00:30:26 · Akshay Chaturvedi
[00:30:26] S1: Sure. So so, Anirudh, excitement I was doing multiple things and we were... I remember in the in the last six months, right before I started, there was more focus. I used to work with a friend of mine called Amisha, who was a senior UI person at Myntra. Now she's at H and M. And Level Road And those are fantastic days. So I had all of those things ready, and then we launched in January, and then I quit my job in March, and then we started the company in April. But we realized very quickly that while we were trying to build a career advice marketplace, nobody would pay for something which wasn't very tangible in nature. And we also realized that we need to focus on things. And when we talk about college admissions, we realized that in India, you get a college admission by the basis of a number that is printed on your forehead, be it in CAT or JEE or NEED or UPSC or whatever the the exam be. And test prep companies are essentially... Like today, they're fantastic companies like Unacademy and Byju's and Vedantu, a bunch of them were solving test prep already. And there were Akshay and FitG and the like of those that met Aakash Chaudhary in those earlier. Test prep company enabled And that time, I would say that study abroad was a very huge category. Hence, And we went into study abroad. And within that also related to multiple segments of the student. There was a student who was very privileged. She was applying to the top 50, 60 schools. There were boutique agencies which was serving the student. And then there was the rest of the market. So we realized that we'll have an iPhone and a strategy started from this, went all the way down. I won't go further than that. But today, we've essentially... I think it was very tough for... To kind of make people believe For the longest time in my space, for the first, I think, in my four and a half year journey, for the first two and a half years, I've just educated people about the market. I've just kind of kept telling them government UN report build a big market here. It's only about two years back when things started to get a hot tiger kind of funded a company in New Zealand and which went to The US Then a couple of other pension funders started to play in the space as well, which is when people realized, okay. This is a space which can grow like fire as well.
00:32:51 · Akshay Chaturvedi, Anirudh A Damani
And very interestingly today, out of all the tech businesses in the world, the largest revenue multiple that a company holds in tech is a business in the study abroad space. [00:33:03] S0: Which is? [00:33:04] S1: A company called Applied Board. And just for design because what you're doing for the student in this category is so much more. You're essentially helping them crossover what is going to be the most pivotal part of their life. Like you rightly said, fifteen minutes back, when you went to ISB, that was a very pivotal point of time for your career. And that it is for essentially most of us, when we go in and offer higher education. So that and then essentially the ability to do so many things alongside with the student, be it with their visa, be it with their education loan, be it with their forex accommodation, and so on and so forth. And essentially, tomorrow, even selling like, there are couple of these small time agents in Gujarat who we partner with. They also sell to these students once they land up in the UQR in Canada. Wow. So it's a LTV. [00:33:50] S0: That's that is original. Keeps going on and on and on. [00:33:54] S1: You're catching them young. And then you're kind of making the fun in love with you and your service and then ensuring that they keep coming back to you again and again.
00:34:04 · Anirudh A Damani
[00:34:04] S0: You know, it's it's so the leverage, the leverage Edu, Edu journey and obviously, earlier it was called leverage and then became leverage Edu, right? Leverage. Very, very leverage, right? Yeah. Like, very interesting how the whole thing pivoted and how you've just adapted to the times, right? And we'll talk about, I mean, you've talked about how it went from, you know, a mentorship discovery platform to, you know, now completely owning that journey, right? Of getting a student who wants to go abroad, figuring out which university to go to based on their aptitude, etcetera, etcetera. But I think the real impetus would have probably come around COVID, right? Because that's when things got really, really interesting. Know, now people could not travel to The US. I mean, they had to really figure this thing out when everything went kaput in early twenty twenty. But for you, there must have been some scary moments, because suddenly, you know, there's a travel ban. People can't go to The US anyway, or can't go to anywhere else in the world, and neither can they come to India, like India also has their own, you know, incoming student population. What were you thinking when, you know, when on March 22, the PM says, you know what, India shutting its borders, India shutting itself for three months, you know, what was your reaction? Certainly. Were you out were you out there banging Thales as well?
00:35:28 · Akshay Chaturvedi
[00:35:28] S1: I did that. One. And two... I think so the first time I realized COVID is going to break in is when... So I think we anticipated a bunch of things. And this... I would be lying if I don't say completely went under. Our burn reduced by about one sixth immediately. We cut everything that there was to... We delayed our promotions. We promised the entire team. Our team around that time was about about 65, 70 people. Now we're about four fifty, But four sixty we promised each of these people that we won't get a single job. The management did not take salary for about three to four months till July and until things improved. But we made sure that things were okay and it was just a very emotional time. Right? So absolutely, was damn scary for the business. I remember Bloom used to do these sessions every week around that time and they would talk to us and make sure that you wake up on 01/01/2022 and you're alive. And by the way, and actually we are in 2022 now. So the first time I heard about COVID just to get a circle back on the story when I was in The UK. And just an year before that, we had realized that now we had built a good branding for ourselves in terms of helping every student to use the platform punch above their weight. Students are using our platform and going to the top schools across the world. So now we realized that, okay, now we can go and partner with universities and help them recruit as well, which is a larger game in the segment, student recruitment. And ApplyBoard and had kind of gone ahead and done that in Canada. We realized that a similar opportunity is gonna come up in The UK as well. So I also realized sometimes that in in the in the larger ecosystems where we end up abusing the word networking. But a lot of my wins essentially just came because I was out there talking to people. For example, in my category, I was hobnobbing with the embassy folks through and through from the first day. And because of that, I realized that UK things are going to change. I kept hearing that. I ended up taking like four trips to The UK in the latter half of two thousand nineteen and early two thousand twenty. And I remember 2020 reading daily mail while sitting in a public bus there and realizing that one case in London today, will things become like Brits get more scared kind of more easily. Right?
00:37:48 · Anirudh A Damani
[00:37:48] S0: So There's only about 2 crores altogether. Right?
00:37:55 · Akshay Chaturvedi
[00:37:55] S1: True. So we realized around that time that the traditional vein with the spaces worked, which is universities coming in to emerging countries like China, India, rest of South Asia, Brazil, or wherever. So essentially doing this big education fairs of sorts in five star hotels and convention centers, you would have seen ads for these across the entire country in or or like in in particular admission seasons. So we realized travel ban essentially banker bank So, we realized that even these guys can't move but they still need to sustain their business. So, we built a platform called Uniconnect in about twelve days flat. Which is a virtual fair platform. So, we did the entire fair piece but online. So a platform like this, but with features like a student could apply to a university with just one single click. Student could kind of short list universities in the business of the program that they want to pursue and then directly meet them. There's no wall in between. Universities should also kind of come in and speak to students who are right fit for their programs. So we built out that technology out there to ensure that universities intend to recruit, and it's still very, very student first in the entire narrative per se. And that worked like magic for us. So till that point of time, we were working with universities by pushing out the narrative that boss, we can't give you quantity right now. We are very small company. We are a startup. But we can send you very high quality students from India. And not everybody met. We had about 15, 20 university partners in about... In an effort of about six to seven months. And then in the next four months, while everything was happening, in about four months, we got about 100 to 120 partners join in just because we had kind of told people that, hey, if you want to come and kind of use Uniconnect, you need to partner with us. And in our in our business, having a university directly work with you is a huge moat. For example, we have the university called Queen Mary University of London, which is a privileged university based out of The UK, with the first players that were given a contract in the last ten years. So we realized that a contract and how can we kind of really go out and play our value prop. It takes multiple meetings. It takes them to kind of... You know, demonstrating features.