00:09:28 · Krish Bajaj
[00:09:28] S2: That's a great question, both of them. So to answer your first, yes, if we were only serving one country, it would be a seasonal business. But if you look at the year, the calendar, students leave for The US between June and August. Then UK starts in September going to November. Australia only begins in January, February, March. So given that we're serving students going globally, yes, in technical terms, is seasonal by country, but we have business year round from different parts of the world. So we've created the list of services such that it completely aligns with the student life cycle, wherein at every stage we have value to offer and the service providers we work with are by far guaranteed to be the most affordable, the best offering out there for what it is you come to search. So if I were to just give you a layout of the life cycle including where we first plug in become top of mind, The second you secure your admission, the study abroad counselor who's helped you get to that point, their job is done. Then actually moving to the new country and starting a life, there's no one to help you. That's the gap we found when we personally experienced this. And that's where we plug in. So this distribution network we've created, most of it consists of these study abroad counselors whose service offering ends when the student gets in. Now we've given them a new way to earn more revenue by adding our service offering on top of what they already offer. So that bridges the gap to help the student actually get set up before they leave home. And in terms of life cycle, talk about the essentials, your bank account, SIM card insurance, that's phase one. Phase two is let's say you need a job. We have international only job boards, we have resume tools, we have everything you need to curate your experience to go out there and land an internship. And then talk about loan refinancing. Let's say you get a job, now you can take that 12% interest rate down 9%, we can help you with that. Let's say you're getting off the f one onto an h one b or an alternative visa. We have about eight different visa partners who can help you with these different visa types. So anything you need, we've got you covered.
00:11:46 · Michael Nogen, Krish Bajaj
[00:11:46] S4: So I guess it sounds like probably one of the biggest challenges is the education piece. Right? It's like how do you you get the college counselors or guidance counselors or these, you know, how do people find you? How are you addressing that? Are you doing seminars? And are you outreach to various universities? [00:12:06] S2: Three ways through which students find us. The biggest one is our media presence because we realize that this shared trauma really pierces through everyone and they feel this emotionally. So we've built a big enough social presence where we reach about half a million students a month organically with $0 spent, and that is a huge revenue... Huge lead channel of organic support to bring people to the marketplace. Second to that is the distribution we've amassed in South Asia through which we're able to reach all these study abroad aggregators, whether that be schools, counselors, test prep agencies, lenders, anyone who deals with students before they leave home, we have access to them and we incentivize them to push these services forward to students. So yes, part of it is in person seminars, but it's all done by the person who the students already trust. So we don't have to reestablish that connection. They've already been working with said person for an extended period of time, making that person appear better for helping the student get set up with everything. Meanwhile, we benefit by offering them the platform to do so.
00:13:17 · Michelle Kwok
[00:13:17] S3: So I I am this student. So, like, I had this exact problem. I'm wondering... You you said you've said you've done a lot of different things, and I had this exact problem. I went to different companies for that. And now there's, like, my great mate, which is that job board. There's, like, Lighthouse or Lighthouse Labs that's doing the visa aspect. Like, each of those things that you've mentioned that your company does seems like a different company. So how are you guys the, like, pinnacle of all of these different things that people have built full companies on and how do people know that they can trust you with all of these different things that you really need to have like deep expertise and trust?
00:14:00 · Krish Bajaj, Vansh Langer
[00:14:00] S2: That's a great question, Michelle. We don't offer these services natively. Our whole business model is bringing them together. So we refer you to Migrate Mate, we refer you to x y z person. These, like you said, you've already heard of them or you might have heard of them, we are the platform that you come to to discover who they are. And then the next phase of what we're doing with the marketplace is ratings and reviews. So amongst the eight or 10 job boards that focus on international student sponsored roles, we can tell you which one to go to. If there are special discounts, they come through us. So we have these tie ups with each of these providers like Lighthouse, like Manifest, Alma, MigrateMate, where our students or our audience get exclusive benefits to go ahead and engage with those partners. Effectively, those partners get access to students very early on through our ecosystem. We are simply the enabler, the connector. You can think of us as Amazon with the last stage, integrate, being wherever we see traction or the potential to vertically integrate and do it ourselves, that is when we'll step in and say, we will natively offer this solution specifically. [00:15:06] S5: Have you tried working with the actual universities themselves to be, like, in their welcome packet or whatever?
00:15:06 · Vansh Langer, Krish Bajaj, Michelle Kwok, Michael Nogen
[00:15:06] S5: Have you tried working with the actual universities themselves to be, like, in their welcome packet or whatever? [00:15:12] S2: So we're in process of doing that. And that's where it really links well with the global access solution where universities come to us for enrollment. So in this case, not only when can we give you more access to students, but we also support them after they're enrolled and works both ways, so yes. [00:15:29] S5: That makes perfect sense. When you first started explaining your pitch, that's what I thought you were doing. But I'm curious what the margins might be on SIM cards that you need to do that as well. [00:15:42] S3: Yeah. Yeah. That's where I got confused. [00:15:44] S5: You know, [00:15:45] S2: like it doesn't... No. I see it. [00:15:46] S4: You don't wanna, like, hold inventory. [00:15:48] S5: Yeah. It doesn't seem to make any sense to... You're spreading yourself thin when your core business should be being the company that universities have in their welcome packet for students and making your annual revenue from the university directly. [00:16:03] S2: I appreciate that. No. I think that's the direction we're headed in and it was kind of a quite a long journey to assimilate everything and move in that direction. But I think we're aligned with moving there. So we're currently in the process of doing so. [00:16:18] S4: Just final question. What's the biggest challenge right now? Like, what's the biggest risk? What keeps you up?
00:16:18 · Michael Nogen, Krish Bajaj, Vansh Langer, Vansh Langer
[00:16:18] S4: Just final question. What's the biggest challenge right now? Like, what's the biggest risk? What keeps you up? [00:16:25] S2: That's a great question. The biggest challenge that I'm trying to figure out, our team team's trying to figure out is we have tremendous volume flowing through our platform and we have exceptional business development. We are trying to figure out how to capture this and that could be as simple as having a follow-up sequence with every student or managing a way to nurture these leads more effectively so that they convert to these services. Because we see about a couple 100 organic clicks to a very high ticket service like a Visa where we get paid $3,000 per student that signs up but then there's no follow-up. So we're kinda losing people over there. Just bridging that pipeline would help a lot. [00:17:07] S5: Thank you so much for your time. We'll see you in a few minutes. [00:17:10] S2: Thank you very much. [00:17:13] S1: Alright, judges. Now it is time for the judges debrief component of the show. How are we feeling about the pitch?