much are able to launch their career in marketing. So whether you're sitting in a business school or whether you're trying to get into marketing from some other place, let's say you're in IT.
00:54:55
Speaker
One of the things in the marketing launch that I noticed is that half of people are engineers and half have come from different backgrounds. Some haven't done an MBA and then come in. Some have done a degree in chemistry, in arts, in pharmacy and hospitality. Obviously, hospitality was very badly hit during COVID. So in that sense,
00:55:15
Speaker
some of our best students have actually come from that space. And so it's a rich representation of what people do in India, essentially. And then they start their career in marketing. And I think that's probably why the program has worked really well. It's because most people are in this loop. You don't have experience, so you don't get a job. So you don't get
The Importance of Trust and Incentives in Education
00:55:36
Speaker
experience, you don't get a job. This sort of breaks that loop, the marketing launchpad for us.
00:55:42
Speaker
So, you know, one of the things which I would, I mean, you know, if I, if this idea had come to me, I would probably not have gone ahead and done it the way you have done it, because I would have thought that if people are not paying anything upfront, will they really be serious? So, you know, how do you counter that? Like, how do you make sure that without taking any money from them, the students still take it seriously as if they had paid for it?
00:56:12
Speaker
Yeah, so we've introduced a registration fee precisely for that. We say that, all right, why don't you pay a little bit of money, and it's a 10,000 rupees, pay a registration fee. Make sure that that is there. But that's also completely refundable. So it's not as if you don't get a job you have to pay it. People can opt out of the program as well. So if it doesn't work for them, just opt out, no questions asked, and so on and so forth. So in that sense, I think that when it comes,
00:56:40
Speaker
I think most people underestimate just how serious people are about their careers. You know, you look at the decisions people make and you think people are not serious, but actually the reason they're making those decisions are because they usually have bad advice. So what we have found is that people are desperately keen to make their career in.
00:56:58
Speaker
What challenges them is the fact that their perceptions of online education at Tech and education in general is very low. They expect schools to rip them off. They expect
00:57:13
Speaker
companies to take advantage of them, to tell them anything in order to get their money in. There's just this culture that if the educational institute is not government run, then it must be badly run, unless it's like a global institute like Harvard, which is obviously global.
00:57:29
Speaker
So, in that sense, what happens is when we do this, it automatically encourages people who just want a great career. They want to believe in something, but it's just that their experiences haven't let them do it. It just allows them to not have this conversation and worry about it, knowing fully well that if it doesn't work out for them, they don't have to pay a dime.
00:57:57
Speaker
So that focus on the self has been quite high. People have had a lot of accountability because they always had that accountability.
Pay-After-Placement: Future EdTech Trend?
00:58:05
Speaker
It was just sort of getting hidden behind bad advice, which is why bad decisions were being taken in.
00:58:16
Speaker
You know, it seems to me like probably the next wave of EdTech unicorns would be built around this structure of pay after placement. Because, you know, I think the current wave is built around sales, like, you know, by users like a sales machine, you know, in terms of their ability to sell. But with a course like this, I think that investing a lot of money in sales is probably not what you need to do, right?
00:58:47
Speaker
I hope so, you know, like, I mean, our sales team, I mean, we have grown like five times from last year to this year, our sales team hasn't been added by one person, you know, it's the same number of people that that are sort of doing it. And the thing is that, you know, our programs itself are improving so quickly because
00:59:06
Speaker
everyone in the team knows that the only way Kravshala makes money is if the students are good. So no one takes any decision that is not more. You know, it is easy for me to live up to my vision with all the people that are in there because everyone knows at the end of the day, the student should know what it does to succeed. If they don't know, then it doesn't come in. So admissions are well taken care of, training is well taken care of. You know, a lot of times, you know, like placements are well taken care of. One of the things that
00:59:35
Speaker
You know, students sometimes ask us, will you place us in a customer support job or in any of these jobs, we're just paying okay, but are not marketing roles. But there's no incentive for us to do that, right? Because people will not succeed there, they will not be able to afford any money. So, you know, it's okay for us to say that we'll charge you, but if you would not want to do that job, we're not going to make any money.
00:59:56
Speaker
So, I hope that this is a trend and certainly I think it's a trend worth sort of accelerating because I think that this could solve for
Operational Challenges and Quality Maintenance
01:00:08
Speaker
the biggest issue in education in India, which is incentives, right? I go back to the campuses I've been part of. The best professors were great, but it wasn't as if they were rewarded as being great.
01:00:20
Speaker
They didn't make more money. They were not given more responsibilities. It was the same campus politics that happened at any institution globally, not just in India. So what is the incentive for someone who's great at teaching to be still teaching? Whereas here you get the best people involved in teaching and they end up making more money and that's how it should be.
01:00:45
Speaker
Do you think this will become a billion dollar business if you are only focusing on sales and marketing? And that too, it's more of marketing than sales, right? Yeah, I think that we will probably have to expand to other zones in order to build a billion dollar business. That's a given. And it's something that will, I'm sure, at the right time, be a question that we'll have to address. And I think
01:01:11
Speaker
More than building a billion dollar business though, I think that the goal is to build something which is an institution that can survive for a long period of time. Colleges are the way they are because they've survived for centuries really.
01:01:31
Speaker
And there's a reason that they survive. There are many things that work for them. And I think that they will continue to survive and thrive, to be honest. It's just that as the world gets more complex, you need, you know, it's no longer necessary that excellence is restricted to just IITs and IAMs.
01:01:51
Speaker
I think that excellence can exist in a lot of different places and especially if you can deliver excellence for mainstream students, I think that the value of an institution like that goes well beyond the money that you can create it.
Emotional Support and Management in Education
01:02:07
Speaker
So I do agree with you that in order to build a billion dollar business, we will probably have to do more than marketing and sales. But I think the more interesting question is that what is it that we can do that can institutionally allow us to run these experiences at scale?
01:02:24
Speaker
Already we are seeing the difference between training 100 students and 30 students is substantial. We can't do the kind of intervention we were doing earlier. So we are solving the problems that we were solving earlier and now when we do a thousand students, as we hope to do next year in a batch,
01:02:41
Speaker
We will be solving the same problems again. How do you make sure that the experience is great for them? How do you make sure that they feel cared for? The challenge with young people is insecurity. If I go out and I do a sample of the people who are listening to us today, I would
01:03:03
Speaker
You know, I just sort of would not be surprised at all by high levels of insecurity. I was insecure when I was when I was, you know, 25 or even 30 for that matter because it's just that, you know, when you're young, you just tend to think that things might not turn out well. Generally speaking, they do. And the best way for them to turn out well is for you to not worry about the future as much as focus.
01:03:23
Speaker
on the now, right? Make sure that you're doing interesting things that you enjoy and things tend to take care of themselves. But even when people are enjoying their course, they struggle, they have doubts. And a large part of our goal in this program is to make sure that those insecurities don't get into the way of professional success.
01:03:43
Speaker
And that's an idea that we hope to instill in. There are others as well, but this is an idea we hope to instill in every student at Grafshala, that manage your emotions and the rest of it will sort of tend to work
Commitment to Scaling with Core Values Intact
01:03:56
Speaker
out for you. Now, I can't teach them that until their emotions spike. So as the placement season gets in closer, the emotions start to spike. And as they get to spike in, that's when we do our real job. You know, it's easy to teach people marketing. Very hard to teach them emotional management, but the value of that
01:04:11
Speaker
value of teaching someone that then you're just feeling stressed and you're going to be fine. It's so enormous that, you know, like that it just sort of boggles the mind that what we could do with 1000 students in a batch, you know, like that, that's real impact and hope to get there. You know, so, so internally we have this thing that we scale with soul, you know, like we're going to scale, we're going to scale quickly. We're going to scale with, with making sure that what has gotten us here doesn't get lost.
01:04:37
Speaker
in the attempt to scale too quickly. So we're going to continue to make sure that this unsaid part of Kravshala is sort of teintara. Every student who comes in, feels scared for, goes out of it a stronger human being and someone who can then kick ass. How do you see a thousand student bats?
01:04:56
Speaker
being, you know, the outcomes being as good for all 1000 of them as it is for all 30 or all 100. Like, would there be more of a tech platform approach then or would you have more instructors or you know, how would that happen?
01:05:14
Speaker
Yeah. So it's already a very sort of, I mean, a lot of our programs are sort of running on autopilot, largely due to tech, right? So every time a student starts training with Kravshala every day, we know how the day is going in for every student. So I know when they're feeling stressed out, I know when they're feeling burnt out. I know when a concept hasn't landed. All of those are essentially data. How do you know that?
01:05:41
Speaker
because we track it, we ask them, we track it, we look at this course, we look at, we ask them the specific question of how they're feeling in it. We ask them the specific question of what they've taken out most, what has worked for them, what has not worked for them and do it every single day. Like there's a survey form after every class.
01:05:57
Speaker
Absolutely. Which gives you this. On our platform. So in that sense, we get very good data on what is really sort of happening again. And that allows us to intervene very quickly when things are going off, right? I mean, that's what care is, right? It's about making sure that when things are going off, you intervene in time. So
01:06:17
Speaker
The way we're doing 100 is already quite tech enabled and this is just going to increase. The challenge in scaling up is to do this for every piece of the business. Not only is that training tech driven but also their placement is tech driven. Today placement is not tech driven for us.
01:06:39
Speaker
It will be for sure because otherwise you can't play. Like you have a team that understands the profiles of students and then recommends them to companies that these are the best fit for you. Exactly. So for us to automate that process in, the openings themselves have to start coming in organically for us because people should be able to float it in and so on and so forth.
01:07:04
Speaker
The great part is that every recruiting partner that we work with is desperate for us to succeed because what we do for them is we save them a lot of effort of training and onboarding and hiring, right? So we have partners who've given up on a lot of the hiring pieces because they know that 70 to 80% of the talent is just going to come in here.
01:07:26
Speaker
and the rest can just come in organically to them. So in that sense, the number of jobs in digital marketing are spiking so, so high right now that for us, there are a lot of wins in our favor as well. And it's gotten accelerated since COVID came in. Because what COVID did was that it removed this perception that you needed a marketing team sitting out
01:07:52
Speaker
out of the US or Europe to run a campaign in your US or Europe. A person sitting in India could also do it, which is what happens in IT. That's why SaaS companies like Freshworks and Zoho are so successful. So in that sense, the same piece is sort of happening in marketing. It's going to happen in sales. It's going to happen in a bunch of other functions as well. So in that sense, our goal is to sort of make sure that as those waves come in, our programs are sort of getting people ready for that.
01:08:21
Speaker
So there's lots and lots of jobs. It's an operational challenge in order to do it. And that's the problem that we essentially solve for. And how does your lead generation happen? Do you do like online ads or what?
01:08:39
Speaker
Yeah, largely online ads. A lot of the students are through recommendations, obviously, but everyone else comes in through. And what is the student journey on the platform? Is it that there is one single portal where classes also happen and homework also happens? Or do they go to Zoom for classes? What is the online campus like? What does that look like?
01:09:05
Speaker
Yeah, so we have a platform where students essentially come in to do most of the learn-related activities. The live sessions are happening on Zoom, so they essentially go to Zoom for the sessions.
01:09:23
Speaker
Other than that, they always come back onto the Learn platform for us. And that's where the collab happens. That's where the submissions happen and so on and so forth. How does collaboration happen on this? If they have to do a group project, for example, wouldn't that happen again through a Zoom call? Or how would they do collaborative work? How would teamwork happen? Team projects and stuff?
01:09:44
Speaker
I mean, I think, so what we've done is for us, Google Chat has been the platform which we've used essentially for Collab. So in that sense, we've integrated Google Chat within the platform itself so that people can essentially sort of have that single view.
01:10:01
Speaker
Then the chat is a fairly specialized piece to build in. And that's where most of the collaboration is happening and most of the discussions are happening and most of the communication is really happening.
01:10:19
Speaker
So people need to sign up for the Google account first. Yes, but I mean all of them have a Gmail account. So as long as you have a Gmail account. And so you would have like a room for a batch and then within the batch different groups would create their own rooms where they can collaborate and sync up and submit stuff.
01:10:42
Speaker
Yeah, for different summits, different rooms and different agendas and so on and so forth. When you have a batch of 100, for example, you have to split them. So some people are good at communication. Some people are good at X, Y, Z. So you have then different things which are happening. And it's quite something. I mean, when we started it, it was just one course, videos, project. People do it. Today is just like a university which is running. And then it's quite something. These 100 students.
01:11:10
Speaker
Do they also interact with other people like you know every 10 weeks you start a course so which means that they would still be studying when 100 more would join so do they is there like interbats interaction also or it's largely within that cohort only that the interaction and the collaboration and all of that stuff is happening.
01:11:32
Speaker
So it happens to the extent of alumni interaction. It's not as intense as it would be on campus because there you have ready access. But there is interaction and there is a lot of guidance in terms of how to navigate certain aspects of the program, how to manage your schedule and so on and so forth.
01:11:49
Speaker
I'm sure there's a lot that they aren't telling us in terms of how to get through certain tests and all of that. So I have no doubt that those networks are getting built in. And obviously, as these students go forward in, a lot of job opportunities, future job opportunities for them would be floated in amongst each other as well. So that's part of the gig. I mean, we're very early in this journey. The first batch for us graduated this year itself.
01:12:16
Speaker
pretty soon by next year they'll be opening up job opportunities amongst themselves. So you would have a separate alumni portal and an alumni chat or they must be connected on WhatsApp and stuff already.
01:12:30
Speaker
Yeah, so we're still using Google Chat for our community pieces as well, right? I mean, the piece around Google Chat, and it's just so surprising that so few people use it. I mean, it's not as good as Slack, but it's with everyone. You don't need to install Slack for it. And there's a lot of interesting stuff that you can do there. So those pieces are already coming in. A lot of our professional students, et cetera, float in roles and so on and so forth right now in our community rooms. But that process is just sort of getting started for the launch point.
01:13:00
Speaker
amazing and so how do you replicate that you know building friendship part which happens on campus like you know you you make lifelong friends and stuff like that like
01:13:13
Speaker
Yeah. I think that part of that, I mean, there are different aspects to it. So the first piece is that the way you make friends is almost by design. Like when I put you in the same hostel, you have no option but to encounter each other every day. And at some point you're going to notice my stupidities and I'm going to notice yours and you're going to bond over that. Right. So in that sense, it's about
01:13:40
Speaker
It's about making sure that you can get people to really work together in an intimate fashion such that they reveal themselves to be who they are.
01:13:55
Speaker
So the initial part of the program is focused on that. We sort of design the activities in a way that it asks them to reveal more of who they are. And it forces them to sort of really dig deep, right? So the initial part of the program is actually quite intense for that reason. And then because it's online, you will not have chance interactions with other people outside of the people that you're collabing with. We mix up the groups completely.
01:14:23
Speaker
So it's like, you know, first four weeks are here, then four weeks are there, and then the last four weeks are there. And that ensures that, you know, like the thing that would happen organically happens here a little bit by design.
01:14:36
Speaker
So that's how we've solved it. So far, it seems to have worked well, but I think that test is really in the larger batches. So the 100 batch is really where we are, I think, going to see our first result of that. But thus far, it seems to have worked well. Fascinating. I can't wait to hear about your 1,000 batch. 1,000 student batch. That would be pretty amazing.
01:15:02
Speaker
Yeah, a thousand and across streams as well, you know, like, I mean, I mean, the dream is really to sort of get people sort of working in, coming in from a different skill set as well. Right. I mean, I spoke about this aspect that marketers are coming on all ships, but in reality, when you need to solve a problem, you need all of them working together, right? You want to run an ad on Facebook.
01:15:22
Speaker
You want someone to figure out what is supposed to be said, how it's supposed to be said, what is the visual image, and how do I optimize it in terms of an ad. That's four different skill sets in order to run one successful ad. So in that sense, for us, that's really what we're building up to. And what we should hopefully have the first piece in starting in January itself. So just a couple of months from now. But we have different streams of different skill sets of people coming together in one group so that
01:15:49
Speaker
you know, they can really get to experience what it looks like. So this would be even closer to the traditional MBA where first year is common and second year you specialize. So this would be something like that where first X number of weeks they are together and then they all choose their
01:16:05
Speaker
They specialize and then they sort of do it. So, you know, like I said, I mean, we are very much building a university of a kind. We started with a slightly lesser ambition, but it's very much a university and we hope to sort of create the same kind of impact on the students. Do you also think that eventually companies could be paying for this course, like, you know, instead of the student thing?
01:16:34
Speaker
I mean the companies are kind of paying for it because what happens is that there are many companies who have been forced to pay a lot more money in order to participate in the recruitment of these students. So anyone who was paying let's say X if they pay more money then obviously they get access to more talent.
01:16:55
Speaker
So companies do end up paying it. It's just that that money goes to students and through them, it sort of comes into us. And similarly, there were companies that were not paying, you know, even a base level four and a half lakh rupees, right? And from multiple companies who've had to change their processes so that they can do it. So eventually, I think the companies to pay it is just that they pay the students and they don't pay us.
01:17:20
Speaker
Okay. You probably wouldn't have seen it so far, but eventually you would have defaulting students who don't pay. And because this is pure online, you never met them in person. How would you handle that?
01:17:36
Speaker
I think we've had only one scenario where a candidate has had issues of that kind. So one out of a hundred is, I guess, par for the course for us. I think that that also is not so much the candidate not paying as much as the fact that
01:17:58
Speaker
that they sort of lose faith in the process a little bit, in that if you believe that something is not great, then it's unlikely that you're going to sort of find too much greatness within. But that's a very unusual case for us. What we have noticed is that people are
01:18:21
Speaker
people are more than happy paying for something if they find value on it. And in fact, for that there is 100%.
Challenges in Delivering Value to Students
01:18:28
Speaker
It's that for one student, we couldn't deliver that value really, where we couldn't sort of get that person to, we couldn't find a way across whatever is the construct that that person was sort of built in. But other than that, everyone else has sort of been been quite sort of, you know, quite
01:18:45
Speaker
And that's what I said. The industry works on trust pretty easily because all of these students want to build marketing careers. They want to be associated with us. They find value in the programs. They know we can continue to add a lot more value to them going forward.
01:19:03
Speaker
And so in that sense, we are also very comfortable in sort of running this structure. And so it was one of our fears that, you know, that, you know, like, for example, our legal team had said, you know, you should have these checks, which are blank checks signing in from the students and so on, so forth.
Flexible Payment Solutions for Students
01:19:21
Speaker
We didn't go for any of that, because we know that at the end of the day, if you give a great experience,
01:19:25
Speaker
generally speaking people would want to reward you and they'll find value in sort of continuing that relationship there. So thus far we haven't had that challenge and we're not really anticipating much on that front having done this now for a year.
01:19:40
Speaker
What is the payment cycle? Do they pay in three months? Like the three months salary? Yeah, so if they have the money, they pay immediately.
Benefits of Educational Loans in India
01:19:52
Speaker
If they don't have the money, then what they do is they go for a payment partner in NBFC with us, and then they structure it over six months, 12 months, 18 months, 24 months, whatever it is.
01:20:05
Speaker
And one of the great things about India is that the interest that you have to pay on this is very low. So educational loans are always great loans to take in. What most people don't really realize is that it's unlike any other loan to do. And that's one of the good things that the government has done.
01:20:21
Speaker
You save tax also on the interest. Absolutely. So that ways people structure it in those fashions. So the credit risk is essentially going to the NBFC then once again, zero defaults there as well. So it's like not a single student who's
01:20:43
Speaker
who's lost their job, who's chosen not to paint. Once you've
Future Program Plans for Craftshala Alumni
01:20:48
Speaker
said people on the right track, generally speaking, they're okay. It's when they go off track that those challenges typically tend to happen. Do you plan to monetize the alumni base? Eventually you would have thousands of people who've done the course. Is there a path to monetizing them also?
01:21:10
Speaker
I think that we will definitely
Growing Demand for Entry-Level Marketing Training
01:21:12
Speaker
offer more programs to people through the life cycle but at this stage you know like I mean for us the entry level
01:21:22
Speaker
opportunity is very, very valuable. I think that most people haven't heard of Craftshala and most people, when they heard of Craftshala and the concept, they tend to think there is a hole in the contract. There is something that will make you pay whatever it is and so on and so forth.
01:21:40
Speaker
So we have such a massive opportunity that we're addressing right now that I guess for the next couple of years we are going to be very focused, maybe more actually, we're just going to be focused on this and we're going to think what kind of programs can we build in that will allow us to sort of run the same model very well.
01:21:58
Speaker
But at some point I'm sure that we would definitely like to build in more programs for people to do it because you know people need scaling up through the course of their lifetime. So I'm sure that will happen in as well. How big is the opportunity like you're saying in the marketing training space like entry-level marketing?
01:22:20
Speaker
Entry level marketing, you know, just to give you a quick context, if you go to North Korea, in fact, if you go to North Korea, roundabout in in February, March of this year, you would have seen about 10,000 jobs in digital marketing in North Korea at the entry level space.
01:22:41
Speaker
which would be there. So, Nokia is obviously a small subsection of the whole. They're the largest job platform. Now, if you go to the platform today, you'd find more than 30,000 jobs. So, in six months, it's sort of rocketed to that level.
01:22:58
Speaker
And things are just sort of getting, I think, interesting here. So I think the marketing space is large. I think there are other spaces as well, which are interesting and as well. But marketing is probably the most underestimated one because it's risen quite late. Coding has been around for a while and it's a massive space for short. And then there have been other spaces as well, which have been talked about.
01:23:26
Speaker
The thing about tech is that it's not just revolutionized coding, it's also revolutionized traditional forms like marketing and sales.
Is Sales a Viable Career Path?
01:23:34
Speaker
So even if I put sales and I say, okay, what is the opportunity of, which is just centered within, let's say something like a technology sales or a SaaS sales, you know, software as a service sales, which is the sector that
01:23:46
Speaker
Freshworks, Zoho, and all of these companies, Salesforce, all these companies, that's a massive sector as well, which is sort of growing it. So technology has just opened up lots and lots of different kinds of roles, and we're very much at the start of the curve. But do you think a pure sales-driven course, like a course which guarantees you a job in sales, will get volume? Because as we discussed, people are not looking at sales as a career, even though it's a good career.
01:24:17
Speaker
I think that it depends on what kind of viability people can see beyond that. So if you think about it, most MBAs go ahead and do sales. Does that stop people from doing an MBA? No, but they're not really doing an MBA all the time to do sales. What they're doing is they're doing the MBA to sort of... Future profiting themselves. Even if it doesn't happen at least mentally, it feels like that. So I think that
01:24:45
Speaker
If you can find a way to show sales as future proofing your career, if you can show a viable path of it, people will be interested. If they don't see that, then it's unlikely to solve one because sales as a career has been less interesting.
Changing Perceptions of Sales Careers
01:25:02
Speaker
I think I'm speaking about it on 25th of October, you know, tomorrow Elon Musk might talk about, I mean, Elon is the best salesman on the planet, right? Tomorrow, if he actually admits up to that, suddenly sales could become quite sexy as well, you know, like so, like, I mean, it'll not be his best interest to do it, because the best sales tends to be
01:25:22
Speaker
disguise sales, which he knows and he understands and he leverages. But things can make other things sexy. People realize that if you do sales in Google, that's much more valuable than if you do marketing in Google.
01:25:39
Speaker
something's gonna change there. So it might change it, but as sitting in today, I would think that it's more about if people can find a way to think about how a sales program can future-proof their career,
Sponsorship by Long Haul Ventures
01:25:50
Speaker
then it'll be interesting. This episode of Founder Thesis Podcast is brought to you by Long Haul Ventures. Long Haul Ventures is the long-haul partner for founders and startups that are building for the long haul. More about them is at www.longhaulventures.com.