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.
00:40:05 · Akshay Chaturvedi, Anirudh A Damani
It's it's enterprise sales in some sense. [00:40:07] S0: Can I take that? [00:40:09] S1: So because of how things happen in this way... So by July, things were kind of looking more rosy for us. And people were saying, okay. UK was the first country to open up. And UK around the same time, my hunch proved out right because UK in June and July then opened up a new graduate route, the post study work visa, which said that if somebody's coming in and entering the country right now, they can go ahead and work for two years after they graduate and three years of their PhD. And that just opened the floodgates for us because we had built out this entire supply over the last four to five months. And now we could go ahead and say that UK university supply And now we had built up the supply. And that is when our business scaled very, very quickly. And to to give you a... Give you some perspective, even towards the latter half of last year, we were helping about 100 students a single month. In comparison, by the way, when I met you, we were doing about 15 students a month in 2017 or 12 to 15 students a month. So So we're doing 100 students a month by the end of last year. Today we do about close to 1,500 to 1,600 students a single month. So our scale is massively, massively.
00:41:20 · Anirudh A Damani
[00:41:20] S0: Massively, massively changed. And we were talking about it before, right? Because unlike other EdTech platform which obviously, you know, because of the complete shutdown, almost all like a new hockey stick kind of a growth. You know, for you, you really had to figure figure your way out because it, you know, how do you, like you said, how how do you figure out and and estimate what a government is going to do and then then ensure you've got all the back end supply ready to go at the same time?
00:41:47 · Akshay Chaturvedi, Anirudh A Damani
[00:41:47] S1: Wasn't an easy one, I think, in in hindsight, just keeping our ears close to the ground in terms of... It it... It's a multi dimensional business. It's sort of two two sided marketplace. It's a, like, multi sided marketplace in some sense. So just keeping your ears close to the ground. So for example, now we have realized this kind of pull that thought that we need to build a much more supply as well, supply intelligence. So now we have offices in both The UK and Canada as well. Mhmm. We ensure that on the supply side, it's like a make my trip or o y o. So to ensure that you have ears close to the ground on the consumer side, which is a student, ensure that you have ears close to the ground on the supplier side, ensure that you are essentially working with peers in the ecosystem as well the government. So we ended up, I won't name on this show on the DamaniTalks show, but I'll tell you privately, but we essentially had to get a letter from somebody higher up in the public world of UK and using that letter, we essentially went out and told universities that, hey, we have a letter from this person. Can you please let me in? And that's how a lot of those things happened to begin with. [00:42:51] S0: I mean, you have to scrape. You have to go, you have to do all of all of those things, man, to make it work. So it's a hats off to you truly. [00:42:59] S1: No. Thank you.
00:42:59 · Akshay Chaturvedi, Anirudh A Damani
[00:42:59] S1: No. Thank you. [00:42:59] S0: But, you know, I I I do want to mention something, you know, you've... While all of this is going on, right, it's very interesting to keep reading your LinkedIn profile. By the way, you've got one of the longest... There should be an award for the longest LinkedIn profile available. [00:43:12] S1: Have cut it down, Anirudh. I, about 1.5 back, somebody gave the same not so sweet compliment and I had to cut it down. This is a trimmed down version. [00:43:21] S0: Oh, wow. But but, you know, what what I'm saying is that you've you've actually been involved in other activities, right? Because it's it's like, I, I maybe sometimes find myself guilty about the fact that I, I had so many more ideas to be more socially involved, right? In other causes. I might have written checks here and there, but I'm not really been able to essentially get involved, right? But you were part of the PM's, you know, Committee Form for the #India2022 Policy Building, right? And you did that in 2017 while you were building a startup, and you literally were at the start of building your startup, right? And you, I mean, how would you manage all of these things? I mean, are entrepreneurs out here listening to you, wondering like, you know, startup KPMG, committee, helping other people out, traveling, doing all of these other things. While building a... I mean, while building a startup almost 100 x in the last... I know that growth in the last three years.