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The global SaaS venture for educators | Deepak Joy Cheenath @ Quizzizz
412 Plays2 years ago
Quizzizz is the most unique ed-tech startup in India. It does not have a large sales team responsible for acquiring users. But it’s a product with massive global adoption. Deepak talks about his journey of finding product market fit and then scaling up through a product-led growth strategy.
Read the text version of the episode here.
Read more about Quizzizz :-
1.Why US kids are raving about an Indian quiz app
2.Edtech Startup Quizizz See Huge Spike In Global Adoption With 65 Mn MAU
3.After tasting success in US, edutech startup Quizizz makes India debut
4.Quizizz raises $31.5 million from Tiger Global, Yahoo’s Yang
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Transcript
Introduction and Early Journey
00:00:00
Speaker
Hey everybody, I'm Deepak, co-founder of Quizzes.
00:00:15
Speaker
Nothing can stop an idea whose time has come. And if the product you're building is an idea whose time has come, then what you really need to get right is your product market fit. Product market fit is the state in which a startup's product is so powerfully useful for the market that the viral adoption loop kicks in. And this episode is a masterclass in product market fit. Quizzes is the most unique edtech startup out of India.
00:00:39
Speaker
It does not have a large sales team responsible for acquiring users. It does not spend money on Google and Facebook ads. And it does not pay any celebrities to promote it. But it's a product with massive global adoption. It's one of the most popular tools for teachers to make their classes more interactive and fun.
00:00:57
Speaker
Deepak Chinnat, the co-founder of Quizzes, talks to your host Akshay Dutt in this episode of the Founder Thesis Podcast about his journey of finding product market fit and then scaling up through a product-led growth strategy. Stay tuned and subscribe to the Founder Thesis Podcast and any audio streaming app to hear about the many paths to discovering product market fit.
00:01:27
Speaker
So I was born in Ahmedabad in Gujarat. So my dad was in the government. He was an IAS officer. And based out of Gujarat, growing up, I actually moved around quite a bit between like Gujarat and Delhi. My father even went to the US for five years. So I did some of my schooling there. Then I was
00:01:49
Speaker
in boarding schools from the 9th onwards. So I was really hopping around a lot as a kid, barely spent more than a few years in any one place. But I think you're over the 11th and 12th, even just doing computer science in school, right? You have your projects, the library management tab and all of that. I enjoyed that stuff. And I actually built like the website of my own, just my personal website.
00:02:19
Speaker
and still doesn't have much, but I think by that time I figured that I'd really enjoy programming, right? And so by the time I was getting into college, I'd actually kind of decided I wanted to get into that line of, you know, engineering, which I think was good. Otherwise I may have just done the normal thing, right? Go to the best college you have and take what is a branch you get. So that I think helped. Okay.
00:02:46
Speaker
And so you joined BITS and that's where you met your co-founder Ankit also, right? Yes. So we actually, again, it was fate, I guess, that they randomly just pay two kids and me and Ankit were paid together. We are from very different backgrounds and everything.
00:03:02
Speaker
Paired in a project or like as roommates? No, as roommates, yeah. Okay. And we actually, often that's not with somebody else of the same branch, but as chance would have it, we were on the same branch too. So even second, third, fourth year, we were together because after that, you stick with your branches. So we became really good friends then during college. Amazing. Okay.
00:03:28
Speaker
So what next that once you like graduated from bits? I think we both had some interesting, so I think some interesting journeys, but during college, I think both of us had done a lot of these little projects, whether it was for the college or just for our own entertainment. And, but after that, you know, it came time for placement, just like everybody
Founding Wizen World
00:03:49
Speaker
else. I think you're looking for a good salary, nice company.
00:03:52
Speaker
interesting work. And so I ended up at Amazon as a software engineer. And Ankit joined this company called Opera Solutions, which was a kind of a business, no, not the browser company, I see. So this is a different company, which was into business analytics and
00:04:10
Speaker
big data sort of analysis. And so he was a kind of a data researcher there. And then he, in fact, an interesting part of Ankit's journey before we got out to college, he actually interned at Flipkart. He was one of the very early folks there when they were just maybe 40-50 people. He did like six months. So after working a little over a year, I think at Opera, he joined one of our batch mates
00:04:36
Speaker
who was doing this startup of their own. And so he did that for around a year before we ultimately started up together. This you're talking of Weizen world. So Weizen world was what we did after that. Yeah. So tell me about the journey of jumping into entrepreneurship, like leaving that comfort of a job and starting that journey. Tell me about that. How did that happen?
00:05:01
Speaker
What's the story there is like? So I mean, I think one good thing was the job itself, wasn't that comfortable hitting Amazon really makes you snog. And so though I enjoyed it, I had no complaints about it. And in fact, I think that's what got me thinking that if I'm working this hard anyway, why not think of doing something on my own nearby. I had actually tried a few things on my own on the side and during even my after joining Amazon. And I realized I just wasn't able to do justice.
00:05:31
Speaker
Either you do it full time or you might as well not do it. So I think I was sort of in that state of mind when Ankit reached out and we started talking about maybe doing something together. We'd always done these projects even in college and I think we both felt like this is as good a time as any because you know before we invested a lot into our careers and all of that
00:05:54
Speaker
Why not give it a try now? I think a lot of people wonder or ask us, right? Like, how did you take such a big risk? But I feel like that was the least risky thing to do at that time because what you have to use, right? And the worst happened that all goes down the drain, you come back.
00:06:11
Speaker
a year or two later with this great experience under your belt. And you'll probably pick up right where you would have been had you just stayed in the corporate job even. So, I didn't really see it as a risk as such. And I think we were always, we had this mindset that if it's not working out, we'll just drop it. We can always come back to our job. We had that confidence at least that we can share an interview. That stack was like a safety net. I think that helped.
00:06:40
Speaker
What did you want to do? I think with how this idea itself came about, we were actually thinking about different types of ideas. To be honest, it wasn't that we had decided upon education as the only thing.
00:06:57
Speaker
So, we actually spent a couple of months before we actually took the plunge and quit our job, just brainstorming on ideas, not building anything. And we tried to step on finance and ticket booking and all the usual suspects. And ultimately, I think at that time, I was also volunteering as a teacher
00:07:17
Speaker
And I got to see the technology available to teachers to work with their students and it was, you know, very uninspiring to say the least. I think we've all seen. You were like a teacher in India, like a formal
00:07:37
Speaker
It was this thing called Youth for Seva, where I would just go occasionally, it wasn't as serious as like a full Teach for India Fellowship. But I went for a few and I think that gave me this idea, the seed maybe. And then I discussed with Ankit and he was also pretty excited. I think it seemed like this really interesting problem to work on.
00:08:02
Speaker
and also an underserved market. Like at that time, there were great things being built. There was YouTube and social media and all kinds of other email, these great tools, but we didn't see that level of polish in the education domain. So we thought even we could probably build something that will be useful to people.
00:08:22
Speaker
And that's where it got started. I think we were just excited about this space in general. And without anything more, I think we decided to just take the plunge we put in our papers and decided to shift to Bangalore. So Ankit at that time was in Delhi. I was in Hyderabad. So we both sort of shifted into my brother's spare room in Bangalore. And eventually, in a few weeks, colonized the living room also.
00:08:48
Speaker
But that became our office for well over a year, I guess. And yeah, I think like one of the smart things I think in that respect that we did was we started by finding a school that we could work with. So that became sort of our initial phase of just discovery was every week we would go to the school and work with a small group of students and a teacher and start building things and just showing them, right? And that's actually where we sort of ended up building Wise in World and all of that.
00:09:19
Speaker
What did you discover in that period of that one year when you were doing the discovery?
00:09:24
Speaker
Yeah, it was interesting because it was for us at that time, two years out of college, we really didn't know anything about much. And so I think what that really helped us with was just to get that feedback, right? Because going every week and working with this very different type of audience, right? So the great thing about kids is they don't really hold back, right? When it comes to, you can just see the feedback on their face. They're not really concerned too much about your feelings.
00:09:52
Speaker
So we started with this idea of building games, right? We thought that would be the best way to engage a student. And so we make these little mini games and show them to the students. And this is for like 6 to 10 age group or something like that. This was middle schoolers. So yeah, I'd say like, yeah, 8 to 11, that kind of range. And so they were old enough that they could kind of articulate what they were thinking and all of that.
00:10:18
Speaker
And so actually we learned a lot of interesting things, which seemed maybe obvious, but that we made these very simple games and then we started elevating to more complex thinking that is going to really level up the experience. But then we found sometimes kids would not at all engage with those more complicated things.
00:10:38
Speaker
It was too complicated. So there's value of keeping things simple. You know, how long, you know, somebody like ultimately learning something is a hard process, right? Nothing can make away from that. But I think what we realized is we are making that experience a little more digestible, right? A little more entertaining and rewarding, right? Breaking it into chunks that make it a little less painful, right? So that's really what we discovered.
00:11:05
Speaker
Was it like a story in which there are questions coming in the middle, like something like that? It was kind of the idea, like you would start, we'd made this, that's actually out there on YouTube, the intro video, really quite bad, made on PowerPoint, less background trend.
00:11:22
Speaker
But yeah, the real idea was that you wanted to make this immersive, this epic story where you would, as you went through it, you would have to apply yourself to learn the
The Rise of Quizzes
00:11:34
Speaker
new concepts, all questions and move through it. Ultimately, of course, building something like that is no easy task for
00:11:42
Speaker
two guys should have never done it before. So what ended up being built was this progression of levels where you would solve problems essentially to progress, right? And each level had a theme and all of that. But that story part was something we were still trying to get into it. And we never did really. Yeah.
00:12:01
Speaker
I mean, you would need like graphic design, animation, all of those skill sets, which among the two of you, you didn't really have to. Yeah. And at that stage, right. So we copied things together using free resources and all of that. Yeah. But yeah, we didn't even have money to pay anybody. Literally we were running on our savings from our, you know, short stints networking. Yeah. So, so you built like a test or an assessment kind of a product, like.
00:12:27
Speaker
Well, you could say it was a practice product where students could pick a topic and sort of play this game that helped them solve questions and things like that. So I think in those early days, because also how we sort of built it, but even as soon as we put the link out there, I think we realized that this is something that teachers were going to use with their students, though that wasn't something we knew before launch.
00:12:53
Speaker
As soon as we looked at the analytics, we would, you know, like 25 people pop up in one place and we knew it's like a teacher and students. A teacher is using it in school too. Okay. And it started picking up in the US and these other countries where they had that sort of infrastructure, right? And yeah. So why?
00:13:14
Speaker
topics, like global topics on which you had the tests. Yeah, definitely global, like maths, it was all math, like simple, like arithmetic and reading. Okay. Yeah. So you could say, yeah, from like third, fourth to seventh, swaggering or popular topics. Yeah. Okay. Okay. And this was like a web app, which you started and you called it quizzes or like, what did you call it?
00:13:40
Speaker
No, so this was called Weizenworld. So this was around 2013. June was when we quit our jobs and started. And until around the end of 2014, we worked on Weizenworld, which was this math learning game kind of thing where we were making the content and creating these game levels and all of that ourselves.
00:14:00
Speaker
Oh, it was only focused on math. Only on math. Yeah. Got it. Got it. Okay. So, so then what, like, how did Wyzen become quizzes? Yeah. So that was, so around, you know, during this journey, we also got into this accelerator program, GSF India. And there we got this opportunity to pitch our product to a lot of investors. And I think the great thing about that program was we just really were forced to do a lot of pitches to a lot of VCs.
00:14:30
Speaker
and get a lot of rejections. So I think helped us refine that pitch, but we also at towards the end of it, we realized this product is not clicking with investors. We were quite happy with our pitch by that time, but just the scale of it and we were
00:14:48
Speaker
personally struggling with just keeping up with the content demands because users were actually engaging and enjoying the product. We had I think around towards the end, it may be 45,000 registered users, teachers and students, but they would drop off in a couple of weeks or a month because that was all the content we had. And so creating and this was, yeah, and there was a monetization.
00:15:12
Speaker
No, it was completely free as well. So there was no monetization needed. And so we couldn't even pump in money or anything to churn out more. And also, I mean, it took it was more than just creating questions that you had to create this game experience and all of that. Yeah, you have to build in those hints and like all the interactive layer on top of that set of questions.
00:15:34
Speaker
Exactly. So we were really struggling with kind of churning out content. And we also kept hearing from students that they wanted to play with their friends, right? They wanted it to be multiplayer, which was the single player experience. So
00:15:49
Speaker
We were at this crossroads pretty much where we weren't really getting to where we wanted to be on Wyzenworld. And so we could have either thrown in the towel, as they say at that time, or, you know, we thought we were excited about exploring this idea, though, right? Can we make something multiplayer that also is crowd source, right? Opens it up for teachers to sort of fill in the content.
00:16:12
Speaker
And that's where really quizzes was literally the simplest way we could achieve those two things. Because we wanted to do it in Weisenberg, but to make a system where teachers can kind of build that themselves would have been a lot of work. So we thought, okay, let's make this simple quiz game.
00:16:28
Speaker
make it fun and competitive. We know how to build a nice experience there and let teachers put in the questions and we'll make it just engaging and leverage this multiplier dynamic. And we, I think built it in like a month or a month and a half and put out as opposed to wise in world where we worked on it for six months plus before we even put out anything, I think more than nine months probably.
00:16:52
Speaker
And we had really built out the whole experience. With quizzes, we made this really bare bones thing, which though had something useful, like this one quiz experience that's multiplayer and where students can do the questions at their own pace. And that was something that wasn't really available at the time, like a student-based multiplayer quiz. Most of the things that were out there had it go one question for the whole class at the same time. And by then we knew a little bit about how to get
00:17:21
Speaker
the early word out, right? Like how we can get to at least a few thousand teachers. We had all these forums and we'd build some friends among teachers. So we just put it out to them. In fact, we actually didn't even leverage the wise in world audience because we were like, let's not ruin wise in world. We've got something good there. This thing may or may not really take off.
00:17:42
Speaker
So let's try it out as this separate experiment. But yeah, the interesting thing was a couple of months into it, we could just see the trajectory being so different, right? The users were a lot more sticky and they were, we had removed the shackles, right? That you can only use this for the content we've made. So teachers just dived in, started making their own content and they just made it their own platform.
00:18:06
Speaker
And I think that's what unlocked our growth. I think within two months we had to surpass whatever numbers we had on twice in the world in a year and a half. So I want to like zoom in on a couple of things. Did you raise funds from GSF that you joined the GSF accelerator? So GSF happened in
00:18:27
Speaker
the middle of our early part of 2014. And we did get a little funding there, but that was again, maybe enough to just pay us some meager salary. After we launched quizzes, we actually got back with to our investors, right, who yet we wise and will do and
00:18:44
Speaker
through GSF. We had got in touch with these investors through GSF. So then we just had to reach out to them again. And so then Prime Ventures, which was our first real investor, they had seen us during Wizen World and they liked what we were doing, but they weren't really seeing the growth that they were looking for.
00:19:04
Speaker
But we had told them that we're going to build this multiplayer thing, right? And when we went back to them three months later and said, yeah, it's built and it's bigger than Weissenworld and it's growing, I think they really appreciated that and we pretty much got the term sheet within days, I think. We just hired one person after we did that fundraise, around 500,000 dollars.
00:19:27
Speaker
And this one software engineer, I mean, so the three of us, then we're building it for the next nine months before. So, and our kind of subsequent hire after nine months was a recruiter, right? Who then helped us build out the rest of the team, because we realized by that time, this is not really our strength. You need somebody to keep the gas on, you know, growing of the team.
00:19:52
Speaker
I also want to zoom in on the product. Now you said it was a quiz product. Was it like a Google forms where there's a authoring interface where teachers can do the authoring and create the questions and the correct answers. And then there is a student interface where they have questions with like, say it could be multiple choice of it in the blank or so on, like something like that.
00:20:14
Speaker
Yeah. Pretty much that, right? So the only thing I, so it is kind of like that forms interface for a teacher, right? Where they create the questions in this tool. And I think where it differs is when you actually share that with students forms and all of these things are a very independent experience, right? You get your form link, you fill it up and you're done.
00:20:34
Speaker
Whereas in quizzes, you would do that together as a class. So everyone would join this game, the teacher would hit start and then you would see a live leaderboard and that was really the experience that clicked. Okay, so like in Google Forms, it shows you a progress tracker, which is your solo progress tracker. In quizzes, it would show you like progress tracker of multiple people and
00:20:59
Speaker
Yeah, you would see your rank going up and down and you would be on the board, you could see what's happening and all of that. So teachers often had a projector, right? So that's when there was music and animation. And you gave teachers the ability to add hints and stuff like that and to make the learning. So over time,
00:21:19
Speaker
Yes, we added the ability to add an explanation if somebody gets it wrong and add various types of questions. And these features that you allow a student to redo a question perhaps and reattempt the whole quiz and all of that so that for a teacher, it sort of just happens automatically to an extent.
00:21:39
Speaker
And this was like, what was the monetization here? Like a freemium model that teachers could. So we actually kept it completely free for the first five years, right? Since we launched quizzes, we had a long journey of keeping it free. And I think we could sustain that because the growth was really tremendous, right? So I think investors saw that and were ready to back us.
00:22:01
Speaker
And we also had a very low burn rate. So we had this small team of I told you for the first year, investors would actually tell us like, why aren't you, utilizing this money more effectively, which was a fair call out. And eventually also we grew to 10, 15 people who are still a very small team, mostly young folks straight out of college or one or two years experienced.
00:22:24
Speaker
And so it was a very lean, low burn team. You're not spending on marketing or any of that stuff, right? So we, that became actually our growth here with it, having this great free product that people would love to share and talk about. And you initially got it kickstarted by like, personally going on to various groups and forums of teachers and like spreading the word through more of those organic outreach efforts.
00:22:49
Speaker
Yes, exactly. So, that's how we got started because we didn't know anything else. So, we thought, how do we get people to try this? Let's see where teachers hang out and post it there. And thankfully, there would be different forums where mostly US teachers would
00:23:05
Speaker
be engaging and also they were engaging on other platforms like Twitter and things like that. So we then started figuring those things out. We would go reach out to some of these influencers on Twitter and take influencers.
00:23:21
Speaker
I think one of the great things, especially in those days was it was just this very close-knit community, right? You could just reach out to somebody even if they had like 100,000 followers and say, we want to check out this thing we're building. It's this free tool for teachers and they would get on a call with you and then they'd actually champion your product, right? If they liked it. And we, I think in those early days, we really leaned into
00:23:44
Speaker
teacher feedback, right? We would be on chat support. We had the simple chat support widget and 24 seven, we were online, right? So in those initial days, I don't even know when I slept because I was so excited, you know, we were working in the day and at night, we were working from India, right? And the US will come in towards the evening and you would just stay up and then sort of those are somewhere in between that. That really helped us to actually figure out how to evolve the product.
00:24:13
Speaker
because we had very little idea, right? We were not teachers. So, but we just listened to teachers and everything they said, we just tried to do it as soon as possible. I think that was our strength of building like a nice product experience and doing it quickly. Engineering, I think has always been kind of our core strength that quizzes.
00:24:32
Speaker
We just leaned into that, like we would be so desperate to retain that user. We'd be like, oh, this guy bothered to give us feedback. Let's build it quickly. And sometimes the same day we would email them back saying, and now what you asked, what is there or that problem you had this fixed now. Right. Yeah.
00:24:52
Speaker
Give me examples of this evolution journey, like what were some of those things which you learned that we need to incorporate these features. Yeah, there were so many all kinds of little things that I remember we used to let students, your teachers set the time and we had up to like from five seconds to five minutes.
00:25:09
Speaker
And this one teacher said, can you add a bigger, longer time option, like 15 minutes? And we thought like, my name is CQ, question, and this multiplayer experience, 15 minutes is a crazy amount of time, right? But we were like, fine, what do we lose, right? We just add an option.
00:25:25
Speaker
And interestingly, after that, we started seeing people say that you can use quizzes for long form question. If you want to do like a deeper sort of a quiz, you can use this platform. So all these sort of little things, right. I remember in our initial three, four years, the most popular tweet that we had was that we had this feature to print a quiz where you could basically print it as a PDF, the content.
00:25:51
Speaker
And that was very, the whole point of quizzes is so that you don't have to do that. But, you know, teachers, so we never thought about that feature would your, a bunch of teachers said, please add the answer sheet, you know, the answer key to that list of questions. And so we added that little thing and it became our most popular to each. Why is that? Yeah. So now the thing is, that's the thing when you, I think just listen to users, right?
00:26:16
Speaker
What we realized later was that wasn't that teachers were just printing out quizzes and giving to their students, right? Was that they would do an activity with their class, but two kids would not be there. They'd be at home or something, and they wanted to give them the same quiz and they want to make a separate game for them. That just felt though they could do that, they could just make another game two clicks and sync it to those kids.
00:26:41
Speaker
but they felt like, okay, B schedule left out, so I need to give them a printout. That was their way of thinking. And so we just all for that right here. So that quiz became study material in a way, basically. Yeah, it became like a makeup assignment for them. Fascinating. Does the checking happen automatically? Like you can only do like limited type of questions, which are easy to check. Or can you also do like,
00:27:04
Speaker
questions where people can write a full sentence, because the moment you go into writing full sentence, then that's not something which can be automatically checked, right? Right, right. So that still remains like a limitation of question, right? That largely you can only do objective type of questions, but we've tried to at least add variety in that where you can do max the columns, or you can do a fill in the blank or a drag and drop or drawing type of questions. And there are certain questions where
00:27:32
Speaker
we just can't evaluate. So the teacher by default, we let the teacher grade those manually. But I think that's one area where we are looking into. In that case, the leaderboard at all will not be there in time if the teacher has to evaluate manually.
00:27:47
Speaker
Yes. So typically what we see is there will be a couple of those questions in a quiz, but not the entire quiz of that kind. Though we also do see where teachers have the whole quiz that way, and then usually they're not using it in that competitive way. So teachers can actually turn off the leaderboard and those sort of things. Yeah.
00:28:05
Speaker
Okay, there is a more serious like what we used to have in our school days like a class quiz, you know, we used to have every Monday used to be a quiz day or like a test, some Monday test kind of a thing we used to have. And what kind of traction were you seeing? Like, what was the peak traction, which you saw at Weiserworld and then tell me like, what kind of traction did you see?
00:28:28
Speaker
So I remember like in after a couple of months of launch, I think two months or so, we hit this milestone of a million questions solved on quizzes, way more than what we had done on Weisenwald. And so like today, I could say that we end up doing that within like a couple of minutes. So that is sort of the progression we've seen over the years. But if I talk about like 2015,
00:28:57
Speaker
we hit roughly like 100K users, right? Then we, in 2016, we kind of really in terms of percentage, we went through more than 10X, right? To around like one, one to 2 million monthly actives, right? Then we, the next year, we went to five, 6 million, then 10 million, right? In 2018. So it was all due.
00:29:21
Speaker
In a way, it is very gradual growth,
Monetization and Global Expansion
00:29:23
Speaker
right? I would say people tend to look at where you are now, but it took us like five years to really get to like 20, 25 million active users. So it was a very gradual growth where every month we would just grow a little bit, but steadily growing. Yeah. Okay. So today you are at 25 million MAU.
00:29:43
Speaker
So now we are at actually over around 70 million MAUs. Yeah. 70 million. Wow. Amazing. Amazing. So then after the initial five years, we've now had two more years since we started monetizing and all of that. And that also coincided with the pandemic and everything. So very interesting, very different two years for sure. So in your users, the student is also a user.
00:30:11
Speaker
Yes. Yeah. When I talk about these users, I'm talking about students as well. Yeah. Students plus teachers. Okay. So students have their own login where they can see the history of scores, like their journey, they can see over there, like something like that. They can see the history and things like that. The word we've seen is
00:30:29
Speaker
students don't really want to sit and analyze that a lot because largely it's guided by the teacher and see most of the engagement is driven by a teacher assigning a teacher in class or as a homework assignment, that kind of thing.
00:30:44
Speaker
Okay. So in case of homework assignment, it will not be like start, stop by teacher, but teacher will say that over the next 24 hours, you have to complete this something like that. They can set some timeline or even just keep some teachers have a list of 20 quizzes, which their students can come anytime and play. So quizzes that way now over the years, we really try to solve for a lot of different ways in which teachers can use this platform.
00:31:11
Speaker
But we still try to keep according to them. So yeah, let's talk about monetization. So where did you decide you want to monetize? You were at what number of MEUs when you decided to monetize? And which year was it? Yes, I'd say we actually were starting to think about it from our kind of third, fourth year itself, right, of operation. And by that point, we knew we had a sizable sort of, we were getting to be even one of the biggest in the world, right.
00:31:38
Speaker
And so far, just that 500k from Prime was sustaining you. 500k dollars for this. No, so in 2018, we also raised another 3 million from Nexus Venture Partners. But we did have another fundraising between, but this was all way before we started monetizing. But we did have that solid growth already going.
00:32:01
Speaker
What I think, so after that next fundraise from next week, that's when we started really thinking about it. And what we were actually hoping to do was to not charge teachers at that time. We knew that teachers had so much value to our platform. So one of the things we didn't talk about just that all the content is created by, and we did talk about that it's all created by teachers. So
00:32:26
Speaker
that really is what allowed quizzes to be used in so many different countries and for all types of subjects. In fact, we have right from school teachers to bank employees and fortune 500 company users and casual people just doing a pub quiz just because it's this next week. We tried ad-based monetization that we had this huge user base, but pretty soon we realized that's not something we wanted to do.
00:32:53
Speaker
Just because the audience we are working with, students and teachers, so we pivoted away from that. Then we tried actually building experiences for students, right? Like we thought if we could get even one student in a classroom to pay, they have essentially the same paying capacity as a teacher, right? The parent of the student. So that could be this great monetization, but I don't think we were ready for that because we didn't have parents on our platform in teaching.
00:33:20
Speaker
at that time, especially. So then we took that as a learning that, you know, we tried premium content, right, which students could pay for, we tried these more fancy power ups that wouldn't allow you to win, but just allowed you to create like a moment in the class, right? Like draw attention to yourself or just create this one moment for everybody.
00:33:41
Speaker
Again, we saw good engagement on those sorts of things, but the willingness to pay wasn't there because I think ultimately the student has $10 and they're going to spend it on some actual game or some job.
00:33:56
Speaker
You know, platform that the teacher is using. In fact, so when we launched our paid product, we didn't take anything away from the free experience. We just added some new functionality, a couple of things which we knew teachers wanted, which we hadn't been able to build, which took some heavy investment. So we kind of built those over a couple of months, package these things at pretty much like around numbers to $5 a month as the price point and just put it out there.
00:34:22
Speaker
And I think to us, you know, we were thrilled to see that a lot of teachers just picked that up, right? They started paying out of their own pocket because they just enjoyed using quizzes, I think. And this was something within their pricing. And so we saw a lot of, we pretty much became prospectical overnight, as soon as we launched that. There was also this pent-up demand and all of that. So I think
00:34:47
Speaker
that was when we became a sustainable company. Covid must have really given you wings, right? Because the need for tools which allow you to do remote learning, remote teaching rather, must have exploded. Yes, for sure. And though we were actually not building that, we were building for
00:35:04
Speaker
teachers and students to engage online, but it was mostly happening in the classroom. But again, I think just because we always had that engineering hat on, we always built it like it should also work if they're remote and what if they're one kid at home and all that. So we had built everything to work well in this remote setting. And I think
00:35:23
Speaker
When the pandemic happened, all of a sudden teachers just found like there's a great platform that I can largely use even for free. And we saw this amazing growth and I think even a great growth in our revenue as well because those additional features were also quite valuable to teachers.
00:35:42
Speaker
Yeah. And like, did you have to build special stuff once COVID hit or like, how did COVID impact the way your business was running? Luckily, we were able to keep the site running, right? That didn't become an issue. We literally in countries, we grew like 10X overnight. Like
00:35:59
Speaker
Literally overnight where they would announce a lockdown and the next day and over a period of like a month where all the lockdowns happened that globally, we just had this huge surge. I remember India 2019 to 2020 was 30x growth for us, right? Like you had built it in a way that it was scalable, like easily scalable.
00:36:20
Speaker
Right, we built it all on cloud services like AWS, Kupi Cloud and all that. So that we were able to scale up pretty easily. And what did you include in the premium plan? What were those extra things that people paid for? Yeah, so it's interesting. It was actually...
00:36:36
Speaker
Really, it wasn't about powerful new features, right? And like, we didn't know that at the time. So we had a mix of those. Like we had the ability to add video and audio. We had like the question could be a video question. The teacher could be. Yeah.
00:36:52
Speaker
speaking out the question. And so it would make it more engaging, especially if you're doing remotely. Yeah. And especially like for language learning and those sort of things, audio becomes big, the ability to even have the student speak out audio.
00:37:08
Speaker
Yeah. Or video. And then just, I think it was around these, your new types of questions that you could create and just the ability to say, keep an assignment open for longer than things like that. And little things like if your assignment runs out, then being able to reopen that for say some students who are late. So eventually you win.
00:37:31
Speaker
Yeah, access to our library of content, things like that. It ultimately we realized that teachers wanted to save time, right? They wanted convenience. So, things that gave them that really worked well, right? So, if I don't have to submit send out a new assignment,
00:37:48
Speaker
right? Every two weeks, that was a limit we had the length of the assignment. So they would pay for that. Or if I just find this really great quiz, features would be to get access to our full library so that they can, you know, save that kind of time. And so, you know, something around bulk grading questions, things like that is what sort of eventually made it into it. But I'd say in the early days, there were just a few features.
00:38:13
Speaker
How did you create this library of quizzes that teachers could just use as templates? So we actually didn't create it at all. It was made by our users. So what we really focused on was giving them those really easy
00:38:30
Speaker
intuitive tools to create this interesting content and building that interface to create this varied content, right? So different question types or adding an explanation and a lot of the details in that, right? Like a lot of the popular platforms in those days had a limit for the length of the question, let's say.
00:38:48
Speaker
It would be 250 characters or something. We would say just put it as long as you want and be the other side of the interface that would automatically resize the text and maybe add a scroll bar if needed. So we really went deep into solving these, I mean, seem like small problems, but not really. If you have to give a 500 character question and that is beyond the limit, you're really stuck. That becomes a block for an English comprehension question.
00:39:18
Speaker
So those were the things. And so then what were the workarounds? They would take a photo of that passage and upload it, right? But that's not nice to read and render well across mobile and desktop. And now you can't read that out, right? So we had a feature that would say, use the browser's read aloud functionality. All that will fit in if this whole thing worked, right? What we were really doing is leveraging technology in the most effective way to solve these problems.
00:39:45
Speaker
So these quizzes that were created by other users, you license them out so that you can offer it to the rest of the, or like, how did that library of content, like how did that? You could think of it like YouTube, where all these creators come on the platform and upload their stuff further. So as a teacher, you had an option to keep it for their audience, basically.
00:40:06
Speaker
Yeah, you could keep it private like you can on YouTube, right for yourself. Or you can give access to your students and things or you can just put it out there for the world to leverage and teachers would do that because they were also saving so much time utilizing the content made by others. So percentage conversion do you see out of free users getting converted into paid users and you have a very large base. So I'm sure this will be a small number, but
00:40:34
Speaker
Right. So if I talk about globally, it's really a small number, right? I'd say in the US, where we've been our mainstay for a long time, we have a really healthy percentage there, right? So in this 5 to 10% range of our users end up upgrading in the US. And so there we have a really good product market fit here.
00:40:57
Speaker
And globally, what is the number? So that's something I mean, I honestly don't even know the exact number, but it would be very low. So in fact, in countries like India and Southeast Asia, we're pretty early, right? And actually the main difference is that in these countries, that decision to purchase is usually not a teacher paying out of their own pocket, right? It's usually the school.
00:41:22
Speaker
And we don't even have the sales set up right now to capture a lot of that. It's a lot of on the ground selling, which we need to figure out. Like in the US, we do have that aspect. So even our aim is increasingly how can we get the school or the organization to pay rather than the teachers themselves. And so we offered them like a refund of their school upgrades or those sorts of things as well.
00:41:48
Speaker
So that way the teacher becomes your salesperson then because she will get a refund. That's amazing. That is exactly what we would hope for, right? So you have like an offline sales team in the US, like which does these conversations with school administrators and so on.
00:42:04
Speaker
Yes, we have a team in the US and a team in India, because we get the majority of our leads are actually inbound. So a lot of people just coming to our website and filling up our song. And what is the kind of revenue you do now? Like what's your ARR currently? Or what do you expect you will end this year at? And what is your number of paying users currently?
00:42:27
Speaker
Are you between 10 million and 50 million error? Like just that range. That's a very wide range. Yeah, I think you could say you could put us in that bracket. Okay. Got it. Cool. Amazing. Okay. So do you consciously follow this strategy known as PLG product led growth?
00:42:47
Speaker
Yeah. So what is PLG? Can you do like a PLG 101 for our listeners? Sure. Yeah. So I'd say at least what I understand of it is where you leverage your product to drive your flow thread. You don't try to grow it through inorganic performance marketing and all of that. And like what you have never spent on performance marketing, right? Yeah. We've never spent a penny on any of that. Yeah.
00:43:11
Speaker
So for founders who want to use this kind of an approach of product, let grow up, not spend on performance marketing, what's your advice to them? Like, you know, do you have some broad principles you can share? Yeah. So one, I would say the most important thing that is it's not really a hack at all, but care about your users. Right. I think, and that you reflect in everything you do. So I think that is one thing.
00:43:34
Speaker
because the people who end up using you in those early days, I'm sure you'll find somebody through forums and those few dozen, few hundred early users. They are people who are earlier doctors, right? They will try something just because it's good and they are curious.
00:43:51
Speaker
If you engage with those people, they'll become real champions for you. The other, I would say, is try to reduce the friction in your onboarding experience. If I talk about what's a little different today, when you're in the early stages, nobody knows who you are, what your product does. It probably doesn't even do it that way. To make somebody fill up a big form and what is your role and this and
00:44:16
Speaker
that is really overkill. And you should, so one of the things we did in early days was you could use the whole platform without getting any login prompt. The teacher could do a whole class game without even signing up. They just found a quiz, start the game. Kids would get a game code. You just join with that and you get your report, which you can download. And so we really just tried to eliminate the friction and then sort of once they've got that value, we say, why don't you log in this report, you get stored to your
Organic Growth and SEO Success
00:44:46
Speaker
account.
00:44:46
Speaker
Right. You told me that you also fixed your onboarding experience once pandemic hit. Like what did you fix? So I think a lot of it was just when we did a lot of experiments to just lay out of the landing page, right? Things around, you know, there were cold parts of our flow, right? Where once you, you know, you essentially sign up and then you search for a quiz, there you
00:45:12
Speaker
you know, just the CTAs on that page, things like that. And some parts around classroom creation and those sorts of things. Coming back to PLG, any other principles? Your vibe was purely word of mouth. There was no incentive for people to, like there was no incentive-led violence strategy. Yeah, there was no incentive. I think one thing I could say though, which again is a little hard to
00:45:39
Speaker
achieve, but create that, that inspiring moment for a user, right? Something which they like to share, right? So that if you don't have that incentive, right? Like how we achieve that, this was a little feature we had from the very first release. After every question, you would have this funny meme that would pop up, right? Like a funny image, which is if you got it right, it would be something about that. If you got it wrong, it would be some joke around.
00:46:06
Speaker
You know, it's okay that you got it wrong or just making light of it. I remember like in MailChimp, right? When you would have to send out your, like MailChimp is like an email campaign too. And so they would have this monkey mascot. And so when you would have to send out your campaign, it's always this moment of slight nervousness, right? Did I get it all correct?
00:46:27
Speaker
So they would have this animation of this finger sort of shivering over this red button. So it's like making your product a little quirky. And it may depend on your industry, right? But I think definitely. What about starting your revenue flywheel? Any advice on that? Like what is the stage at which you monetize a user? Like after how many days of signing up or is there a milestone after which you feel, yes, this is high likelihood of conversion and how do you
00:46:54
Speaker
push them, you know, is it like, yeah, I think I mean, honestly, I'd say I don't think we are the best at that. We took a long, lot longer probably, then we should have to monetize what we've seen working is like,
00:47:10
Speaker
Once you've launched your monetization plan, I think it's definitely a bit of a gamble, right? You take a bet on something that you think will, and to figure that out, we had five years of feedback, right? People asking for features and things like that. I think we knew there were these three, four things that they want that we had just then decided these are the top requests. We'll put these into the paid plan.
00:47:32
Speaker
And not just the top request, like a lot of the top requests we put for free also, but some which were heavy investments for us or we felt were very differentiated features or hard to build and sustain. So those sort of things went into the paid plan. But ultimately, I think that, of course, what is tough for you to build isn't necessarily what the user wants to pay for.
00:47:55
Speaker
But really just keep looking at what's working. So we had a lot of learnings in that journey as well. We realized that a lot of these powerful features were not things teachers wanted to pay for because that's still more work for them. If I give you a more fancy type of question that you can create, it's probably more work to make that type of question also. And that's not necessarily something people are really excited about.
00:48:21
Speaker
Do you get an CO benefit? Like, so you said you had like a YouTube of quizzes where there are these creators who are essentially like education creators. You can say who create these quizzes. And so does that give you like a benefit in traffic? We show up for like millions of Google queries for all types of content. Again, that became a great thing for us because it was, again, our users were doing this for us, right? So they would create probably the question they needed, which chances are other people also need.
00:48:49
Speaker
So the questions, the title of the thing, and now we have actually gone beyond this quizzes as well, where teachers can create lessons or more instructional content. So all of this is now kind of showing up on Google and it becomes a huge source of new users. So I'd say like,
00:49:08
Speaker
especially outside the US, a lot of our growth came from SEO, right? People either searching for a quiz platform or an online teaching platform, and then also searching for the content itself, which is a huge part of the traffic that comes in.
00:49:26
Speaker
Okay. So tell me about this. Like are you now pivoting into becoming an LMS, like a learning management system from just a quizzing platform? So not a learning management system. What we want to really focus on is the
00:49:41
Speaker
the learning journey itself. So I would say one is just building out these interactive experiences. We want to be the tool that integrates with your elements, but that you actually use for learning, for teaching, for practice, for homework, for assessment, and for checking the pulse, all of that. We want to own that teacher-student engagement around learning.
00:50:06
Speaker
I think what we are building for that a lot of other companies aren't doing is for that classroom experience, right? Like that classroom environment, students and teachers, right? Whether it's physically in the classroom or at home or remotely and all of that, but solving for that, really making that teacher-student interaction more meaningful and delightful. So you're not building a video, like a pre-recorded video lesson tool, but you're building an interactive video.
00:50:34
Speaker
class tool essentially. So in fact, we don't even do the whole video part. In that they still use Zoom or whatever they use, but we are building the engagement tools that work with all of this. So while on the Zoom calls, there can be a link which is shared with everybody and which can open up a whiteboard for them and you can have all the treats.
00:50:53
Speaker
interactive features. Got it. Right. So you can have like a lesson where the teacher is going through slides, then pops up a question. So like, again, usually teaching becomes this one way broadcast. Usually just zone out after a point. So now the teacher can ask a question. They can, we have these fun feature where they can just spin a wheel and pick the next student who gets to answer a question. All of these just add some level of
00:51:18
Speaker
just big kids up by keeping them in engaging with that experience. So instead of using PowerPoint to project, you use quizzes to project. Like you can upload your presentation on quizzes and project that and intersperse it with the interactive.
Community Management and User Engagement
00:51:35
Speaker
All these interactive tools. So you have like an authoring tool for creating these slides. So we have that authoring tool, or you can even import from your existing slides. And so really what we are not trying to innovate on being the best slide creation tool, they're a great tool out there. Use them, but you can import and then make it interactive is what we are really trying to do.
00:51:58
Speaker
Do you do stuff for community building? No, I like people to comment and like, and all of that, like the typical social media techniques, like what social media does. One of the challenges is just the whole safety issue, right? That ultimately when you're working with students, you have to be a little careful about
00:52:18
Speaker
So we do a lot of automated checks on our content that's created to make sure that nothing inappropriate comes in. And so there can be a lot of negativity also. And the thing is, it just takes one bad actor, somebody who criticizes the creator of a quiz.
00:52:38
Speaker
that sort of thing. So we want to be really careful about opening up that handlebar. Commenting is a double-edged sword. Like, yeah, it could backfire. So you don't want to risk that. The sign-up process for teachers and students is different. Like they have a different onboarding flow. There is a different experience there. And in fact, they don't even need to sign up. So again, we've always tried to keep and just put a name and start. Yeah, just put their name and get in or put any name really.
00:53:07
Speaker
So like your homepage right now is not really like a YouTube kind of an approach, but it's more to get teachers to sign up instead of having a homepage, which directly shows you quizzes of teachers. Why did you take that call? Like, so, I mean, we, what we've seen is that if we just directly drop them on to me, as soon as you sign up, that's actually what you land on.
00:53:29
Speaker
It's something like a YouTube update. But before that, it's quite a lot to figure out on your own, like that this is a platform to engage a group of students and all of that. So that's kind of why we've gone with this approach. Right. Plus this approach would give you better conversion rates in the long run. Right. We've seen that. Got it. Amazing.
00:53:50
Speaker
So, and you just had a pretty big fundraise last year. Tell me about that. Oh, sure. I think one of the things we had not done a good job is growing the team during this journey, right? We kind of, in our first year and a half, we got to a certain size and then pretty much with that team we built, you know, it grew a little, of course, but like two, three people every year, sort of a growth. And what now we ended up having to do is all of a sudden, as soon as we monetized, we were
00:54:19
Speaker
making, you know, relatively a lot of money. So we could easily justify a much larger, you know, deal. Why did you need to raise? You raised like 30 billion from like Tiger Global, among others, 31.5 billion, I believe. So what was the need to raise this round? Like, because you were making money anywhere, like,
00:54:38
Speaker
So I think we felt that this was like one thing just if I'm being very honest, right? Is that when you're that small of a company and nobody's heard of you, you need some validation. It definitely helps with building that brand. And also that we do have, I think we need to get better at maybe thinking about growth more systematically, right? And how do we grow more aggressively sort of put fuel into some of these fires that are going.
00:55:04
Speaker
And that's where I think this, I said that we have never spent on paid marketing, but it's not that I have anything against doing that. We just didn't have any money to do it, but it was, you were forced to do it. Yeah.
00:55:19
Speaker
And I think that's been a good learning for us, but it's not to say that tomorrow we won't look at effectively leveraging marketing. So right now, US is your top market. After that, who else is it? So in terms of user base, I'd say Southeast Asia is the next big one for us. And so Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam, Malaysia, Philippines, a lot of these, India as well.
00:55:41
Speaker
So this is an area where we've grown a lot. Also South America, like countries like Brazil, Colombia, Peru, even in Europe, we have a number of countries, Poland, and Israel. So in fact, it's very, it's hard even for us to know why we work in certain countries because we just see it post, you know, the thing happening. And then we try to put this in
Advice for Startups
00:56:05
Speaker
that.
00:56:05
Speaker
By supporting the language better than getting in touch with users there to understand that's kind of big countries. So what's your advice to aspiring founders? Yeah. So I think the one thing I would tell people is that it's really a journey, right? Not a destination. And so.
00:56:23
Speaker
you need to find ways to enjoy that journey. First of all, it starts with picking something that you're excited to build, for whatever reason. We picked education not because we had a particular background in it, but it just felt like an interesting problem that we would love to work on. It turns out also that's a user base. That's a pleasure to work for. Teachers are
00:56:44
Speaker
great users to get feedback from, they'll promote you, they'll talk about you, and they don't want anything in the chat. So you will have to find those things in your journey that really drive you and motivate you.
00:56:56
Speaker
Because without that, it's really hard to, you know, just keep it going, you know, day after day, because every day you're not going to, or even every month, or even a year might go by, and you don't really achieve anything that is meaningful to anybody outside of yourself or your team, right? And so, I think really just enjoy what you're doing. And
00:57:21
Speaker
care about you know who you're doing it for right and I think with all startups one your real advantage is speed right that how quickly can you do that right and how can you do something that you know team of 50 people can't do with you know three people who don't know much of anything. Amazing, amazing.
00:57:41
Speaker
And that brings us to the end of this conversation. I want to ask you for a favor now. Did you like listening to this 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 this show? I'd love to get your questions and pass them on to the guests. Write to me at adatthepodium.in. That's adatthepodium.in.