As a response to tackle the pandemic, educational institutions across the nation were shut in March 2020. This posed an immediate threat to majority of the stakeholders in the Indian education industry, especially the offline individual tutors. In order to help them in setting up an online coaching institute, Teachee built a SaaS-based platform, which allowed tutors to build and grow their brand across India and also enroll more number of students with their built-in acquisition tools.
In conversation with Mr. Aakash Kasaundhan, Country Manager- Teachee India, we attempted to seek his opinion and understand his side of story to Online Ed-Tech SaaS Platform market in India. Here are some excerpts of the interview:
Q1. How has the journey been in coming up with Teachee and scaling it to where it is now?
Teachee started in October 2020, since then we have grown to 150 employees globally with 40 being in India. It’s launch in India happened on 23 August 2021. We are going to get on with full force in India because now we have a good product, a decent customer base (from our beta launch phase) and good success stories among our customers.
Our product and technology team are based out of Singapore and sales & customer experience teams in the respective countries where the product is launched. From day one, the product was built keeping the global market in mind and as of now, we have presence in India and South Korea. In addition to this, we will be launching our product in 10 more countries by the end of 2022.
Q2. What are the gaps/opportunities you identified in the industry while building Teachee for your end customers?
We identified especially in Indian context was that five or six years earlier there were only few decent sized players in the B2B SaaS Platform industry (for educators).
But with the onset of pandemic, this industry came into notice. As of now, several funded companies have entered the domain and all of them got prominence after March 2020 when the lockdown was announced.
Due to the lockdown, the teachers had no choice but to teach online as all educational institutions were shut down. Moreover, coaching institutes are optional unlike schools and colleges which are mandatory in whatever format as per their choice whether it is convenient for the student or not. For instance, take a college going student even the one in the elite colleges, they have to attend classes even if the experience is not good since it is formal education.
However, skill learning or coaching is not an compulsory. So, until and unless you are going to deliver a good experience, student is not going to come to you and it is applicable to all fields be it academic or non-academic. Due to the above-mentioned reasons, a student either chooses to postpone it (as it is not mandatory) or maybe join some other online course as there are plenty of them available now in the market. This is the main reason that a student prefers a nearby tutor as they give them more personalized experience in an offline format. Apart from this, there are two more important factors, one is the way of teaching which is different for every teacher and the other is the language or the dialect. Since India has so many languages, it is difficult for large B2C companies to cater to all languages. This is where the small tutors are filling the gap. However, when classes went online, students got the choice to study with a large institution which could be in other state or another country. Since in online mode, vicinity of the institute was not an issue, small scale private tutors or institutes faced difficulty in acquiring students. So, this is where Teachee came into play and provided them with all the tools they required to acquire new learners and to retain the existing ones.
Q3. What are the challenges you have faced in the industry while establishing your brand?
Well, because of the pandemic, most of our target customers lost their income capacity owing to inadequate infrastructure to run their classes online. And there has been no government support for them. When government talks about any kind of measures or industry support, there is nothing in there for these teachers, because government generally don’t even recognize them as a part of an industry despite the fact that they are the biggest contributor to Indian education system/industry.
So, the initial challenge that we faced during our pilot phase was that, most of our customers liked the product, but they did not had the capacity to afford the subscription fee and therefore, we kept the pricing in India cheaper as compared to our global counterparts. Just to give you a competitive analysis, we are priced at almost one tenth of what the leading global companies charge and on top of this, we have even offered our customers an option to choose from quarterly, or half yearly plans rather than just the annual plan (which is an industry norm).
Q4. How is Teachee different from other Online Education Operating SaaS Platforms available in the market? Who are your main competitors?
So just to give you example, there are three products that have been around for quite some time, and they have seen some good growth in the last one and a half years in this space and they are ‘Spayee’, ‘Learnyst’ and ‘Vidu’. Then there are global players such as ‘Kajabi’, ‘Teachable’ or ‘Thinkific’. And there are two other players, ‘Classplus’ and ‘Teachmint’, but I would not call them a proper SaaS platform, because they are just providing a mobile app. However, they have seen some good traction in the market in recent years.
In terms of USP, if you just look at the surface of our product, it’s not much different. If I talk about, players like, ‘Classplus’ or ‘Teachmint’, because they are only app providers. So, we are very different compared to them in terms of product. But if I talk about full stack products, like ‘Spayee’, ‘Learnest’ and ‘Vidu’, these companies have quite similar offering to what we have, the major advantage that we have is, there are certain inbuilt marketing tools which we offer, that helps teachers/tutors to acquire new learners easily. Besides, as I mentioned previously, Teachee is way more affordable compared to any other full-stack competitor.
Q5. How is your presence across India? Are you focusing on any specific regions for growth?
Nothing specific as of now, we have our sales team members present across 20 cities, but because everybody is working remotely and now even the customers have become accustomed to interacting with the sales guys remotely, so therefore our focus is to cater to the entire country, across all regions. There is no specific focus on any particular geography at the current stage.
Q6. How big is your team today and what are your revenue targets for the years to come?
We have 35,000 educators on our platform right now. We are aiming to reach half a million by the end of 2022. At present, we are growing more than 100% month on month.
Q7. Who are your major customers today- individuals or corporates? What value/offerings do you offer to these customers?
Most of the competitors that I mentioned previously like ‘Classplus’, ‘Teachmint’, ‘Spayee’ and ‘Vidu’, are focused mostly on coaching institutes.
Nowadays, as so many new technologies are coming, each person who is working in software development must learn something new every year or so, and if you are in a marketing or in sales & operations, there are certain courses that are very important for you and you need to learn them, so to upgrade your skills and be competitive & relevant in the job market. Companies like ‘Upgrad’, ‘Great learning’, ‘Simplilearn’ are doing pretty good in tapping this opportunity and are seeing exponential growth.
This is one area which most of our competitors are not catering to and since we as a company, have more of a global outlook and have a product which has been designed keeping in mind different type of customers in online education market, we will be able to cater to different set of requirements in the market and reap the benefits of a solid product and gain customer trust.
However, as of now we are not working with corporate customers and are serving individual customers only. Most of our customers are individuals or a group of individuals, like coaching institutes but we may venture into tapping corporate customers as well in the coming years.
Q8. Where is Teachee based in India? Did you face any challenges while setting up the business in this country?
In February 2020, we hired our first employee, and leased out a big office in Gurugram and started our operations. The office has 100-seater capacity and is located in a prime area. However, after 20 days, the lockdown started and since then our office premise has been lying vacant. So operationally, things were very difficult in the start and because it’s an overseas company, nobody from Singapore could visit India owing to travel restrictions. Finally, our operation saw a traction in October, when the economy started getting back on track, few schools and coaching institutes opened up.
But for the safety of our team, we still are working remotely. India is a huge market and is expected to show double digit growth in the coming years as well. The industry will witness many players operating in different segments even though some consolidation might happen in few segments, however as course requirements are so diverse and wide, there will be growth opportunity for all players in the market.
Q9. How do you feel the New Education Policy will impact the online education industry?
I personally believe that the importance of skill learning is further going to increase. The government has put a lot of emphasis on an all-round development, especially in the K-12. So, National Education Policy largely caters to K-12 and to some extent to colleges, from what I have read in the policy, I believe there is no change in terms of pedagogy, but yeah, there is change in terms of how the degree and the courses are structured.
The government now wants students to learn programming languages, and wants to help them learn basics of entrepreneurship and other life skills. The schools as of now are not very well equipped to offer all that. So, I think there will be a good demand of supplementary courses in these fields and there will be emergence of a lot of companies who will work closely with the schools to be deliver these courses. So, if somebody wants to specialize, there will be a good demand for that in the market.
Q10. What does the future of the industry look like and what are your future plans?
So, I believe, that it’s not going to be a winner takes all market and you have to be patient, you have to like continuously work towards improving your product. You continuously need to work with customers to make the product successful, it’s a long-term game. Unlike other industries, you cannot splurge a lot of capital and get users overnight and simply become a billion-dollar company. It’s not going to happen in this industry, you have to do each thing fundamentally right at every stage.
For Teachee, we are going to focus on improving the offerings for our customers in terms of the product and the additional services that we offer to them. From day one, we wanted to be a one stop solution for them. Business wise, like I said before, that we want to reach to half a million users by the end of 2022 and that that is the benchmark that we are going to focus on.
