These Two Indian Startups Want to Change How You Learn

There's a nearly endless demand for education in India - whether it's coaching centres that help you 'crack' IIT or apps that help you learn new life skills, such as a language or a musical instrument.

Recently, Gadgets 360 caught up with two early stage startups in the ed-tech space that bring very different approaches to changing the way we learn. While XPrep is focused on tuitions and classroom management, Skillmate wants to make it easy to find someone to teach, learn from, or pair up with as a study-buddy.

XPrep follows a fully paid model where the partners have to pay (though it's experimenting with different models, such as pay per use and subscriptions), while Skillmate is free to use, and is avoiding the commission based revenue model. It has a few ideas about subscriptions in the pipeline, though these are still in the offing as it grows the user base.

Though they couldn't sound more different to each other, they have one more thing in common - recently, both companies were selected as a part of Facebook's FbStart program - a global program designed to help mobile startups to build and grow their apps.

For startups, FbStart is useful in a number of ways - as Skillmates's Co-founder, Gitanshu Soni points out, "It helps you to get noticed, it's a stamp of approval of sorts, which is very important."

Instead of cash, Facebook gives winners credits, which can be used for advertising on Facebook, or redeemed with a number of partners. "Partners such as AWS, MailChimp, and even Facebook ads, are spends we already have so having the award come in the form of credits isn't a problem," adds Soni, "and the other benefit you get from this is that you get access to the Facebook developer community, and you get to be a part of workshops and conferences. It's already a great experience."

Organising India’s tuition centres
XPrep's Co-Founder and CEO Mukul Rustagi agrees, and says, "FbStart will help us to cut down our technology costs a lot, and we can now use this to spend more on marketing, because customer education is a big part of what we do, not just customer acquisition."

Rustagi says that he and his co-founder Bhaswat Agarwal were friends in coaching classes studying for IIT together, which is how they got to know each other, and that's why they wanted to make a company around coaching - their coaching centre closed seven months ahead of the JEE which left a lasting impression, and Rustagi says that part of the problem was how unorganised the institute had been.

"We wanted to make a company that could organise tuition, because it's a completely unorganised sector in India," he says. To this end, the duo first started off as an online teaching platform, but quickly realised that this wasn't working for them. The next step was to develop a lead generation platform, but again, they realised that there are already plenty of ways for students to find tutors, so this doesn't fundamentally change things.

That's when they hit on the idea for a tuition management tool that they can sell to institutes - the tool is designed to help plan group tuition, and there are separate apps for students and teachers.

"Using the app, if you're a tutor, you create the student roll for your class, and then the daily problem of attendance becomes a one-minute process," Rustagi says, giving an example of how the app can make a difference. "Students also have the app so the teacher can just send out assignments, tests, or announcements through the app. And parents can also see all of this through a similar app on their phone - when logging in they just need to select whether they're parents or students, and there are different tools available."

In the last couple of months, XPrep has signed up over 100 tutors, and over 6,000 students. It's early days still, and Rustagi believes that FbStart will help the company to build its product and add features.

"Our goal was simple - first of all, make it mobile first and easy to use. I think we've already done this to a degree," he says. "Step two is to make it automatic. For example, tests, right now there's still a lot of manual intervention needed in this, and we want to automate this process so that you don't even have to take your phone out of your pocket. All the class reports, assignments, and so on should be sent out to the students and their parents without any intervention, based on what was done in the class itself."

For Rustagi, this is very important, because according to him, the typical tutors are not young people keen to adopt technology, but slightly older, in the 35 to 45 age bracket, and thus, it's essential to un-complicate technology and make it as easy to use as possible.

"Through the app, the parents can see all the information about their children, the students can find all their tests and assignments in one place, and the tutors are the ones who get the most benefit as we speed up and simplify all the things that aren't directly teaching," Rustagi says, "and we're keen to grow slowly, adding features and experimenting with our revenue models, to find what is right for us at every stage of the journey."

Helping people learn new skills
Skillmate, which alse launched a couple of months ago, has a slightly different approach - it's seen 10,000 downloads in two months, and people using the app can create cards for themselves, for either teaching, or learning skills, and according to Soni, the number of cards is nearly 20,000, which he says is a sign that people aren't just using Skillmate as yet another platform to advertise services, but are engaging with the platform.

Unlike XPrep, Skillmate isn't designed for formal education centres. Instead, it's a place to go if you want to find some one-to-one learning. In the app, there are three options - you can list yourself as a teacher, a student, or a partner. This is different from a typical platform such as Urban Pro or OLX, which also allow teachers to list themselves, in that those are a one way street - if you want to make some money by teaching people how to play the guitar, for example, then you place the listing, and hope you get a call.

With Skillmate, you can also check the students listings to search for people who are interested in learning different skills, so you can more actively find people. "What really sets us apart though is that we cater to partnering," says Soni. "So basically, you could be a professional tutor who is listed as a teacher on the platform, but if I'm a student, I might prefer to learn from someone else in my age group, so instead of going to the ‘Learn' tab to find teachers, I could go to the ‘Partner' tab to find a study buddy."

In fact, that partner tab also allows you to find people with shared interests - looking for someone to play tennis with on the weekends? Check the partner tab.

"What's very important in all of this is trust," adds Soni. "We did a survey at DU and that's the feedback we got from everyone, so we have built a complex algorithm for trust. For one thing, if you sign up with your Facebook account, it boosts your trust score because people can see who you really are. Then, we do two way rating after all interactions, which is also contextual. So you could be a guitar teacher, a cooking learning, and a badminton partner, and you will having ratings on how good you are as a student, teacher, or partner, and you will have a trust rating as well."

"This way, the system is very transparent, and people can make properly informed decisions," he adds.

Despite such different ideologies, both companies are confident about the education sector, and that there is scope for a variety of approaches. Of course, it's still very early days for both companies, but they do show some of the different ways in which education and technology are going to intersect, going forward.