The FinCradle Story: Training Students to bag their dream jobs in Finance industry

Every year around 3-4 lakh students in India pass their 12th CBSE exam with Commerce stream. This number goes even higher after combining state board students. Among them, many are willing to develop their careers in the Finance industry.

However, they do not have the right guidance. The only option which they know is an MBA in Finance. As a result, most of the professional finance courses are left unexplored.

Naman Jain, the co-founder and Navneet Bihani, the chief mentor of FinCradle, identified this major gap of awareness about the available career options in Finance and access to the right resources. 

Navneet (38) is a teacher with an experience of 10+ years in finance education while Naman (21) is himself a finance aspirant. The student-teacher duo soon made a roadmap for FinCradle aiming to educate young students by delivering professional level training courses such as Financial Risk Management, Investment Banking, NISM etc.

Just like any other successful startup FinCradle also has its share of challenges and hurdles.

Launched in January 2020, FinCradle started as a classroom-based education setup for providing training on multiple courses. Hence, they invested a huge amount in setting up a world-class infrastructure. 

They conducted their first classroom session on 15th march. However, to everyone’s surprise lockdown was imposed the very next week with a lot of uncertainties and question marks about the future.

After 3 months of hard work, FinCradle was back to square one with lost capital.

Reckoning the same, Navneet says “Looking back 18 months, we never thought we would come so far, especially when we had lost the initial investment completely in the first quarter of starting up.”

FinCradle’s Strategy that beat Pandemic Impact

Since the team was not in the position to spend a huge amount on marketing, they tapped in all the resources of marketing which were accessibleat a minimal cost.

That’s where FinCradle pivoted to the platforms like Quora, YouTube, and LinkedIn to market their offerings. In addition, they tied with some student communities to expand reach and presence amongst major universities in India.

The strategy took off well and within a couple of months, FinCradle’s team was able to get a lot of traction in different courses.

Talking about this strategy, Naman says “After analyzing our marketing strategy, we realized that youtube was the game-changer for us. Our content received a lot of affirmations from our students, which has resulted in a good subscriber base and views. Talking about numbers, to this day, we have over 6.5k subs and 2.5 lakh views.”

What’s the motivation behind?

When the path gets tough, and pandemic was even tougher, it is important to have the consistent motivation. 

Naman says “Since we had invested a lot of time, effort, and money in our dream of setting up an education institute, we could not afford to let it go in vain. The market was going down, coupled with job losses and uncertainty all around. Hence we realized that this was a one-way ticket which meant that there was no option of going back. 

As a result, this efficiently drove us crazy and motivated us to work real hard. With god's blessings, what essentially started as a loss-making setup turned into a profitable venture in just 12 months.”

How did things move up in 2nd year?

In the first 6 months of this year FinCradle has more revenues than complete last yearand the graph is moving up exponentially.

The platform has added new courses, hired a bigger pool of faculties to share their experience with candidates. The mentors at FinCradle bring over 100 years of collective industry experience so that anyone who joins a course can vastly benefit from this.

What’s the road ahead?

After 18 months of operations and being profitable, FinCradle realized there are gaps at the grass-root level in the present training program imparted by popular institutions. Thus, FinCradle is creating programs for the school students which will help them to understand various facets of the financial industry and thus choose their career wisely.

Navneet explained it further saying “We are collaborating with multiple schools and institutions to provide the right guidance at the base level and help students prepare a road map for their professional careers.

In terms of numbers, we plan to grow 3x in 2022, expand our current team threefold and develop around 15 new courses.”