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Making India Financially literate | Prateek Singh @ LearnApp
186 Plays4 years ago
Today’s episode of Founder Thesis is a story of finding opportunity in adversities & seeking lessons in all the curve balls that life throws at you.
In what has been one of the most spirited conversations on the show join in as we catch up with Prateek Singh - Founder of LearnApp.com over tons of infectious laughter & incredible life experiences.
Born in Abudhabi and educated in Tanzania, Singapore, Malaysia & India Prateek’s multicultural childhood may come across as a dream come true, but each time having to start life from scratch was not an easy task especially when it had to be done for difficult reasons.
But this is when Prateek learnt his people skills.
Settling in India after living abroad, the transition was difficult for a young Prateek and he could not pursue schooling any further. This is when the 8th grader turned into a financial trader!
A job at a call centre selling travel packages is where Prateek learnt what he considers to be one of the most valuable skills to have - Sales.
Odd jobs & after four failed attempts at entrepreneurship, tons of learning along the way Prateek then founded LearnApp.com
Tune in as we speak to Prateek about his early years, how he overcame self-doubt, and what led to the genesis of LearnApp - an E-learning platform for high-quality financial education taught by Veterans. His failures building the platform and genie & lamp framework that he used to build a scalable business model.
For more such inspiring & intriguing leadership stories visit our website at www.thepodium.in
We are also on Instagram at @thepodium.in and have a Whats app community of fellow entrepreneurs & startup enthusiasts at www.podm.in/growwithpodium
Join us there to stay updated on the latest from The Podium.in
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Transcript
Pratik's Unconventional Path to Success
00:00:00
Speaker
Take a minute. I'm dead. I'm dead. I'm dead. I'm dead. I'm dead. I'm dead. I'm dead. I'm dead. I'm dead. I'm dead. I'm dead. I'm dead. I'm dead. I'm dead. I'm dead. I'm dead.
00:00:33
Speaker
Not every successful founder needs to be an IIT or IIM alumnus. Pratik Singh is proof of this fact. In fact, in spite of being bright and curious, he barely managed to finish his schooling. But his innate intelligence, coupled with his curiosity and will to succeed, led him to create LearnApp, an edtech startup with a goal to bring forth experts from their fields to teach us tricks of the trade. Joy Naksha on this episode of Founder Thesis
Early Exposure to Trading and Risk
00:01:02
Speaker
as he uncovers Prateek's journey from growing up across multiple countries to becoming a wildly successful stock trader as a teenager. He then went on to create LearnApp, which is one of the few profitable and sustainable edtech startups in India, despite having what he calls the world's worst business plan pitch.
00:01:25
Speaker
So Prateek, it's good to reconnect with you again after our last meet at a Starbucks, a serendipitous meet at a Starbucks. So I want to know more about where you grew up and what kind of kid Prateek was. Tell me about a 10-year-old Prateek. What was he like? That's damn interesting. Akshay, thanks so much for inviting me, man.
00:01:53
Speaker
So a very interesting childhood, I think. And now that I look back, born in Abu Dhabi. And then I studied in Tanzania, Dar es Salaam. And then studied in Malaysia, Kuala Lumpur. What was your dad doing? Why were
Overcoming Family Challenges
00:02:08
Speaker
you globe hopping? That's interesting. So my biological dad didn't work at all. So I don't think I ever saw him go to office. The hero of my life was and still is my mother.
00:02:20
Speaker
And she was a pretty well. So she would move from one city to another, one country to another, and then sometimes a continent to another, and we would move with her. And then much later in my life, mom remarried to my dad. And because of him, I am where I am. Otherwise, I don't think I would have been able to do anything. But dad, he basically gave his entire savings and has let me trade in the stock market. But anyway, that's for another time.
00:02:47
Speaker
No, no, I mean, there's no better time than now. So we'll come to that on how your dad got back into your life. But so like you grew up in all these countries, like what was your I mean, what was your mindset like as a kid? Like you thought you'll grow up, get into a job and like, you know, what was it that you were thinking? Right. I mean, you know, kids are awesome, right? They don't think about the future, which is why they're so happy.
00:03:15
Speaker
That's true. As adults, we worry so much about the future of what, and I think most worrying just never happens. The bad shit happens of stuff you never thought of, you know. So I'm a kid, I was super happy. I was making new friends, meeting new people. I think that's where my people skills developed. Although it was a difficult childhood in the sense that my biological father wasn't, there was something wrong. And when you would move from one city to another, mom would start from scratch.
00:03:45
Speaker
So we would go from zero savings and then she would build it back up with a new job in a new city, new country.
The Value of Practical Skills Over Formal Education
00:03:52
Speaker
Why did you move from country to country? So unfortunately, there was something that always went wrong with the way my biological dad
00:04:01
Speaker
work, tried to work in those places, and something or the other went wrong, and we had to leave immediately. I don't want to get into the details, but it wasn't very pleasant, obviously, as you can guess. And mom had to find a job, basically, we had to move out from that country, right? So just think about this, you're actually like, in my mind, we restarted our lives four times from scratch.
00:04:25
Speaker
So little kid Pratik, the definition of risk was nothing. What's the worst that happened? You go to zero? No worries. Mom climbed back up and I will climb back too. So for me, the definition of risk was nothing, right? Because my mom just built this so many times, built the family so many times. Me entrepreneurship comes so naturally because there's some risk involved. Like worst case scenario. You'll just start from zero.
00:04:50
Speaker
So that's OK. OK. So what kind of work did your mom do? Like when she went from one place to another? Was it mostly like she found jobs and moved up in the corporate world? Or did she start her own stuff? Or what like? Right. Right. So educationist, right? So she was a principal. She was in Mahabuddhavi back then. She was a school teacher.
00:05:15
Speaker
And she would go out of her way to work so much in this place called Birds of Hope for nursery kids. And she worked so much that one day, and the principal had a lot of attitude. There's this amazing story around this, right? And the principal said, hey, do you think, sorry, the owner said, Falafessel, I think was his name. And he said, do you think you can do a better job as a principal? And mom said, me, principal? I don't think so. And that's how she got the job. And she never looked back, right?
00:05:43
Speaker
And then she kept getting a job as a principal in different countries, different schools. Okay, okay, amazing.
00:05:50
Speaker
So where did you finally settle down? And like, you know, when did your father get back into a more productive role in your life? Right. So I think in Singapore, after Singapore, we went to Malaysia. That's where I was studying in grade eight, equivalent to grade eight. And that was awesome. So that was a British curriculum. The people were great. It was wonderful experience.
00:06:15
Speaker
And that's when Mom divorced our biological father. And then we came back to India. Not back to India. I came to India for the first time. Imagine me with this British accent. I didn't know Hindi, and I have to find a school. It was terrible, actually. And Mom found Ratan B. Singh, who's now my dad. And he's like, Bita, what do you want to do? I'm like, Dad, I want to be rich.
00:06:47
Speaker
I'm like, I want to be Tata Sons. How do I be billionaires? So I said, I want to start a hedge fund on a hotel, et cetera, et cetera. When you were still in school, you knew what's ahead. Oh, hell yeah. Because to me, money was a big problem. We would move from one city to another, and we always start from scratch. I'm like, OK, if I can just take care of this money bit, then we can just play in the playground all
Learning from Failed Ventures
00:07:14
Speaker
day. We can have fun all day.
00:07:17
Speaker
It became this mountain I wanted to climb. Did you hate India when you first came here? Considering that you lived in Singapore? That's such a bad question. I don't know.
00:07:32
Speaker
I mean, after a clean country like Singapore coming into the chaos of India, was it like a culture shock? No, culture shock. Yeah, I think when you meet adults, they're very nice too. The culture shock happened when I met people my age.
00:07:51
Speaker
I mean, because I mean, dude, imagine this young kid coming with a British accent saying your country's dirty. I mean, what do you think is going to happen, right? I should have been beaten up. But yeah, but I remember not liking India when I first arrived. I am sorry I'm saying that. I love this country now, but as a kid, when I came, it just wasn't as pleasant as I thought. And also I didn't have friends, right? So kids, kids just want friends.
00:08:20
Speaker
So, yeah. So what do we talk about next? What happened after I came back to India, I guess? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So that's in the army, right? So we were in Delhi. And obviously, no friends, no school. And no school admitted me into the class nine because they said, you go back to class eight. I was one year
00:08:49
Speaker
or one and a half years overage. So I'm like, I'll lose like two and a half years. And just time went by. I just couldn't get admission into school. And dad called me and he's like, yeah, I've opened a brokerage account with ICG deck. I'm like brokerage account. Okay. And that moment changed my life, I think, right? So he said, it's stocks. It can't be rocket science. Uh, you know, just go online and just figure it out. I mean, it was to dad, right? And dad just put
00:09:19
Speaker
money in it, and he said, just figure it out. So that's why I said everything in my life is because of that. Persistence because of great persistent mom and then career is all that. So I started trading man at the age of 17. And I think this is 2006. And that's in the army. So hey, he would keep moving every two, three years. But that wasn't surprising to me. I was already used to it. So then we moved to Nenital.
00:09:47
Speaker
And you know, army men get these weird postings. They won't get Nainita. They'll get Goda khal. You know, they won't get a normal sounding city. They won't get Alwar. They'll get like Tijara village. It's damn weird. So we obviously hit Nainita but it is actually a place called Goda khal.
00:10:09
Speaker
And then, obviously, I was translating. I'm like, Goda means horse. Kal means skin. What kind of place is this? So that's where, again, no friends, self-isolation, just traded in the stock market. Did you ever go back to school to get that stamp of schooling done? No. OK. That's brave.
00:10:38
Speaker
I don't think, I mean, back, yeah, I mean, now it sounds odd. I wish maybe it happened. But back then, I was just like, hey, if I can make more money than when these idiots graduate from college, then it's okay. But that didn't happen. Then I was the idiot.
00:10:59
Speaker
Were you making money from trading? I assume your days would be full of reading about stock markets, learning how to trade and stuff like that. Correct. Yeah. So I read hundreds and hundreds of books. I would just gorge books every day. I would look at charts and stock market data for at least 10 hours a day, if not more, every single day, including Sundays. I was wholeheartedly dedicated to this. I would sweat volume and bar charts.
00:11:29
Speaker
Like when I would cough, I would say Sensex. I was completely in it. And I said, look, burn my bridges. Like that told me the story. He said, when people went into war and they knew they were going to lose, they would burn their bridges. So if they came in ships, they would ask the ships to leave. And they said, now the only way for you to survive is to actually beat the crap out of the people in front of you. And that's what dad said. I said, burn your bridges. I said, OK, there's no plan B. Plan B is to make plan A work.
00:11:57
Speaker
And I will become a successful trader. And there is no education around this. Actually, when I would tell people I want to be trader, they would say, trader, that's not a thing. It probably still is. People don't consider it a profession.
00:12:11
Speaker
I just, there's no support from older folks, apart from parents. So, uh, it wasn't a career, right? But I wanted to start a hedge fund and I would sit, you know, on this vision board writing down, okay, if I managed a hundred million dollars, how much would I make in fees? But there was no place where I could learn this. So a lot of simple things took me many, many years to learn. So I've been trading for what, 13 years now.
00:12:41
Speaker
And I feel like a lot of simple things which could have shortened the learning curve could have just been taught in a few weeks, right? But it took me so many years to understand because you just have to do it by making a lot of mistakes. So I think that was a lot of time wasted. But anyway, what next? Like you continue to trade there? Like how many years were you in Nainital? It's about a year.
00:13:05
Speaker
And then I said, okay, this trading thing is getting really difficult. I also want to do a job and have friends. Because since I've come back from Malaysia, not have friends, I want to go to Panchula and I'm going to find a job. And this friend of mine, Sahil, he said, dude, you can come anytime you want. And I think that's really good. And without telling you much, I landed up at his home saying, hi, I'm going to stay with you forever. And his parents just looked at me.
00:13:35
Speaker
and said, who is this guy? And he said, no, your son told me that this house is my house, so I have to stay. So I don't think his parents liked me. The uncedable makes me ask me to leave after a few weeks. But I did do a job in a call center, which is very interesting. I think that's where I learned the most important skill anyone should learn. So what is that? That's sales. Yeah, OK.
00:14:03
Speaker
Dude, sales gets such a bad rap, right? Sales is not calling a random person and saying, I think sales is about finding what the other person wants and solving that problem for him. And that empathy and problem solving skill and trying to figure out a solution and get the joy on the other person's mind that, yeah, hey, you solved my problem. I think everyone should know that.
00:14:29
Speaker
So I think DNA-wise, humans are self-centered. If you say, if you read the Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins, that's what it said. It's self-preservation. Me, me, me, me, me. But no one learns empathy, right? So I think that was really cool. I sold, missold, missold travel packages to Australians. And on the handsome 12,000 rupees a month as the top seller over there. So that was cool.
00:14:58
Speaker
And how long did you do sales for them? So that was a year, again, a year. But I was living alone, very underconfident. I wouldn't use the bus service actually, because I was scared to ask them to drop me. So I would walk to my room. I don't know why I did that. I walked to like 18, 17, right? So what do you expect?
00:15:19
Speaker
And they were like, you're below 18, why would I give you a job? So they gave me a call center job. And you didn't have that school certificate also. People are like, which year are you in college? I'm like, dude, let's not talk about this, please. Can I sell you this pen? Please ask me that HR question. Sell me this. I'll do better, I promise.
00:15:48
Speaker
And then I felt very ill because I wasn't eating. People would come and have my lunch and I was only eating once a day. I don't know why actually. I think I was just very underconfident and scared to do anything. And I wouldn't tell people don't eat my lunch. I don't know why. And I just became very weak.
00:16:07
Speaker
I'm not able to picture you like that. No, not in that sense, but you being under confident. I mean, you moved from country to country. You saw your mom building stuff up from scratch. And I mean, how did you get into that kind of mind space of being under confident and so under confident that you couldn't tell people, I want to eat my own lunch.
00:16:33
Speaker
I'll be honest, I think after so much of expectation that I'll manage money, I'll do well in trading and three years went by and my friends were getting into college and I thought I just lost the race up here. I just thought that they'll get placement. I wasted my years and I'm a total loser. I'm working here. I'm earning such a small amount.
00:16:57
Speaker
you know, what did I really do? What if I don't turn out everything that I wanted to win? Maybe that is the world, I think. That's a good question. How did you like kind of come out of that mindset?
Founding LearnApp: A Journey of Alignment and Learning
00:17:13
Speaker
I don't think I did for a long time. Then I got this job as marketing head at the school called Safire International School in Ranchi. Like a regular CVSC school. It was a British, it was Cambridge, Cambridge affiliate.
00:17:35
Speaker
It's like an international, right? So they're like, Oh, you understand this. You've done a GCE, et cetera. I mean, I didn't get my old levels, but I knew what the pattern was at least. And, and they said, you come and do marketing. And they said, head of marketing. I wonder there's no one there. There's just one desk. I'm like, who am I heading to? Like, no, you, you are, you are the only person.
00:17:57
Speaker
So basically my job was to talk to parents and tell them why they should join the school. How did you get the job? Did you convince the owner to hire you? Was that it? Or how did that happen? I mean, you're not an obvious choice for a school to hire as a head of marketing. So how did that happen?
00:18:21
Speaker
Absolutely. So, I mean, again, I didn't do this at all on my own. This podcast sounds like me demeaning myself too much actually. I just speak the truth. My mom was working at the Paris National School and she said, we need some help. And I worked for free for a few months. And then I went out and I'm like, the Sajar salary bills.
00:18:48
Speaker
And I was so scared that he's like, yeah, sure. I'm like, a month, right? Because then I started dividing it by 12. I'm like, what if it's a year? He's like, yeah, per month. I'm like, OK. I'm sorry if I'm disappointing you, Akshay.
00:19:18
Speaker
Now something cool happened after we got this marketing job. I think I did a decent job explaining people, but people are very confused why such a young 18-year-old boy is explaining why my child should go to school.
00:19:35
Speaker
I shorted the 2008 crash. This is when the 2008 subprime bubble happened. And for people who don't know what shorting is, who are listening, shorting is when you take a position in the stock market, seeing that the market will fall, which means the index that is nifty fell, you would make money. And if the index rose, you would lose money.
00:19:56
Speaker
And I put a short position on Nifty and the market actually crashed. And I built my money in two or three days. Wow. Okay. How much money did you make? Good question. So my 33,000 rupee account went to a lakh.
00:20:14
Speaker
So in terms of monetary value, it wasn't that much. So I didn't tell anyone how much. I just said, dude, I tripled my money. That's all you had. So I mean, nonetheless, it is like an achievement. Right. So I was super happy about that. And then I said, OK, the crash isn't going to happen again. Now what do I do? Crash probably happens once a decade, I guess.
00:20:43
Speaker
It's not like, so do I wait another 10 years? So to be honest, you have to create systems around trading, just like you create systems around businesses to keep going every quarter. And you can measure everything. So how trading has to be looked on is that it's a data science. You have a data problem, which is the price. And you look at that price and you find irregularities. And based on those irregularities and probability, you can consistently make money in the stock market.
00:21:10
Speaker
The problem is, how do you execute regularly with full discipline every single day for a year? People are not able to do that. And what are you supposed to do, which is a strategy, people are not able to get that. So these two things you can put together, like while you're successful, Forbes 100 may, I think 25 people are hedge fund managers.
00:21:35
Speaker
They're all traders, but they're so low key, no one knows their name. So you should go out and search hedge fund managers pay and you'll see 2 billion, 3 billion. There is a way to do it. It's just that it's not talked about as much. Anyway, should I move forward? So after that, I said, okay, it seems like, I mean, I want to make money, but this seems like the compounding of this at 30% a year will take a few decades to reach a billion dollars. So what do we do next?
00:22:03
Speaker
And I said, okay, I'll start a cafe because CCD was very popular. Remember CCD? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Not so long back. Not so long back. It's sad what happened in the end, but I said, okay, if CCD can do it, we can do it. Why don't we build something called Knight's Cafe? And that's what we tried to do. We tried to build a cafe. I went to...
00:22:27
Speaker
We were planning to do this in Chandigarh because that's where like dad used to stay. A lot of my friends that I made was online. They were all in Chandigarh for some reason. So I said, okay, we just build it there because everyone's there.
00:22:41
Speaker
And, uh, we used to play this, this game on Facebook and that's where I made friends. And, uh, so, so nights cafe we made. So actually we did everything except the business model. Like we made the logo. We did the menu card. We did all that.
00:22:58
Speaker
We did the location, the interiors, the kind of chairs we should have in the upholstery on it, but not who's the chef, not what will they eat? Where will the people come from? None of that. And obviously that failed because it just failed. We spent six, seven months on that project. The bank said, yes, we found it. Okay. And V means like, who else was with you? So me, Swati Sharma, who was my friend, still is.
00:23:27
Speaker
And I reached out to her because her mom was in the bank. And I said, we need a loan to build this really awesome cafe. So can I speak to your mom? And I'm like, OK, since her mom is going to help us, and she connected us to a completely different bank and said, do this, and they might give you the loan. And they agreed, actually, that IDBI was the bank. And they said, we'll give you the loan. Just give me the location, and we'll release the amount because it's a small amount.
00:23:57
Speaker
I said, OK, fine. And six, seven months went by. And I got everything aligned. Everything was aligned, including the interior designer, everyone. And then I go to the bank. I'm like, you asked for all these documents. It's ready. Please release the amount. And he said, no, you can't do this. Please leave. And that was just this is sad. Just a lot of time went over there and that didn't start. But I learned a lot. I learned that.
00:24:25
Speaker
Just because people agree, you shouldn't believe that they'll do it. Words are cheap. Actions are hard. And you asked me. So then Swati Sharma, Ankush Oberoi, who was my friend, Mayank Atharv and Gaurav, these were all friends of mine. And we all said, we've got this. And we decided equity and all of that. And that's the story. And by this time, I was earning some $12,000 to $13,000 a month from trading pretty consistently.
00:24:56
Speaker
but I knew it's not going to be in crores anytime soon. I was a successful trader, but I didn't have the capital. So, and we would make, I would make money very consistently, like very rarely would a week go in losses. Almost every week would be profitable. So that was nice, but it took a long time to reach there, I guess. And then I just fast forward. Then there are two other companies I tried to start with your online education on trading. One was traders in forum and the other one is called tradeonomics.
00:25:27
Speaker
both didn't do well because the owner didn't like the idea of video and thought that no one will consume video for education online. Okay. Oder meaning like you weren't you the owner? So he was the guy funding it and he said, I'll give you a copy, but you, I have to run it. He gave me a fancy vice president title and said, you have to run everything. I'll find it. And I think he said, I'll give you 12% of the company or something like that.
00:25:55
Speaker
And, uh, but that didn't work out because, uh, I, I call this alignment issues, you know, that the top, that the management didn't agree on things. And I think that's why most rock bands and startups fail. The band doesn't fail. The people do stick stick together. Don't you think what's been your experience in this?
00:26:18
Speaker
Yeah, so my very first venture was very similar to yours in the sense that we had zero understanding of business. We were starting an education thing and our calculation was like this.
00:26:37
Speaker
Okay, in one class, one faculty can handle 10 kids. So, for every faculty we hire, we can make X rupees. So, we just need to hire lots of faculty and... So, you know, again, no, we did not even stop to think, you know, so that...
00:27:00
Speaker
So yeah, I completely relate to what you're saying in terms of the newbie mistakes and eventually when money doesn't come in early, then I've also seen that the differences kind of crop up.
00:27:15
Speaker
Because once money starts coming in, then you make your differences. Typically, you would make more efforts to go in the direction where the money is coming. The alignment might happen just because you see money coming from that direction, so you're automatically aligned. So I think probably, maybe in your case, the money didn't start coming in early enough. That could be the reason.
00:27:41
Speaker
Yeah, I totally agree. And then I think they're just three things to business. What I wanted so far, one is the people are they motivated and they really care about this, et cetera. And can you, can you keep them motivated and stuck together? Second is obviously capital. Like do you either raise capital or your cash flows strong? One of the two.
00:27:58
Speaker
And the third is distribution, right? Like, is this a machine that can continuously grow over the next few years, at least versus just one-off project where you get and then the business dies away? You know, like I think that doing concern thing is very difficult to do. Consistency? Easy to do a consulting project, earn some money and then feel like, oh, I earn 2 lakh rupees this month, but can you really do that every month for the next X years? I mean, that's difficult.
00:28:24
Speaker
Making money and then building a business, they're completely different things. I mean, we could just stop running the business and just do consulting and just make money. But that's very different from building a business machine. So over these two failures, you kind of learned about building a business. Correct. I think over here, I just learned alignment.
00:28:50
Speaker
that how the founding team has to be super aligned and super talented and their expectations should be set. Because I don't think I actually ran a business at this point because they just never took off.
Strategic Collaborations and Business Growth
00:29:04
Speaker
It's so easy to make that PPT and plan and project and all of that, but can you really execute a simple idea? I mean, the listeners listening, think about it. Can you, can you even start a blog, which is the simplest thing to do and just do one post a day, one post a week for the next four months? I bet most people can't.
00:29:23
Speaker
It's easy to get excited in the initial idea, but can you really execute? I don't think more people can. I mean, it's difficult. So I said, okay, enough of this. And there was this, which year was it when the second venture also didn't work out? Oh, that's a good question. So market scientists, which is the following ventures started 2014. So I'm guessing this is 2011, I guess, or 1212, probably 2012 or 13. Sorry.
00:29:51
Speaker
somewhere there. So I find out I was probably 12 or 13. And there was this drama in the end. And, you know, I, it is all online because I was not with this person. And I just said, I'm leaving from now. And I can't do this anymore. And that's how it ended. And I never did the salary, never earned anything off it, just wasted time, I guess, but learned about alignment. The new venture, there's these two websites and Duolingo and Code Academy.
00:30:22
Speaker
I still love them to this date and still think about them because they make you do something to eat you something versus give you a lecture.
00:30:31
Speaker
And I think lectures are totally outdated, although that's what LearnApp does right now, but I think their history. So with Market Scientist, I said, okay, I'm going to create this platform where just like Duolingo and Code Academy, you can actually draw lines on a trend line, on a chart, do valuations on an Excel sheet, all online.
00:30:55
Speaker
and be able to learn these skills by actually doing it in real data versus listening to someone or reading a book. And how do I do this? I can't hire someone and I just learned coding.
00:31:08
Speaker
very basic copy codes, snippets, make them work somehow. There's no option of hiding a freelance role. Sorry, because there's no, there's no capital. It's just you. I just learned coding, started marketscientists.in, started posting blogs every day, started posting a bunch of stuff every day. And I was told that if I compare brokers, then broker would, and if someone clicks on open an account, they would happily give me a commission. I said, Oh wow, I can make new from this.
00:31:35
Speaker
I never knew that. And we used to get about a thousand users a day, which was really surprising. But I think no one was doing this, Akshay. That's why.
00:31:45
Speaker
Okay. So this was like, like your solo venture on the same concept only that you wanted to teach people how to trade. Correct. That's right. And so what traders say in forum and tradeonomics, the two before this, they were the same, but then someone else owned it and it didn't happen. But this is the same thing. But except I said, I'll do video because I think, you know, video works. Right. I'll tell you a little story if you don't mind of a turning point over here. Yeah.
00:32:13
Speaker
So the two largest, I mean the two most interesting brokerage houses in the country today are Zerotha and Upstocks. So back then they weren't Zerotha and Upstocks, they were just Zerotha and Upstocks.
00:32:29
Speaker
I'm being honest, right? And what happened was I wrote to both of them to make a comment from Ziyota saying, hey, I run this amazing, mind-blowing website. And I'd like to take a commission every time someone opens an account to us.
00:32:49
Speaker
And then, you know, do you think we could work together? I think I can create an education portal within Zeroda and we can call it Zeroda Academy or something like that.
00:32:58
Speaker
And I simultaneously also wrote to RKSV, which is more upstops, saying the same thing. We didn't reply at that point because he was unwell, which I found out later. But these guys at RKSV said, OK, we want to do something. And then Raghu called. And dude, he called from America. I have hit the big time, baby.
00:33:24
Speaker
And I picked up his call in America and actually said, hi Prateek, how are you doing? So I was just happy someone from America was calling me. He said, we love your website and we think that we can possibly work together. I said, oh, that's great. I would love to work with you.
00:33:51
Speaker
I think you have the talent, but you don't have the resources and we could provide that to you. And then I went to dad. I'm like, he's saying resources. He means money, right? What does that mean?
00:34:07
Speaker
So eventually, basically, we talked a lot, right? Okay, we'll start the new venture and we'll teach people and they have all these users, they had 12,000 users back then. I think upstarts today has, I think they have like 10 lakh users now or something like that.
00:34:23
Speaker
That's crazy, right? There were 12,000 men. That's crazy. And we built those, and education can be a big funnel for us. It's great. And I believe in education. And Ravi actually believed in education. So did they. So did they actually. They all do. And we spoke a lot, and he said, you know, Pratik, let's meet over the weekend.
00:34:44
Speaker
I said, okay, but you're in Mumbai. He's like, yeah, I mean, we'll send you tickets, obviously. I'm like, oh, that's great. Can you please add breakfast to it, please? I don't want to pay for the sandwich. Anyway.
00:35:03
Speaker
And surprisingly, dude, at that point, suddenly Nitin replies saying, sorry, I was unwell. This is really cool. I'm coming to Delhi on Saturday. Let's meet. I was like, wow. Nitin wants to meet me. Holy shit.
00:35:21
Speaker
I was that happy. And I told this to our guests, you guys. And they're like, okay, I'll call you back. And then they got, and then they, I get an email actually saying, we don't want to meet you on the weekend. I've sent you a ticket for tomorrow morning, five o'clock. Before you meet Zayra, you have to meet us. That's great, right? So I was like, Oh, wow, this is fantastic. This is great for my, my confidence, by the way, which is, as you know, know all the time.
00:35:48
Speaker
And I went to Mumbai, and a few drinks later, I was sold. We went to this bar, I think it's Peaky Bar or something in Bandra. And they were just great, man. They were just fantastic hosts and their vision, and everything was perfect. And in the end, I also met Nitin that weekend. And in the end, it just seemed, because I'd spent so much time with up stocks on thinking on what the platform should be, what the content should be. I said, OK, we'll trade academy together.
00:36:17
Speaker
Plus the Daru would have helped. I think so, man. Like, damn. The Daru changed everything. But to be honest, I've met a lot of brokerage, the owners of a lot of brokerage houses. It's probably only these guys who are the nicest, smartest, most intelligent and have the vision and all of that. But a lot of the other CEOs just want to run the brokerage for just like that. Maybe because they're hired hands, Akshay. They don't own the business. They're not founders.
00:36:48
Speaker
But it's only these guys, even some smaller businesses like SaaS online, fairly unknown, but really smart owner. I think the guys who actually own it, who want to change the industry, actually do something. The rest are just there, like whatever. That's the story. The market scientist ran for about eight, nine months. It made some money and then it just turned to Trade Academy.
00:37:13
Speaker
And then we had trade academy for a good trade academy owned by up stocks. Like you had some stake in it or what was the arrangement? Correct. Yeah. So basically a market scientist was supposed to, I mean, was supposed to own a stake in trade academy. And that's how it was supposed to be.
00:37:34
Speaker
And to be honest, I think a lot of what I've learned from business is from Ravi, Shrini and Ragu. There's no doubt about it from our stocks. I learned so much from them. Why do you say it was supposed to be like? So that arrangement didn't go through.
00:37:53
Speaker
I think because Trade Academy could have grown to something better, but it didn't. And I also feel like we didn't as a business do as well as we could have, like the resources that up stocks gave us. I don't think I was qualified or smart enough to actually grow that business as much as I should have. And for that reason, one, I don't think I deserve that because it didn't grow as much.
The Vision and Evolution of LearnApp
00:38:18
Speaker
And to just seem like up stocks wanted more accounts which made sense for them, and I wanted to monetize education. And they are like, no, don't monetize. I mean, if you monetize it, it should be a decent stream of revenue and they're completely right. And if you're not monetizing, then open accounts. So I don't think we did either. Great. We would make maybe five six lakhs a month, which is not great. Maybe some month you would make like eight, nine lakhs. But again, that's not impressive.
00:38:48
Speaker
Um, so I would say because I, again, I was not able to align all of this properly. I didn't know how to run business. I mean, I probably don't. Um, it didn't work out for that reason. Uh, but I mean, if you look at them, they've gone to like a million users, right? So, I mean, they obviously knew what they were talking about. They are still running trade academy. So after I left trade academy shut down, do you think that's bad actually? Like, I mean, I don't know what else should, I really tried to make it work and we did a lot, but it just didn't happen.
00:39:19
Speaker
But I guess it is what it is. Zeroda also has that Zeroda Academy, and I've heard a few interviews of Nitin Kama talking about how that is like a major asset for them, the Zeroda Academy. Yeah, they have something called Varsity, run by genius Karthik. And Karthik is super smart, right? He just writes blogs.
00:39:48
Speaker
And there's nothing special in writing a blog. But what he did was he just wrote the best damn blog in the world.
00:39:57
Speaker
There's no better resource out there for text if you want to learn about stocks than Karthik's writing. And you just became so damn good at it. If you remember that that created Swala's line, what's the point? I don't know who he said that. I think that's what Karthik did. He just wrote his heart up.
00:40:19
Speaker
And people love it for that reason. And it is a huge asset. And the thing is they don't sell zero data on it. So if you read anything with varsity, they don't say open an account. They don't say, they don't say anything like that ever. It's pure education. It's very clean. And Karthik is very clear about this. He's like, I want to make this only about education. If it brings us goodwill, great.
00:40:45
Speaker
If it doesn't, then it doesn't. But yeah, I mean, he would totally write. I mean, yeah, I would be like, nay, nay, nay, plug in my brokerage company here, but you know, Nathan didn't do that. Anyway, after Trade Academy, that shut down, unfortunately. And then now is the fifth startup, which is in your app.
00:41:09
Speaker
Um, where again, I would say, I think I've learned the most ever and learn up basically today has a million people landing on it. Before you come to today, tell me how it started. What was there? Well, you're, you decide to walk away from trade academy and, uh, you know, then what was going on in your mind? What, what led to learn up from that trade academy walking away?
00:41:35
Speaker
I mean, I would rephrase that. I didn't walk away. I think we both walked away because, you know, I think both of us couldn't make it work. So, you know, not that it's their fault or anything. So after that, honestly, I had no plan. So after that, my wife was working in Mahindra Finance, and she's like, I don't like this job. I don't like this job for a long time. And then one day, suddenly I'm like, I'm not no longer part of Trade Academy.
00:42:03
Speaker
And both of us have walked away from the project. And she said, what? I wanted to quit, you quit? I'm like, yeah. I'm a bit upset. And she's like, what are you going to do? I'm like, I don't know, but I feel free. And I joined the gym. I joined mixed martial arts in the morning, in the afternoon. I would swim. In the evening, I would go for a cycle ride or a walk. And that's what I did for a few weeks.
00:42:29
Speaker
And then I realized someone has to pay the bills. And then I reached out to a few brokerage houses and said, Hey, I'll just do these online webinars for you. And the thing was at this point, my trading was so automated and so good that I was already earning enough to like make savings, which meant that I could pay off all the bills and still have money left over.
00:42:53
Speaker
And the thing about automated trading is that I don't need to be involved. I just run the program and it trades for me. I would just monitor it once a week, maybe over the weekends. Okay. How do you do automated training trading? Like, did you write code for it? Or is this something which you can like get through a SAS platform or like, how do you do that? Right. So higher quants and coder and developers, and you have to write custom code for it. So you don't have SAS platforms for it yet.
00:43:22
Speaker
You have like partial solutions, but not end-to-end. So you'll have to come up with your own strategy by doing all that data crunching. Then once you come up with that strategy, you actually automate it in Python and place orders in the exchange, stuff like that. And then you finally come up with your trades.
00:43:40
Speaker
So you like do like a API connection to some working platform and then your Python based software executes trades based on the algorithm that you create. Absolutely. Absolutely. And it doesn't cost anything. Right. So the API itself would cost a thousand. Some people even give that for free as a broken cost and you pay your developer. That's it.
00:44:02
Speaker
So you hired a developer and got all this done? Yeah, correct. A good developer who has paid very well. And he would basically, you know, I would tell him the strategy, he would code it, we would build it, and then we would execute it. And at least we do it today, you know, so it's just on a simple digital ocean server, it runs every day, it logs in every day, it trades every day, that's it.
00:44:21
Speaker
So that was cool. That also brought a lot of financial freedom and mental freedom. I can do what I feel like. If I don't like it, I won't do it. I think that's very powerful.
00:44:35
Speaker
And I said okay, and I started doing these live classes with people and they started paying me for per class because I just like talking as you can see. They would pay something for that and I enjoyed that for a while. And then my now co-founder, so we were four co-founders, Sohail Swati Angush and I'm the founder and CEO Prateek. Swati is your wife also. Swati is also my wife, that's right.
00:45:02
Speaker
Who knew? I went to her for a loan and now I'm out of here. And so Ankur said, you should go talk to Nitin. I'm like, dude, why would Nitin Kamath? One of the smartest entrepreneurs even listened to me. Nitin Ganesha replied to him and I wrote to him after I think a few months of leading trade academy after just doing nothing.
00:45:26
Speaker
He said, you know, come over. Four of you, like, decided that you want to start this like an online education venture together. And then you wrote to Nathan or like, like, what was this at that time? Right. That's a good question. So back then, it was just me and Ankush, who said we make videos and give it to other brokerage houses.
00:45:52
Speaker
And we'll just earn from that. And one of the ideas for our reaching out was, let's just talk to Nitin and see what happens. The idea wasn't that we'll build an education platform, actually. So LearnApp still wasn't born. Let's speak to him. And then he's like, Pradeek, you have great quality, and this great, and last time it didn't happen, and give me a good business plan. And I presented to him the world's worst business plan.
00:46:23
Speaker
I made sure it was the world's worst. I mean, I tried my best, but it was the world's worst business plan. I still have it saved. Someday I'll show it publicly. What not to do. So these are the list. Everything I've done is wrong. Now that I think about my life, everything I screwed up.
00:46:43
Speaker
So I gave him that and that list basically said we'll reach out to chartered accountancy coaches and Pratik Singh will teach them about trading investing and this is the market size and this is why you should invest. I don't know what he saw, but I'm pretty sure he didn't see the business plan as viable. He saw something else. I don't know what, I mean, God bless him. He basically invested of the belief that we will build something in the future and there might be some value here.
00:47:13
Speaker
So if anything, the second life was given by him because he passed it in me and not my ability. I don't know what, but it was just me that he'll do something. He'll figure it out. So he actually funded and the idea was that Pratik Singh will teach like seven, eight courses, will charge 3000 per course. And I said,
00:47:32
Speaker
Will this really become a billion dollar company where everyone's listening to Prateek? So then I made this framework. I want to share this with you. It's called the Genie and the Lamb framework. Basically, you imagine you have all the network in the world. You have all the money in the world. You have everything. You just don't have time.
00:47:52
Speaker
That's the only constraint you have. And you design a plan that you can do with the current team you have. So you can't hypothetically place Larry King on your team or Barack Obama on your team. So you just place with your current team, what would you do if you had these unlimited resources? So I said, okay, if Warren Buffett is teaching,
00:48:14
Speaker
Investing if like back Obama's teaching how to talk Etc, etc. I think that would be interesting back Obama's examples wrong But I said, okay if this fund manages teaching valuations if that fund manages teaching top-down analysis So and so forth that would be of some value because it's not a professor. It's an actual guy who's managing billions of dollars I thought that's interesting And I said, okay, this was like super cheap
00:48:40
Speaker
super affordable, then we have a shot at getting lacks and lacks of users. So I went, sorry.
00:48:49
Speaker
Yeah. Um, so I went on again, my Photoshop skills, because by now I was designing all these, all these previous startups. I used to do the design, right? Oh, by the way, when I was in Fairview, um, to get us through school, that's in Malaysia. I would work in Fairview's admin office after hours, and they would pay me in kind by giving us the uniforms and also reducing the fees slightly. So that's how the school happened in Malaysia.
00:49:17
Speaker
So my basis in design was built there. So even today, I'm heavily involved in Learn Apps design. And I made this page right, Akshay, where I put all these faces of these people and said, Phala Dimka, a person teaching Ashish, Johan, Bombay Stock Exchange, teaching Capital Market, so on and so forth. CEO of Bombay Stock Exchange teaching this. And I made all these faces on the Photoshop. And I said, this is what I want to build. And I literally went to all those people with that Photoshop file.
00:49:45
Speaker
and said, and people who manage 40 billion dollars said yes. That's how we got our first 10 people. You did like a cold email to them or like, how did you get time from them? I landed up on their freaking office, waited until they gave me an appointment and talked to them. And I remember I was sitting and, uh,
00:50:12
Speaker
is my third visit there. And finally, Mahesh Patel, the CIO, just walks in, slim guy. I was like, damn. And he's managing 40 billion, I think, at that time. And I showed him this 10 minutes into it. He just asked me why you're doing this. I said, I wasn't formally educated, but I think I still made it.
00:50:30
Speaker
And I think if people who've been there teach what actually needs to be taught versus theoretical stuff that no one will ever use, I think we can change the way financial education works. And I just saw this glint in his eye and he said, okay, I'll do it. What do you want from me? And that's how we got the first 10 people. I think all of them were managing at least a billion dollars at that time. And all of them, that's how we got our first 10 people.
00:50:54
Speaker
And that's how LearnApp started, right? So, I mean, that's it. So you like got them to, like you took a video crew to their place and shot them teaching a course of like, how did, how did the first version of the product launch? Yeah. I mean, the first version wasn't great to be honest, but the first version was basically we would ask them questions and we would plan a day in advance.
00:51:24
Speaker
of what needs he needs to be teaching. And he would turn them, their teams would get involved, get out data. So many people, for example, from Aditya Birlai taught, when oil goes up, how does the stock market react? So macroeconomics and stock markets. And sector-wise, so if oil went up, how would the industry react? How would the airline industry react? So on and so forth. And he uses this daily.
00:51:48
Speaker
Um, and that, that was interesting. And basically the idea was it should be filmed like a movie. So it's interesting because no one wants to listen to a talking head. So it's pretty extremely well. Like we have sound engineers. We have these nice cameras that we have great lighting. Uh, we have great storytelling. There's a good flow. The animation is great. The production quality is top notch. So if you compare Coursera Udacity, Coursera is probably at 4% completion rate. We are 55%.
00:52:17
Speaker
Because our production quality is high. The production quality was funded by Nitin's money, basically. I mean, yeah, that's what we did. But to be honest, it didn't cost that much. So remember Zero that didn't fund us, Nitin personally did. There's a difference. And it was 1.7 crores that he gave us. And the startup cost, like when we launched, we had spent 35 lakhs.
00:52:46
Speaker
on this. I don't think that's a lot of money. And we get like this 10 billionaires on board and a full fledged LMS system that we built with our own tech team from scratch. I mean, 35,000. You like hired a tech team also like at that stage only. Correct. Keep in mind, these guys weren't paid well at all. They were paid probably one sixth or one seventh of their market value. Everyone was. And they all did it for only one reason because they thought that we were building something amazing.
00:53:17
Speaker
So that was like your personal selling skills that helped you get this off at like a 35 lakh number. I certainly hope so. Because I knew one thing that once you start up, there will be 10 things that change and you need to have enough money in the bank to change that because you can be wrong. By now I know that I am going to be wrong somewhere and I don't realize it.
00:53:42
Speaker
So that's why I'm a cost Nazi. I try to keep costs as low as possible. Although today, a learner probably spends like 25 to 30 lakhs a month just to run the business. And we're profitable, Akshay. We didn't raise any money after that. We're completely profitable, high 70% margin, and cash flow positive, right? We're not raising money from venture capitalists.
00:54:04
Speaker
Okay, amazing. So the first version, then what was the traction like? How many customers signed up and how did you go about acquiring customers? I think, I thought it would be a big deal in the press and all would talk about it, but nothing like that happened. We just made an announcement on social media and the first day was amazing. We did five lakh rupees worth of sales in the first day.
00:54:32
Speaker
And I was, I was super pumped. Brand of your teachers, like your, the educators, their brand was pulling in the audio. It was just new, right? Like a billionaire fund manager is teaching me. I wonder what he'll teach me.
00:54:50
Speaker
And here's what happened, right? So I'll tell you the complaints, the hits and the misses. The hits were that people are like, this is amazing. I didn't know all of this. Wow. Amazing value for money. We were charging 500 rupees a month to access all the 10 courses. We're still charging 500 a month, but now we have a hundred courses. So I think we need to change pricing.
00:55:12
Speaker
It still can't serve it. But OK, I need to change that. But probably going to change that soon. And the missus was is that people said, hey, I expected to learn something highly complex from these people.
00:55:25
Speaker
So all the advanced guys who've been in markets for like decades or maybe even five, six years, they were disappointed that, Hey, why is this guy teaching me about like macro economics and stuff? I want to learn like something really deep, really complex. And we just want producing that kind of content yet. So those were the misses. And I realized that the, because the, the bottom of the pyramid is always the most, right? The beginners who want more intermediate content.
00:55:54
Speaker
So that, you know, I think that will be successful, but the guys up, they didn't like it. I don't think anyone who spent money to get customers like Facebook ads and all that or never, never. So we don't have a CAC. We don't spend, we just do something called retargeting, which obviously, you know, when someone lands on learn up, we show them an ad, but we don't do ads as it to pass up anything. Plus, I don't like the idea of doing ads.
00:56:22
Speaker
Uh, like naturally, what can you do to get people coming on your own, even to do 95% of our, uh, users, um, are direct type-in. So people type in learner.com. Wow. Okay. And it's a large base, right? It's like almost 80,000 a month people. Okay. Okay. Okay. So, so tell me about the journey from them, like from the first version of the website with 10 courses to where you are today.
00:56:51
Speaker
So I think a lot happened, right? So we tried a lot of things. In the middle, we wanted to do news. And we did this story on Jet Airways. And we spent two months on it. And people were so confused why we're doing news. So we stopped that. I mostly talk about the failures because the hits are easy to say. We did live classes a lot. So people would come. They would attend live classes called webinars. Now everyone knows what it is. In 2018, surprisingly, people still didn't know what they were.
00:57:20
Speaker
Um, and if classes were with the same brand names. Um, so, uh, no, no. So you wouldn't have those level of people teaching, but you would have a practitioner's teaching. So people who have seven, eight, 10 years, like experts, I guess you can call them. Um, so for example, one of them was, uh, a banker at city bank in Hong Kong who used to look after, he was one of the fund managers. Was it a senior? No, but he was a fund manager. So I still think the level was high.
00:57:51
Speaker
Right. This would be like a buffet, like, like you have like a Netflix system, basically, you pay $500 a month and you want to do a webinar, you want to do a pre-recorded course, everything is open to you. Absolutely. That's right. Okay. And one thing I realized, the live classes would get maybe maximum of 60 people, mostly less, and we would have tens of thousands of subscribers.
00:58:19
Speaker
And I was so confused because all ad tech companies would do so well with live classes. Then I realized all our users are 25 to 35 or 40. Yeah, maybe 40. They're all working professionals. They can't do the time sync. They don't have time. They have the money, but they don't have the time. And that's why all the other ad tech companies which cater to kids, they don't have time.
00:58:45
Speaker
They can learn live classes. So I think for working adults, live classes is difficult. So that's one thing that took a while for me to understand. Yeah, that's what it is. And now what we're doing is we basically infiltrate, if I can say, Facebook groups and different telegram groups and try to teach people trading investing and say, brought to you by LearnApp. And if they like it, then they basically tell their friends and come to LearnApp. That's how we acquire our users.
00:59:14
Speaker
Okay. As in you post videos like, and the video also includes a learner branding. Correct. We'll do something useful and then we've partnered with credit, go to bank, money control, lots and lots of partners.
00:59:29
Speaker
And basically, those partners, it's like a barter where we give them education for their users. And if those users want to upgrade, then they can subscribe to LearnApp. So your partner gets content. We get subscribers and exposure to a large audience. And that's how we get. So imagine this, right? There are 30 lakh traders and investors in India who are active. Not investors, maybe traders. And 9.8 lakh visited LearnApp last year.
00:59:58
Speaker
Um, and you don't need to do ads for that, right? You just need to go to the right places where these guys go and just be there and work out. Okay. So your focus is still like on trading or you also offer other courses now.
01:00:13
Speaker
Right. So I always wanted to do non-trading, non-investing stuff, but is that the affinity of our users is so close to trading investing? It's just a little difficult to do a non-trading investing course. And we did a few, right? We got Gopalakrishna from Tata Sons and Vani from Pepsi Direct. She's the director at Pepsi, and they all taught their thing. Vani taught marketing.
01:00:36
Speaker
and Gopala taught management. And those were huge successes, but not as successful as the traders, because most of our users want to learn trading. So I really want to go into programming and all these other things as well. But only time will tell whether we'll do that in 2021.
01:00:59
Speaker
Although once you go into like, say, coding and all, then that would kind of I mean, there are so many other people who are coding and, you know, stuff like that. So maybe being the king of your niche is a better strategy than. And this is what a lot of venture capitalists I speak to also say the same thing. And I agree, right. Right now, this is a blue ocean. Why should I enter a red ocean? So I completely understand.
01:01:28
Speaker
So the initial courses were like short courses which were giving broad overview. So what are the courses like now? So we've improved a lot, right? So now each course is up to six hours, three hours long. It's super deep. So now we would spend at least 40 to 45 hours in pre-production before we even record the first line.
01:01:53
Speaker
Previously, it was just a day of production, if you remember. A lot of those earlier courses have been deleted now because the level has changed completely. Like the amount of commitment it takes. Imagine Ram Dev Ji, who's the CEO of Mothiaal Oswal. He participated. We spent 12, almost 13 hours with him. And I mean, I couldn't take out 40 hours with him, obviously, right? Because he's...
01:02:15
Speaker
I think his business alone is worth $2 billion today. And him giving 13 hours just to prepare each investing and only shot him for another full day. And he has so much energy. He must be decently old now, right? But he had so much energy to make this happen. And what was his motivation? I hope people can learn from this because you guys are spending time on production and making sure that it's learning and not an interview. He actually opened Excel sheets of companies and explained things.
01:02:43
Speaker
So that's amazing, right? Where else can you get that? Okay. And do you pay your instructors? No, we don't. So these are all done. Usually the people we reach out to are usually earning really high amounts. It will be insulting to offer to pay. I mean, yeah, I mean, if I could offer, then we probably have to sell and have 10 times over.
01:03:09
Speaker
And then it's just convincing, I guess. So what is your organization structure today compared to what it was when you first launched with a couple of coders in your team and your co-founders? So what is it today now? Right. So we're almost 37 people today, full-time employees. Last year, this time, I think we were close to nine.
01:03:38
Speaker
So if the trend continues, we should be 100 plus next year. Maybe you can help us reach the lecture. Absolutely. So what is the split of these people? These are mostly coders? No, so you'd be surprised to know we have only two backend engineers, which includes the CTO. And then we have two frontend engineers. So that's just a team of four people. Then we have about 15, 16 editors and sound engineers.
01:04:08
Speaker
and motion graphic artists. That's the bulk. And then the rest people would be operations. We don't have a sales team. So we have one person who does customer support, which is basically when a person, and I think for having a lack users and having one person customer support means that the product is good and there's not a lot of assistance being needed.
01:04:31
Speaker
And that one person basically asked them two questions. First is, did you enjoy learning how can I help you? If that person says no, he solves a problem and leaves. If he says yes, he says, hey, would you like to upgrade to a 12 month plan?
01:04:47
Speaker
And that's it, right? So that's how that works. And the total is 37. The rest, people are writers. So we write voiceovers. Imagine anything that has to be written right, actually, has to be structured in such a way that it waterfalls into a logical meaning so that the person understands it in a story format. Telling versus explaining are two different things. And we are dealing with non-teachers here. So we have to literally teach them how to teach.
01:05:17
Speaker
And that happens through structure. So we have curriculum designers and writers who do that. That's how you spend those 40 hours with the mentor before the actual shoot happens. And if someone says, no, I can't spend 40 hours, then he's not the right mentor because he doesn't, he's not doing this for the love of teaching. He's probably doing it to be seen or have a nice trailer being made for him. And those are the wrong reasons to be on learn app, right? The right reason is to be like, can I have an impact on these people?
01:05:43
Speaker
So in a way, you know, it seems to me that you are a lot like, say, a Netflix rather than an Upgrad because, I mean, you are very, very clearly in the business of creating content, you know, and you have like a similar approach on how you're selling it like a buffet system kind of a thing. And so what do you think about that?
01:06:07
Speaker
Right, absolutely. In fact, last year, that's how I described LearnApp, that we are the Netflix of education. Now, I think it can't be further from the truth. I hope next year, if we meet again, things have changed. So right now, people come, they pay a small fee, they learn everything they want to, and they leave. The next evolution, 2021, we've introduced this already. These are advanced courses. I think these are the best designed courses in the world. And I'll tell you why.
01:06:36
Speaker
These courses last two to six months. Number one, they're taught by actual fund managers who manage again, billions of dollars, but they're spending eight weeks with you live. Light classes and it's recorded. So you'll spend 70 hours with these people.
01:06:54
Speaker
We'll also spend 10 meetings with people from the same industry who will give you actual projects and say, hey, make a trading system out of this, solve this problem for me. So Goldman Sachs, S&P, DSP, Merrill Lynch, Bank of America, these people participate and they actually give you real world problems to solve. You solve those problems and then graduate and get certification and we'll have some placement support after that as well.
01:07:23
Speaker
And what are you doing again on trading or? So right now, again, we're doing completely focused on trading. So if you want to become a quant, which is what you asked, how do I, how do I automate my trades? Right. That's a skill no one's teaching. And we have some real managers who are teaching the skill from around the world. And it's a 25,000 rupee program. It's for eight weeks and you learn it with an actual fund manager and you come out as a quant. Like it's, it's built that well.
01:07:50
Speaker
And we have a Bombay Stock Exchange certification on it as well. And a lot of other hedge fund managers participate to make you there because even they want to grow their industry, right? And they don't know where to hire. So why don't they just train people here and then we can create those people. And we're going to launch some 20 advanced courses next year, Raksha. Hopefully it's not only in investing, it's also in other subjects.
01:08:14
Speaker
Okay. Okay. So that will bring you closer to like the traditional at tech companies like upgrade and all like, I mean, I think a lot of other companies still have a, so I don't believe professors should teach.
01:08:26
Speaker
All other edtech companies are still getting professors to come and teach and doing certification with them, etc. I'm completely the opposite. I'm saying we have a doer mentality. LearnApp is be a doer. You learn from doers, you get other doers to come and teach you, and that's what makes you qualified, not because you have a degree or a diploma from a known institute.
01:08:49
Speaker
You do it because an actual person has given you today's problems and you solved it 10 times over and that's why you deserve the job. This is completely different and this is where all my peers are going to go towards eventually. I'm going to it now and it seems obvious to me now, but in the future it will seem obvious to them and they will probably do the same thing.
01:09:12
Speaker
Okay. So what is it that is currently like, you know, something that you are personally trying to learn? I mean, you run a learning business. So, you know, what is it that you're trying to learn these days?
01:09:25
Speaker
I mean, as you know, right, so I'm a voracious reader and all of that because I will usually read three books simultaneously. Right now, I'm reading Zappos, Delivering Happiness, Richard Branson's Finding My Virginity Principles by Ray Dalio and A Ride in a Lifetime by Robert Iger. But for LearnApp, there are three things I wanted to learn.
01:09:45
Speaker
And one is how to manage people better. We never get to have like quarterly KPIs and you know what we should be looking at. So we just started that and it's working extremely well. For example, the editor sitting actually his job is not to produce video.
01:10:01
Speaker
He thinks his job is to produce video, but his job is actually to make sure he can attract more users to that course because it's produced well, because it's explained well, and he should be able to measure that. So can you, again, I'll use the word again, can you align the editor to understand how we can produce a course that is better than any other course in the world? And when that happens, right?
01:10:23
Speaker
When everyone is towards that North Star, then that's how you become the best ad tech company in the world. So that's one thing I'm trying to learn, how to align everyone towards a common goal. And then daily job is not their actual job. Their final outcome is what the customer thinks. That's important. Which means I need to share data, give them data, tell them about it. They should be able to access company data freely.
01:10:45
Speaker
stuff like that. So that's one thing. Second thing is, I don't know how marketing and branding works. I'm really trying to learn that. I don't think we, like no one knows Learn Apps vision of what we're doing next year. So I'm going to spend more time explaining that.
01:11:02
Speaker
The other thing is just general marketing, just how do you attract users and tell them about the offering. I'm just saying existing users. I'm not even saying new users. I think our existing users don't know about what all we're doing. I think that's something I'm trying to learn. And the whole thing that I think I really want to learn is how you can hire and train people efficiently in the company so that we can all grow.
01:11:23
Speaker
I think it's so difficult, right? You hire someone and then it takes three months for them to get up to speed. And then maybe you realize they're not good enough in the first place. Or if they're good, then they become productive in the fourth month. So that cycle is really slow. Is there a better way to do it? And then just generally, there's just so many other things like design and then how do you go forward and how do you hire the right curriculum designers, et cetera, et cetera.
01:11:50
Speaker
So that was Pratik's amazing and unusual journey to founding LearnApp. Check out the amazing courses they offer at learnapp.com. That's L-E-A-R-N-A-P-P dot C-O.
01:12:05
Speaker
If you like the Founder Thesis Podcast, then do check out our other shows on subjects like Marketing, Technology, Career Advice, Books and Drama. Visit the Bodham.in that is T-H-E-P-O-D-I-U-N dot I-N for a complete list of all our shows.