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Building platforms to empower jobseekers | Tarun Matta @ IIMJobs and Juno School of Business
357 Plays1 year ago
As an IIM alumnus, Tarun's passion for empowering his fellow batchmates with job opportunities drove him to create IIMJobs.His dedication paid off when Infoedge acquired his venture for a staggering $12mn in 2019. Now, Tarun is taking on his next challenge with Juno School of Business, a game-changing endeavour focused on closing the skill gap in sales and transforming employability.
Additional links:-
1.Engage with new employees at the earliest: Tarun Matta, Founder, iimjobs.com
2.Naukri.com acquires recruitment portals iimjobs.com and hirist.com
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Transcript
Introduction and Entrepreneurial Journey
00:00:00
Speaker
Hi, I'm Tarun and I'm the founder of Juno School of Business. Before this, I founded two popular recruiting platforms, IAMJobs and Hyrest.
00:00:20
Speaker
Discovering your calling as an entrepreneur is a lot like finding a life partner. Some people fall in love with a business idea and take the plunge into entrepreneurship. Some people decide to become entrepreneurs and then look for the idea. And sometimes you have just a side hustle that ends up being your main business, kind of like a best friend who gradually becomes a life partner.
The Birth and Growth of IAMJobs
00:00:42
Speaker
Tarun Mata falls in the third category. He started IAM jobs as a sidekick. He was an IAM alumni and would list the kind of jobs that his batchmates would be interested in. This idea became his full-time job and was eventually acquired by InfoEdge in 2019 for almost $12 million. Tarun ended up being one of those rare founders who actually generated cash wealth for his stakeholders.
00:01:04
Speaker
In 2021, he started his second venture in the space of employability and this was born out of his insights while hiring for sales roles at IAM Jobs. Tarun is on a mission to fix the skill gap in the domain of sales through Juno School of Business. Stay tuned for Tarun's fascinating conversation with your host Akshay Dutt. And if you get inspired by stories of grit and success from real entrepreneurs, then subscribe to the Founder Thesis Podcast on any audio streaming platform.
00:01:39
Speaker
I worked in engineering, product management, I did sales, I did marketing. So even though those were like six months' turns, those gave me tremendous exposure. I would be constantly looking for jobs and I got
00:01:58
Speaker
I got interested, I got really good at it and I used to have a massive network of recruiters who would, you know, constantly reach out to me, send me job opportunities that, you know, I would be friends and party and people would say, you know, there would be conversations around what are the prevailing market salaries, which company is hiring.
00:02:18
Speaker
So I used to be kind of at center of those conversations. And that's how, you know, I am jobs. God started. In fact, I used to have a separate email account that I created just to search for jobs. And now that I would put on job site, I would share with recruiters, I would get tons of jobs in that, uh, email account.
Challenges and Monetization of IAMJobs
00:02:41
Speaker
So, so.
00:02:42
Speaker
Whenever a friend of mine would ask me for interesting opportunities, I would just give them the login password of that account. I would just ask them to go search themselves. And one day I felt it would be interesting if I put some of those jobs on a blog and instead of me sharing login password with all of my friends, anybody who wants to take a look and just go.
00:03:07
Speaker
look at the jobs and apply it wherever they want. So, again the intent of doing all that was not to build a startup or build a large business or any of that. It seemed like interesting thing to do. I was just discovering blogs and publishing content online.
00:03:28
Speaker
And so that's how IAM jobs interestingly got started. This blog you started, this was like using WordPress. And you bought that domain also, IAM jobs when you started the blog? No, so it was Joomla. I don't know what happened to Joomla. Joomla used to be an open source CMS. It's not that I researched anything. That's what I used. The domain initially was IAMjobs.in.
00:03:55
Speaker
And it's also a very interesting story. Again, the intent was not to build it like a startup, so there wasn't very structured, extremely structured thought process. There was no, I am job sounded like an interesting, cool name and I felt that it will be interesting to my, you know, batch mates and friends and so on.
00:04:16
Speaker
There was somebody else who had imjobs.com and he was running a recruiting business in Gurgaon. I think he was an IMCalCATA graduate, you know, building a recruitment business.
00:04:29
Speaker
And he was also trying to do something similar. He had a recruiting business. He would put, you know, put some jobs on the platform. So over a period of time, what happened was IAMjobs.in got popular. You know, one of the things that I used to do was, you know, while I used to get a lot of jobs. And you were still working while it's getting popular.
00:04:52
Speaker
Correct. So I used to work with a company called Rocketog, which again was a very interesting company back in 2008, trying to build mobile apps.
00:05:04
Speaker
early days of mobile internet, you know, on those Java, Symbian phones and so on. So very early and that was my first exposure to consumer internet and building for consumer internet. I would only, you know, post jobs that I built were interesting enough for me or any of my batch mates to apply because the idea was not to
00:05:28
Speaker
I was not optimizing for any metric. The idea is not to get large number of jobs in the platform. It's a cold side project and I would put what I find interesting and I had limited time which meant that you know some of my friends and others would find would you know really
00:05:47
Speaker
and those jobs exciting and they will in a lot of cases find those jobs on other you know platforms like knockery or monster or times and shine these firms back there right so it kind of started to grow extremely popular on its own and I think after about a year year and a half
00:06:08
Speaker
of me doing it on the side. I used to charge number of jobs, I used to stay up. So, I had a day job which I would go to and then come back home, had early dinner and then go back to responding to queries and posting jobs and so on. So, I would stay up.
00:06:28
Speaker
How are you sourcing jobs like people were emailing you like no, so I was in that network So I'm in the network and that's what I had learned that you're all dead those five six years when I had switched so many jobs and Consultants would as it got popular people would consultant would send me and say hey, can you post on your on the other platform?
00:06:50
Speaker
So, I wouldn't go out and call people and say, give me job, I'll post and all that stuff. And I wouldn't care also, right? Because it was just a blog. If one job came that day, I would post. If no job came that day, that was fine. It would go sleep early. If 20 jobs came, then I had a lot of work to do. But I wouldn't care, I wouldn't measure. It was just a fun thing.
00:07:18
Speaker
If that was that. And it got popular, the person who was running imjobs.com or the person who had the domain imjobs.com, Krishna was not even to kind of fit anything, meaning around. So, one day I just sent him, you know, asking if he would be okay to, you know, give me the main day.
00:07:42
Speaker
He was kind enough to do so. He was like, yeah, sure, there isn't much I am doing in the domain. And if you keep it, so that's how I interestingly made the domain. Did he sell it to you? Yeah, no, I think I had to pay for one year or two years, whatever is the transfer charge.
00:08:06
Speaker
But nothing meaningful and back then I didn't have the money also to pay. It was a few thousand bucks whatever is the transfer fee that the registrar charges. That's all that I paid and he was kind enough to offer. Amazing. So when did you finally quit your job then?
00:08:29
Speaker
So I ran it on the side for a couple of years. I think I quit my job in 2010.
00:08:38
Speaker
And so back then there was no sense of, you know, how do we monetize it? How do we, you know, put a business around it? Would it be sustainable? You know, how would I pay my business? So those questions were still open. What was, there are two, three things, you know, from my personal standpoint, what that happened and that kind of helped me. The most interesting thing was that, you know, back then there were
00:09:06
Speaker
three or four large job sites by business houses. Of course, Nokari was extremely large and Nokari was populated. Then Monster used to be a very large company in the US. Hindustan Times had just launched Shine around the same time and they launched massive budgets and advertising all over and so on.
00:09:34
Speaker
And of course, times of India had time jobs. All these platforms were relevant. Unlike today. Today only Nokia is relevant. Nokia and LinkedIn are relevant. Nobody else is relevant today.
00:09:50
Speaker
And what I could see was that all of these companies had deep pockets, spending a lot of money in advertising, large deals, fighting for small shares of market size. And what was happening was that I had a small blog, which I was just updating on the site.
00:10:11
Speaker
I saw that the traffic was growing and you know, I would meet people and would say, hey, I got a job through your platform or somebody could interview. So I felt that there is obviously something that is working, right? And there is something that is happening. Obviously, I didn't quantify, I didn't say, hey, is the market good enough? There is some value, right? Well, I need my backmates and they said, this is interesting. Of course, they've heard of knockery and monster and all those things.
00:10:41
Speaker
So that was one. The other thing that I felt, you know, by then I had worked in, you know, seven, eight companies, six, seven years. You know, some of the work that I did was interesting. You know, I had a relationship in the companies that I worked with. Never did it happen that a random person would, you know, meet me, say, hey, I have seen your work and it brings me some meaning.
00:11:13
Speaker
So, I am in a corporate job doing some stuff, you know, every once in a while the manager would say, take a
Scaling and Acquisition of IAMJobs
00:11:18
Speaker
good job or somebody else would say, take a good job. But it would never happen that, you know, I would...
00:11:23
Speaker
friend of a friend, some together and say, I am Jaws, very interesting. I had some money in my account and I felt that, you know, even though I didn't have a sense of, you know, how would we monetize or how do we make a business out of it.
00:11:43
Speaker
If I keep my costs low and if I don't spend much money, I can even last 3-4 years with the savings that I had.
00:11:57
Speaker
I had the confidence that if I do something for three years, I'll figure it out. I don't know by looking back, you know, it doesn't seem like extremely smart decision making. But that was the thought process back then. So I then and, you know, interestingly, I also back then studied various other classified companies in the US. Craigslist back then used to be extremely large and popular and committed.
00:12:27
Speaker
and craigslist theme all across first to not monetize right or not monetize aggressively of course they monetize and they monetize certain categories but it's not that the focus has monetization right
00:12:42
Speaker
Most of those early internet large companies and projects started as hobby projects and side projects and under monetized. So that theme connected and I felt this is also like a hobby project which is taking off and just like regular story and so what if it doesn't get monetized. The other thing was that other large companies were also were monetizing.
00:13:08
Speaker
in the category, knockery, monster, everybody else was monetizing. So again, the other belief was that if the customer is spending money for the offering, the customer is spending money in this category. So if over a period of time, we are able to figure out and we are also delivering some value, we don't know, we're not able to quantify the value, but there is some value, that's the reason they are coming back and posting jobs and so on.
00:13:35
Speaker
So, if we can figure out some way to get value, demonstrate value, then some of the spec which is going on, you know, existing large platforms, it will come to us. So, that was the thinking back then and the ambition was not too large. It wasn't like, you know, you know, one had to build a large company. The word unicorn was not invented yet. The word unicorn was not called back then.
00:14:05
Speaker
There was no mention of start-ups in media. Nobody would talk about start-ups, nobody would talk about paying. Nobody was raising any money. It was extremely hard to raise money. But you did manage to raise money, right? Pretty early on.
00:14:23
Speaker
That happened later. Back then the mission for me was that, you know, I just want to get sustainable. If I let's say work for three years and I bring it to a level where it generates enough cash flow for me to sustain myself, then it is an interesting project that I can do all my life. That was the extent of ambition that I had. Instead of, you know,
00:14:52
Speaker
a shitty corporate job. I would much rather you know do something that I like and there is meaning people know of. Even if I get 40% of my salary that's fine.
00:15:07
Speaker
I'm happy to do it all my life. So when you quit, it was zero revenue, right? Like you hadn't started anything for monetization. It was zero revenue for a very long time. Even after quitting for a few years, it was zero revenue and there was no hope of revenue. So it's not like I'm going to people and I'm pitching and they're saying, if you do this, there will be some revenue. There is no hope of revenue. I'm the only person. I'm not even going out. All I'm doing is I'm just making sure that, you know,
00:15:40
Speaker
But 2011 you raised the round from Morpheus, right? So Samir was the first investor. Morpheus used to run an accelerator program back then. And those were again very early days. There was nobody who was investing in early stage companies. There were some institutional investors, but they would do late stage deals. Those were extremely rare.
00:16:09
Speaker
Sumorphous, we used to run this accelerator program which was very similar to Y Combinator in the US and they would take 10 companies in a batch and would put in small amount to put in five dags. So that was the first investment that we raised in the company.
00:16:38
Speaker
That was extremely valuable. And of course, you know, Samir and Morpheus had an extremely valuable role to play in the company. And, you know, that's a relationship and friendship that I cherish. So that, I mean, now five packs seems like insignificant.
00:16:59
Speaker
back then gave me confidence and resources to just hire the first person and you know first engineer, number of jobs are growing and those were the high level you know metric that I would look once in a while once in a few weeks or whatever right but it is growing and the number of jobs that I am getting to post every day is is also growing
00:17:26
Speaker
the word is spreading and is popular and that's when we raised a small round from Morpheus and then at the end of the Morpheus program they had a road show they had a bunch of angel investors who would invest in Morpheus companies and then in the road show we raised I think 85 lakhs so couple of interesting things happened around the same time
00:17:55
Speaker
Anand Luniya who runs India Goshant. Back then he had not incorporated India Goshant. I think he used to work with some other fund. But he was an angel investor in Faso's. And he was hiring for Faso's. I think Jayadeep was hiring for Faso's and he posted a job on ImJobs.
00:18:20
Speaker
And he got a tremendous response. And I had not met Anand, I didn't even know who Anand was. He found my email ID, he sent me a mail saying, you know, we've posted some jobs and I am jobs and we like the response. And, you know, if you are thinking of ever raising a round, I would want to invest.
00:18:43
Speaker
So, that's interesting. It happened at the right time and we were kind of in the process of raising some money. So, Arath invested. This was in 2016. No, no. This was in 2012. Two years after I quit my job and I had maybe few months back raised 5 lakhs from Morpheus.
00:19:10
Speaker
trying to raise one crore just to kind of scale up the company. And back then, even raising one crore was not easy. There wasn't anybody who was saying, I take one crore just because you have good... It was a different ecosystem. So Anand invested some money.
00:19:34
Speaker
Vijay Shekhar, who of course runs PTM. He has invested some money. Anug Bajpai, who runs Ixigo, put in some
00:19:49
Speaker
couple of other folks so like 10-12 people each putting 510 lakhs and that's how based 85 but that again gave me some resources to hire the first few engineers to build the product to hire the first salesperson and your start
00:20:14
Speaker
building the company. Of course, the brand and the platform was building the companies, the organization and the other aspects. So interestingly, when we
00:20:31
Speaker
started reaching out to customers, the brand was already established. So it was never a challenge when the salesperson called a recruitment head or a recruiter or HR head.
00:20:45
Speaker
They would have quite a lot of time jobs. In most cases, they would have used the product also. Either as a recruiter or as a candidate looking for jobs. So the brand was established. It was never a challenge to get a meeting. They would say, where were you? We've heard so much about you.
00:21:06
Speaker
So, some of my early meetings were like, where were you all these years? Those were fun meetings and I used to have two weeks a month, one week in Mumbai and then four days in that. So, interestingly, why everybody had heard about IAM jobs, used it. So, trust and confidence was well established.
00:21:36
Speaker
The fundamental challenge back then was, what do we pay for? So when you're saying your job posting is absolutely free, put in my email, I get an absolute difference. So people who are happy with it are happy with it. People who are unhappy are unhappy anyways not buying it. So the challenges then how do you monetize? And you know that brought us to a very difficult
00:22:05
Speaker
product question which is a building a classic platform but if you have pre-listings which obviously help you become popular and gain traffic and so on so forth how do you then monetize? Now one theory is you say now that if the brand is established product is established now every listing is a pre-listing
00:22:35
Speaker
which again is a trend and maybe a wrong call. The discussion is not happening and I'm sure it still happens at high jobs. Do we discontinue free listings? Because there are a large number of people who are, you know, in tremendous value just from free listing. So anyway, so those were interesting times. We launched a bunch of products. So by then, you know,
00:23:04
Speaker
I had never bought or sold rooting products. I had never seen any rooting products. Like I had never, like I had used Knockery and Monster as a candidate. But I had never seen any rooting products. So I didn't have a sense of what is the right to build it for monetization.
00:23:25
Speaker
But some of those, I used to travel a lot, I used to meet a lot of my HR here, HR equipment here. I used to kind of understand what are the products they are using, what are the challenges they are facing. What is it that we could pay for? And we moved extremely fast on that. We were able to kind of add up customers and save revenue really fast. But what were you selling? Like you said yourself, there was already a free listing, so what were people paying for?
00:23:54
Speaker
So, when there were finger listings, people were not paying for anything. Maybe somebody would pay for advertising. Again, that's a tough sell. Some people would have limited inventory. This would be people who wanted more response, they would pay for an ad.
00:24:11
Speaker
friend page or something like selling a course or something like education somebody would say hey we would do that also so you know from my advertising standpoint back then
00:24:26
Speaker
So, I remember American Express launched a card where they were promoting the card only to people from top schools or top colleges, something like that. They had said, American Express will launch a card for a graduate from top schools. So, we gave them an ad slot and they would pay us 3, 3.5 lakhs a month. So, that covered a lot of our costs for a long time.
00:24:50
Speaker
Courses we launched much later. That's another interesting point, but that happened much later. But there would be employers, and it is hard to sell advertising, right? I mean, advertising on one day is performance-based, and people would back then see the cost of advertising and all that.
00:25:13
Speaker
for a block platform, it is extremely hard to monetize unless you have to enter vendors. Not to not to get enough revenue from advertising. I was very obvious in the beginning. There would be certain vendors or employers who would run employer branding campaign.
00:25:35
Speaker
It's a lot. I remember it's we had some campaign. We were at some campaign. When say put this and which they are running on knockery and other. Some just say why don't you put it on your site. I'll pay you some money.
00:25:47
Speaker
So what we did was we launched a bunch of products, we launched premium listings, we had a very interesting product on employer branding, something around diversity hiring. We did a product on analytics, data analytics. So we kind of with that five lags, our first few sales people started closing accounts, started adding customers. And then we became cashflow positive really fast, because our costs were low,
00:26:16
Speaker
But unlike other platforms, we were not spending any money on advertising. So, our only cost was server cost which is again insignificant and then the headcount cost. So, we became cashflow positive really fast. We just went on to deploy that money to hire more sales and more engineers and just build the product based on the feedback they bring and find more prospects and more customers.
00:26:45
Speaker
sell, sell to them. And that's how we, of course, more money in 2016, I think, which is what you were looking at, it was announced. But that's, that's how the journey was. This was about, I think, almost $2 billion, you raised in 2016. Something like that. Yeah. What kind of Edwin's revenue that you had by that time? I think maybe 13.
00:27:13
Speaker
Yeah. Rough numbers is okay. Just get a broad estimate. But that revenue used to be like super high because it's all extremely high. Okay. We're just creating a login for you. High operating leverage as they say. So what did you use those funds for then? Why did you raise? I mean, if you had such a high margin,
00:27:43
Speaker
I looking back maybe I shouldn't have reached honest but back then the thinking was that we were growing we didn't use any actually we didn't use any of those that money looking back maybe I shouldn't why do you feel you shouldn't have what was wrong in it like the dilution is what you regret that you diluted your stink because we didn't use the money
Ventures into Hyrest and Founding Juno School
00:28:13
Speaker
Because we didn't use money and of course, see the process in itself, the process of raising money is distracting. It's not like I had 10 people coming and saying, here's money, sign this. You know, we had to run the process and we couldn't wait and all that which takes. So the process is distracting in new people and they have their own ways.
00:28:39
Speaker
you are accountable to them then they will start asking new set of questions to you. So looking then I felt that there was no need for all that hassle and I was you know the business was self sustainable maybe what I have done was I could have gone to a bank in a line of credit for all that peace of mind and that was all that was required. Okay so that one like from 16 onwards till you sold tell me that journey and what led up to the sale.
00:29:08
Speaker
So, 2019 is when we sold the company. Folks at Info Edge, we had known each other for a very long time. And I had tremendous respect for the company and we were a small team. I mean, we were doing, but of course, Nokia had massive distribution and they were working with every employer and so on.
00:29:33
Speaker
And which is how it actually fanned out. You know, the business after the acquisition grew many fold, even during COVID. And the brand was established, not the sales team loved the product. And they started offering it to their existing customers and there was massive take and the revenue grew many fold.
00:29:57
Speaker
Okay. So, what was the revenue when you sold? I think we went to almost 20 crores or something. It's not, we didn't have other options. We had a lot of options. Any international player who would look at India might put, you know, in very, because all the analysts were from top schools and they would know I am Jaws. People don't know any of them. They, you know, come to us. But I always said, you know, of course, money is important.
00:30:23
Speaker
But the brand has to be bigger than each one of us and it has to outlive us. That's our success. That's our success. That's why I felt that it was extremely important for me to understand who's the right partner, who can help scale this brand and grow the brand further. And that's why I felt that InfoEdge was much better.
00:30:54
Speaker
But you did try to go to other markets like HiRisk, Abdaz. Yes, we did. HiRisk did well. HiRisk was a tech hiring platform for hiring tech talent. You know, we would go to employers and people would say, you know, hiring for tech is a challenge and of course that's something that everybody knows.
00:31:20
Speaker
So we said, okay, let's use the infrastructure that we built for IM jobs to launch something for the tech hiring space. And that's when we launched Hyrest. Hyrest skilled well and it is scaling and again, continue to grow. But doing
00:31:44
Speaker
You know, looking back, I think we should have probably invested more in high-risk. Till the time of acquisition, we didn't have a single person who was focused exclusively on high-risk. So, anything that is happening for IM jobs would happen for high-risk.
00:32:03
Speaker
We would use the same code base and stack and everything used to be the same and we used to just create another instance and use it on high-risk. Our sales team used to be common because anybody who's selling jobs to any of those customers would also bundle high-risk and would get sold. So, everything was common.
00:32:28
Speaker
We didn't have anybody to focus exclusively on high-risk. Despite that, it was growing and it's very popular and so on. Looking back, I think we could have more resources. But doing multiple things in a startup is hard.
00:32:45
Speaker
So, one has to find the right balance between focus and finding new avenues for growth. In hindsight, of course, it is easy to say that maybe I should have spent more time, maybe I should have hired a couple of more folks, maybe diverted more money to high risk. But back then, the focus was on jobs. Again, we don't want to lose the territory that we've won.
00:33:14
Speaker
So let's talk about Juneau now. So once you sold live jobs to Info Edge, you joined the group, right? Was it very clear to you that you're here for a short stint and then you'll start your next venture?
00:33:29
Speaker
No, not really. Actually, when we sold the company, I thought, you know, I would stay longer and we'll kind of skate up and we'll continue to do what I was doing earlier. And of course, COVID happened around the same time. And I also explored a bunch of other things. I made some 30-40 angel investments just to kind of figure out investing is something that I enjoyed and wanted to do.
00:33:57
Speaker
But I came to the conclusion that I'm not a big company guy. I don't enjoy working in large companies. And folks at InfoEd were extremely warm and nice to me all this while.
00:34:14
Speaker
every level, not just at the top, but every level. They were extremely good to me. They were also good to the platform brand, our customers, to employees, to everybody. Like I said earlier, it was a very, very well-managed, well-assembled transaction. But personally, I felt that I didn't enjoy being part of a larger company.
00:34:41
Speaker
And, you know, I missed the early days of, you know, playing a startup and, you know, figuring out things. Like I said, investing in a bunch of startups. And I felt that I didn't like investing either. I just couldn't sit through, you know, presentation. I didn't enjoy it at all. So that's when I kind of thought,
00:35:11
Speaker
The time is right and it's better to go back to what I liked and what I enjoyed doing. And that's how, you know, started to work on Juno School. And what was the, like, tell me about the birth of the idea, you know, what made you want to do this? So...
00:35:34
Speaker
Basically, we hired a lot of people in sales in IAM jobs. We used to have a large team because we had to sell it to enterprise customers and we had a large distributed team. Initially, we had folks in Delhi, then we set up offices in every major city, Mumbai, Bangalore, Hyderabad, Chennai, Pune, all. And we used to have folks there.
00:35:58
Speaker
So, I spent a lot of time and anybody that we hired in our sales team in IAMJobs, they represent the brand and they represent me in some way. So, I had to be totally comfortable with whoever is representing IAMJobs in front of the customer. So, I interviewed thousands of people for
00:36:26
Speaker
for sales roles in iron. There are two or three things that I learned in the process. One thing was, while there are a large number of people into a sales role, nobody actually goes through a structured, formal sales training program. It's just going to fall out of our education system. For some reason, I don't know why. There are so many people who are selling.
00:36:56
Speaker
And there is no school, there is no university, there is nobody who is offering a sales course. People who go to B-school and do their MBA, you know, they have courses for marketing, but you know, reading Kotler and 4P and all that stuff, right?
00:37:14
Speaker
or even if there are courses in sales, those are leadership courses, channel management courses, stuff that people would do 10, 15, 20 years down the line in their career. But nobody's saying, hey, if you're an enterprise salesperson, or even if you're a salesperson, this is the structured sales training. Nobody goes through that. That is why. In fact,
00:37:41
Speaker
Go to the extent of saying that our education system does a terrible job of positioning sales as a career.
00:37:52
Speaker
Most people in our society for whatever reason, I don't know why it doesn't make sense to me as an entrepreneur, look down upon sales as a choice. And that's why there are no sales courses also. I mean, NIS was an attempt by NIT to do that but I don't think they could scale because the demand was not there.
00:38:12
Speaker
No, the demand was there and NIS is actually a massive brand. You talk to people, like everybody I speak to, everybody says NIS. Top of the mind, super brand. But those were different times and they were building physical centers and so on and so forth. You know, I feel that actually there are a large number of people who are in sales roles. People who are not in sales roles also need to have sales skills. And everybody is selling all the time.
00:38:40
Speaker
right from the CEO or folks in other functions, right? You need to be able to build relationships. You need to be able to communicate.
Mission and Vision of Juno School
00:38:49
Speaker
You need to be able to listen. You need to be able to ask the right question. You need to be able to pitch what is it that you are proposing. You have to follow up.
00:38:59
Speaker
whether you are in HR, you are in product, you are in marketing, you are in finance. So, I feel, I extremely strongly feel that everybody, just the way everybody should financially literate, just the way everybody should be able to speak and write well, just the way everybody should have basic understanding of maths, everybody needs to know sales. So, that has been
00:39:29
Speaker
thought process for people in the like in I am Jaws you know we used to hire people federally also and then we came to the conclusion that you know most people come with the baggage from the type of industries and companies that they've sold in they so they don't have formal sales training
00:39:48
Speaker
And along with that, they have baggage on the basis of who their manager was, who their lead was. You know, they would try to sell in that way. So, we came to the conclusion that it is actually better to hire freshers and put them through a one to two month training and we found that it was scalable and so on. You know, people turned out to be great.
00:40:16
Speaker
you know in our case they were selling topmost lever people that recruitment and ledger had in large companies and they were able to kind of do so. So that was the learning and insight which you know I start you know school. The idea is you know for folks early in their career whether they are in sales or not in sales should go through a two month structured sales training program
00:40:45
Speaker
Again, saints, of course, you need to understand the fundamentals, you need to have structured framework, but also there has to be significant experiential learning for you to be... So, you don't learn by framework, you learn by experience, right? So, you do things, there is emphasis on role-plays,
00:41:08
Speaker
assignments, their projects, observations. You can't learn sales from books.
00:41:16
Speaker
I mean, of course, books are valuable and you have the basic framework. But let's say if I have to turn to make a page, then I need some mentor who listens to my page. And since these are the mistakes that you're doing, or if I'm in a sales conversation, I want some mentor who tells me, these are the questions that you should have asked.
00:41:41
Speaker
Or why did you interject at this point when the prospect is speaking? You let him speak. So these are the fundamentals while you could read it in a book that you should listen more than you speak, for example. It doesn't register. But when you do it two or three times with a trainer and somebody says, this is the field, then that's the way to learn sales. And that's what we are trying to do.
00:42:13
Speaker
Okay. So what is the way in which you're doing this? Is it an online course? Is it like, do you have like a campus and these are like, is it like a postgraduate diploma kind of a course or what is it like? No, it's a fully, right now it's a fully online program. And like all the conversation, all the discussions, all the meetings, everything happens.
00:42:41
Speaker
As I mentioned, sales is a life skill. Everybody should do it. Why should we put the errors and restrictions on who cannot learn sales?
00:42:50
Speaker
that everybody is, you know, most welcome and to do that. We are just getting started. I think that, you know, as we grow, we will see scenes in itself is fairly specialized across industry, right? So, the way enterprise software is sold is different from the way real estate is sold is different from other consumer products and so on so forth. So, while, you know, we're just getting started, I feel as we scale,
00:43:21
Speaker
makes sense to actually have specialized courses across industry level and so on so forth. But right now, we are doing one program, which is a Tom Barts program.
00:43:34
Speaker
which is online, happens early morning or evenings and then we bring people from the industry, you know, spend time, talk about best practices. Interestingly, you know, technology has so many tools, makes the job of a salesperson so much easier.
00:44:04
Speaker
If you today hire and talk to, most people won't be aware, right? So again, just the way you, for example, have labs in an engineering college, you know, we have the same construct where we say, hey, these are the tools that every salesperson shows. Okay. So like LinkedIn sales navigator, for example. Yeah, a bunch of them. Like CRM, for example, is basic. LinkedIn sales navigator.
00:44:33
Speaker
Then there are a lot of tools that help you prospect. There are tools that, for example, help you send the right emails. Are your mails being read or not? How do you send the pricing quotation? So, like tons of tools which are available in the market. Then most people are not exposed to and I feel that, you know, that would
00:44:59
Speaker
help them be more employable and do much better in their sales career. So you have like a collaboration with the companies behind these tools to kind of let the students get a experience of it. So we invite experts and they kind of
00:45:22
Speaker
Come with the product, show the product. We have sessions. Most of these products are Frito.
00:45:29
Speaker
register for consumers. Right. There'll be a trial period and all that. Premium model. Nobody stops you from actually registering on LinkedIn sales navigator for a month and use the same for Salesforce, same for any other CEO. So we don't have those collaborations today but I think those are not very hard to do and as we scale up kind of. And so what is the cohort for this? Is it like people who are already doing sales? So
00:45:59
Speaker
There are 2-3 type of people that we get to see in the cohorts. One is folks who have 3-2-5 years of experience in sales, who are self-aware and who know that this is a gap. They think that was the right path. They want to pursue and do better.
00:46:24
Speaker
in the sales role that they are in. But they also feel that they don't have adequate skills and they want to acquire those skills. That's one large cohort. The other is there are a lot of small business owners who feel that they can do much better if they
00:46:49
Speaker
have better sales skills. Interestingly, business owners for us is a smaller cohort, but it's another segment that we see interest from.
00:47:00
Speaker
Then the third is people who are not in a sales role, who are either in adjacent roles or people who are not related to sales at all, but feel that these are things that they should anyways know. That's also another interest. I mean, though these two are smaller segments, the largest segment is, of course, people who are already in sales and self-aware and want to do better.
00:47:21
Speaker
So do you also plan a B2B version of it? Like where you, for example, would go to noxy.com and run a sales training program for their sales team and things like that.
00:47:36
Speaker
See, the thing with B2B is then you end up customizing and it doesn't stay a product. So, for example, if I go to a company that has a large sales team, all large companies actually engage with training companies and feel answered, you know, who helped from a sales training standpoint. But the level of customization that is required
00:48:02
Speaker
is extremely high, right. So, then you end up being in a services business which does not scale and so on, right. So, the idea here is to not become a consulting firm, a training consulting firm, but yet defined
00:48:22
Speaker
and a product that we can offer at scale now some employer comes to us and says hey one of our guys this program and we really liked it can you give us 30 more
00:48:36
Speaker
The answer to that is yes, but with no customization as is. Of course, they are most welcome to join the program. But it's the same problem in IM jobs also. When we started selling IM jobs, people used to say, hey, can you hire for us? Of course, we can hire, but then we end up becoming a recruitment agency, right? It doesn't scale and is a different model and so on. So, very clearly, we are a product business. We want to build our brand. We want to scale the product so that we can offer it to a large number of people.
00:49:02
Speaker
So, just doing it, ISB also offers programs to companies but it's a brand. So, you want Juno to be the brand and offer courses which can be offered at scale to a large number. So, what is the product journey so far? What have you built as a product here? Like, what of course would be like a video conferencing part of it for the classes? What else is there?
00:49:30
Speaker
So, we are extremely early in the process and it's been a few months, a few quarters and I feel that we are still at a stage where we are
00:49:44
Speaker
figuring out the right value proposition for our moves. See, building a product is easy. Once you know what you have to do, you can build that, right? And building an LMS or above the product, again is fair, easy now. It's a solved problem, right? The harder problem is to say, hey, what is the curriculum that we should offer?
00:50:10
Speaker
that we could offer, what is the right duration? What is the right curriculum in that duration? It creates a meaningful impact in the live person who's actually taking the program. If I go through your program for two months, do I actually become a better salesperson? Or if I'm not in sales, do I acquire certain skills that help me
00:50:39
Speaker
help me do better in whatever I
Juno School's Strategy and Future
00:50:42
Speaker
am doing. So I think right now we are on a journey and then it has to be done in a way that it is easier to sell. It has to be meaningful to the person who is buying but at the same time it has to be packaged and priced in a way that it is easier to sell and then you figure out what is the right go to market. So I think we are at a stage where we are trying to
00:51:09
Speaker
identify that offering and value proposition before we start writing software. Okay, makes sense. Okay. And what have you priced it at? So right now it is priced at 10,000 rupees. Okay, which is pretty reasonable. Which is low price. I mean, of course, we are at a state we have, we just put a number and we say, let's see what is the, we don't know when
00:51:36
Speaker
See, if I were to think about it in terms of value that is being delivered, of course, it is maybe 10 times the value that is being delivered. But the harder problem at this stage is to demonstrate value and figure out what is the right price point in the market. Why? What is the way to demonstrate value? Is it through salary entries, like jobs? Is it a job-oriented course?
00:52:04
Speaker
No, no, so we are very clear that we don't promise jobs.
00:52:10
Speaker
We are not a recruitment business. We are not filming at recruitment arena. Again, coming back to the same discussion we had earlier. See, if I start promising jobs, I will have Indians or people outside my door tomorrow morning. Yeah, 10,000. Yeah, absolutely. And enterprise. Even at one leg, I will get a lot of interest.
00:52:36
Speaker
But the point is, are you able to deliver on that place consistently? So, our view is very clear. We are not promising jobs. We are promising education and skill set. And if we do a good job of teaching you sales, then finding a job is not hard. Finding a job is also a sales process.
00:53:03
Speaker
You have to cross. You have to create the list of companies that you're interested in. Then you have to find the people in those companies. Reach out to them. Then you have to say, yeah, I'm a person because this is the experience that I have. And then you have to close. So finding out for a good salesperson is actually, it's fairly trivial. So our view is very clear.
00:53:30
Speaker
We are not a recruitment company. We don't promise jobs. We promise good education. We promise skill building. And hopefully that should translate into a great career for you. We are extremely clear that this is the path that
00:53:47
Speaker
And is this like a cohort based learning? Like you have like say a batch of 50 kids and they learn together with a lot of PL activities, group activities. Like how an MBA is, is it like a similar approach? It's actually better than an MBA. At least the MBA that I did. Of course it is not residential, but there is a cohort of 40 learners.
00:54:11
Speaker
which is extremely interactive. There's a bunch of projects and role plays are extremely important in sales. So people do give feedback to each other. Trainers give feedback. That's some of these skills. How many kids have you trained so far? How many students? I think we have about 70, 1800.
00:54:43
Speaker
are not so far. Maybe this is very early, like the market is you, there's so many people, everybody should learn sales. I feel like it's near zero. So what's your advice to young professionals who are thinking about partnerships? So my advice to them would be
00:55:10
Speaker
Acquire skills, focus on skills. Take up roles where you get to learn your skills. Learn to learn, write code, learn marketing, do all that. Keep your personal cost low.
00:55:36
Speaker
I haven't seen a lot of people get successful in a year or two. I mean, of course, some people win lottery tickets. Surely, you know, you can think about it and say, haha, you're successful in six months. But of all the people that I know in my debt, and you know, people I started, then so on. And it's much easier to raise money now. But my advice to people,
00:56:01
Speaker
Thinking of starting a same buddy, keep your cost, no quiet skills. And that brings us to the end of this conversation. I want to ask you for a favor now. Did you like listening to the show? I'd love to hear your feedback about it. Do you have your own startup ideas? I'd love to hear them. Do you have questions for any of the guests that you heard about in the show? I'd love to get your questions and pass them on to the guests. Write to me at ad at the podium dot in. That's ad at T H E P O D I U M dot in.