WHEN they started working on it, their vision was to create a positive impact on the world. For education start-up Gradeup, its young founders — Shobhit Bhatnagar, Vibhu Bhushan and Sanjeev Kumar — saw ‘education as the most fundamental way of empowering people’. “With the rise of mobile phones and internet technology, we realised that learning and education will be increasingly democratized and personalized. One key challenge for educational platforms is to keep students motivated and engaged. Additionally, we wanted to reduce the anxiety of students preparing for competitive exams. We experimented with a couple of ideas before coming up with Gradeup,” says Bhatnagar, the CEO & co-founder.
Through Gradeup, students and working professionals can access world-class exam specific content on mobile devices, free of cost. The user base has already crossed 1.6+ million this past year. “We have a deep understanding of pain points of students from our experience as well. We want to leverage technology to give benefits like personalized assessment and guidance to students, something which was not affordable in our time,” adds Bhatnagar, an IIM Kolkata graduate and award-winning quizzer.
What differentiates Gradeup from other similar platforms is the community aspect. It is one of the largest online communities in India in exam-prep space. Here, students/aspirants can interact with each other, help each other, access study material and other resources relevant to them, assess themselves and see their progress in comparison to thousands of other students, and seek guidance from experts. In the last few months, many offline as well as video-based teachers have joined the community too.
Like all start-ups, Gradeup also faced challenges like figuring out content strategy, keeping up with new developments, the right audience, and keeping the community relevant and healthy. “It took us around 6 months to develop Gradeup,” says Bhatnagar.
Currently, it’s focused only on Indian competitive exams including those for banking, SSC, teaching, GATE, PSU entrance, CAT, and JEE. They plan to cover all major exams in India by March 2017. As of now, they also offer test-preparation platforms for only a few admission exams like the CAT and the JEE. According to Bhatnagar, once they cross 3 million registered users by March 2017, they will start extending the platform to school-based courses.
Meanwhile, MyStuC is fast increasing its user base with its app.
Founded by Sumit and Neha Sethi, MyStuC provides an opportunity to learn and teach all types of hobbies from cooking to singing with the help of a click. Furthermore, all the information about the latest batches for any type of institute is readily available through notifications.
A student faces various questions as in where to start looking for schools, how to know about the various courses offered by a college, which place is the best to get good tutoring classes, how to indulge in activities via hobby classes, etc. “Mostly, all answers are not found at once. With the intention to be a solution provider to students, MyStuC was formed. It is a complete tool for a student to search, to contact, to know, to reach and to connect with an educational institute, free of cost. While students can indulge in their MyStuC corner, in Q and A sessions, the institutes can put up info through I-Feeds,” says Neha. Check it out.
[sOURCE:-The Indian Express]
