 "Krishna Kumar")
K Ganesh, 25, is an IAS aspirant. Employed at a private firm, he mostly studies at night or early morning. When looking for guidance, a friend suggested Unacademy, a self-learning platform that offers free videos by subject experts.
The platform, which started on YouTube, helps aspirants crack different competitive exams. ''We want to be the YouTube for education, create courses in different languages and eventually look beyond India," says Gaurav Munjal, founder & chief executive. Many courses are in Hindi; a tutor offers economics lessons in Punjabi. The ed-tech start-up has created a platform that can run even on second-generation telecom networks. It got $1 million (Rs 660 crore) in funding from Blume Ventures, Sachin Bansal, Binny Bansal and Vijay Shekar Sharma, among others. This April, it raised $500,000 from Blume Ventures.
Sanjay Nath, co-founder and managing partner at Blume, says Unacademy is like the Bill Gates-backed Khan Academy, which offers free videos. ''It is an age of Youtube and Twitter. Youth will use it for everything, including exam preparation. Unacademy offers live, interesting content of short 10-15 minutes duration," he explains. It started as an experiment, with Munjal started posting tutorial videos on YouTube in 2010. Unacademy now has at least 3,000 videos and 2.5 million viewers on its platform and YouTube. It says it has gained traction without spending money. "We spend less than $30,000 a month (about Rs 20 lakh)," says Munjal.
Educators can upload videos on various topics on the platform and students can access these free of cost. The videos are 15-20 minutes and the platform is most popular with aspirants of the civil service exams. It wants to get the best minds to share knowledge in a way that it is easy for anyone to understand, use and create.
Opportunity
The wider market for education in India is $10 billion, estimates Munjal. These include the test preparation market for exams like the GRE, GMAT, CAT, JEE, IIMs, IITs. Nearly 40 million people take exams for government jobs every year, a focus area for this start-up, and the market for which is estimated at $1 billion.
There are coaching centres which gross Rs 500-600 crore a year for a single exam and there are coaching centres for almost all exams. ''We are a self-learning platform, targeting students in colleges who are self-motivated to take these exams," says Munjal. ''We are still figuring the segments, while targeting the top funnel."
Munjal claims his start-up is the market-leader for the civil services exam, with 30 of the IAS 100 toppers coming back to share videos on its site. These include Tina Dabi and Artika Shukla of 2016. ''We have content from top educators and built a brand," says Munjal. He says YouTube and Facebook did not focus on a specific segment. ''Like them, we want to be the biggest video education company."
Business model
The start-up was incorporated only in January 2016 and is still trying to figure out its product-market fit. It has some ancillary revenue but is still pondering its revenue model. It pays a small sum to its contributors and users who benefit from the videos also pay some guru dakshina; the firm takes a cut, and passes on the rest to contributors.
Unacademy has 1.2 million page views and 0.4 mn people visit it every month; its monthly growth is 30 per cent. The target is to get to a million daily active users by 2017. "The focus is on creating traction, value proposition and stickiness. Revenues are important but not at the expense of growth," says Blume Ventures' Nath.
It is likely to settle for a subscription model like Netflix, where users will have to pay if they want ad-free videos, download these and take assessments on how well they are doing. It will also personalise: Users can reach tutors to have doubts answered. ''The focus right now is to get more educators, to create great courses," says Munjal.
Challenges
The key challenge is to maintain the quality of the videos when it crowd-sources hundreds of these. Though it interviews, trains and filters the tutor-contributors, ensuring the quality of each and every video is a key challenge for the nine-month start-up.
The second challenge is how to encourage more people to come and create courses for a particular domain, get experts, when it barely pays them Rs 500/lesson. The driver for tutors is an opportunity to create a brand name. Many have 50,000 followers; some even put print ads to promote themselves offline, claiming 50,000 followers on Unacademy.
Ahead
The first goal, as mentioned earlier, is to get a million daily active users, its product-market fit (figure out the revenue model) and start monetising. It will launch an app for tutors, which they can use to create a lesson using their smartphone. The app allows an educator to integrate pictures, pointer, handwritten materials, link, sound and graph into a single video and upload it in very easy steps. "Our aim is to make the process so simple that even my grandmother can become an educator on the platform," adds Munjal.
FACT BOX
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Founded in: January 2016, initially on YouTube
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Area of business: Test preparation
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Founders: Gaurav Munjal, Hemesh Singh, Roman Saini and Sachin Gupta
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Funding: $1.5 million from Blume Venture, Sachin & Binny Bansal, Vijay Sekhar Sharma
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Traction: 0.4 million visitors/month
- Target: 1 million active users/day by 2017
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EXPERT TAKE
Krishna Kumar |
With a niche concept, Unacademy has already had great traction in the market in a short span. With impressive management and investors who bring immense expertise across sectors, they should be in a position to focus on a strong revenue model soon, to scale rapidly. Apart from the global success of Khan Academy, we have not seen pure learning models becoming successful. It is also important to tie the business with the goal of providing result-oriented training, by helping learners pass an entrance exam, earn a degree or certification. By having a focused end-result, learners clearly know what they are signing up for and will also give Unacademy much more credibility and trust in the market.
Globally MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) have built an impressive user base. While they provide free content, most of the players are still struggling to build a sustainable business model and in sustaining the motivation levels of learners to complete courses. With targeted learning goals, the sooner Unacademy focuses on building a strong revenue model, the better for its growth and sustenance.
Krishna Kumar, founder & chief executive, Simplilearn, a company that trains individuals get professional certification
