Byju's strategy: Focus on teaching concepts made personalised app a hit

Paid user base for online education in India will grow from 1.57 mn to 9.5 mn in 2021, says a study

Mobile learning start-up Byju’s has carved a niche for itself in the Indian edtech space, eyeing a billion-dollar valuation this year following a profitable last quarter. Its multimedia app, launched less than two years ago, has caught on among schoolchildren thanks to its strong positioning of learning as fun.

The company had started out by teaching candidates of competitive exams in 2007-08. But the realisation that the pressure of cracking competitive would be eliminated “if one learns the concepts in the cognitive years” helped the company to come up with the app where children learn school syllabus on smartphones.

Around 2009, the focus for Byju’s shifted from test preparations to students. It began with offering learning to students of Classes VIII to XII, starting with mathematics and science, in auditoriums accommodating 2,000. But company founder Byju Raveendran points out that interaction is not required if the content is in place. “The biggest constraint today is the class size being too big for the child to learn,” he adds.

In 2009, in a first big shift the company broadcasted classes across 92 centres in the country, utilising technology to enable reach. Two years later, it conducted the R&D for younger grades and launched the product in August 2015 in the form of an app for Classes VI to XII. Last year, it included syllabi for Classes IV and V as well.

Following its 2015 launch, the company acquired data over one and a half years on how children across India learn, which in turn helped it to launch a newer personalised app that identifies the learning journey for each and every student. “We interspersed the videos with tests, activities etc. Some children learn with the help of diagrams, some with words, and some with numbers. This has to be given in the format which they understand. The latest app is allowing us to give almost a one-on-one learning experience where the child has a learning of her own,” Raveendran says.

The learning app has a subscriber base of 400,000, and some eight million downloads. An average annual package is roughly around Rs 10,000, though the price may go up to Rs 50,000, according to the company.

The R&D team of 500-odd people has put together the content in-house. A media team brings the videos to life, with the help of animation, in-air visuals, etc. to make concept appealing to different age groups. On the marketing front, the app has been targeted at children. “Every single message talks about falling in love with learning, as opposed to the fear of exams driving learning today. If a child loves learning, she will learn on her own. We always talk to the students. What we have seen is that in 70 per cent of the cases it’s the students downloading the apps,” says Raveendran.

Cracking the segment could have been initially perceived as a challenge. What Byju’s does is to offer the first 15 days of a programme for free. When parents see children enjoying the app and benefiting from it this mindset challenge is overcome. According to Raveendran, there is a generation gap even between a three-year-old and a 15-year-old today when it comes to learning, as the former is learning on the phone.

Byju’s is seeking to penetrate further in India and also expand to the Middle East, because of the sizeable presence of Indians there. Besides English, the company is also working on including Hindi as a medium of teaching. It is intent on sticking to its methodology derived from global best practices as it eyes markets abroad. It has also begun research for lower grades (Classes I to III).

According to a recent study by KPMG in India and Google, the online education market in the country stands at US $247 million (Rs 15,922.86 million) and is estimated to reach the US $1.9-billion (Rs 122.48 billion) mark in 2021. This growth will be backed by a phenomenal rise in the paid user base for online education in India, which is expected to grow from the current base of 1.57 million to 9.5 million in 2021.

Sreedhar Prasad, partner, Internet business and e-commerce, KPMG in India, points out that today children and parents are both embracing digital medium, and not only in tier-I cities but beyond. Parents allowing children to learn digitally is an outcome of this, which is the very foundation of Byju’s business. As a result, “today’s digital parent, on knowing of the child getting to learn her syllabus in a novel way, is okay to pay an additional amount”. He adds, “The other important thing is their positioning which is making learning enjoyable. Nowhere is schooling and studies related to enjoyment in the earlier days.”

Besides these factors, word-of-mouth also helps provided one offers quality content. Byju’s has quality and variety of content, which along with its repositioning of the beauty of studying and a changing digital ecosystem, has helped its business.

The supplemental education market in India will not compete with schools but will be supporting them. “Companies should be a partner for schools where they sell through the school to larger audiences in tier-III cities. Everybody may not be open and Agile to adopt if the only mode of reaching customers is digital,” he suggests, adding pricing wouldn’t be a challenge in smaller towns. In smaller cities, even in English-medium schools the mode of teaching still remains in local languages. So, adding local language support will help companies to penetrate such markets where children may adopt concepts faster when the medium of interaction is a local language.

Ready to teach

• Byju’s had started out by teaching candidates of competitive exams in 2007-08. Around 2009, its focus shifted from test preps to students
• The latest app draws upon data from seven million downloads, and is allowing almost a one-on-one learning experience, says founder Byju Raveendran 
• The learning app has a subscriber base of 400,000. The paid user base for online education in India will grow from 1.57 million to 9.5 million in 2021, says a study by KPMG and Google