Solo Entrepreneur Building a Venture Scale EdTech Company from India: Cuemath Founder Manan Khurma (Part 1)

Manan’s professor parents in Amritsar didn’t want him to be an entrepreneur. Now, he is changing the trajectory of Math education around the globe by leveraging an underused workforce: stay-at-home moms with strong mathematics background in India. Brilliant story!

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your journey. Where are you from? Where were you born, raised, and in what kind of background?

Manan Khurma: I was born in Haryana, India. That’s where my mother’s family is from. I grew up in Amritsar, which is the city of the Golden Temple in Punjab. Both my parents throughout their careers were university professors. In Amritsar, we have this very famous university. That’s where I spent the first 15 years of my life. My dad is a Chemistry professor. My mom is a biologist. Throughout my childhood, my environment was a lot of science and teaching. That partly inspired my career.

Sramana Mitra: What did you do for higher education?

Manan Khurma: I spent the last two years of my schooling in Delhi. After that, I went to IIT Delhi. That’s where I did electrical engineering. During my schooling, Math was what I always loved. I exceled in it as well. As a second or third year student at Delhi, I started teaching math. My career in the Math learning space started right back then.

Sramana Mitra: What year did you come out of IIT?

Manan Khurma: I graduated in 2007.

Sramana Mitra: What happens after?

Manan Khurma: My friend loves Physics. We decided to setup a test prep business. Both of us had gone through that test prep cycle just a few years back, we decided to set up business in that space. This was a brick-and-mortar test prep center. We started this even before we graduated. By the time we were graduating, it had grown pretty big. We had hundreds of students coming to us and lots of revenue was being generated.

Sramana Mitra: This was in Delhi?

Manan Khurma: Yes, right outside the IIT Delhi campus. That’s how we started. By the time we were graduating, the center we were running had become pretty successful. We continued with that. My parents weren’t happy about me skipping placements. They wanted me to study further. They expected that I would get, at least, a PhD. Here I was, coming from a non-business family directly starting a business. That’s how the journey started. Over the next several years, that’s what me and my friend did. The business became pretty big. From one location, we expanded to multiple centers in multiple cities.

Sramana Mitra: This was all bootstrapped?

Manan Khurma: Yes.

Sramana Mitra: What level of revenue did you reach with that?

Manan Khurma: At its peak, it was a million dollars a year. Our expenses were very low. We didn’t have a large team. We were teaching ourselves. At the same time, this was a business that had scale limitations. Opening every new center required you to recruit stellar teachers. Great teachers don’t exist at scale.

Sramana Mitra: What year are we talking now that you were doing a million dollars of revenue, and you were starting to think of other possibilities?

Manan Khurma: Four years after starting the business, around 2010. Scale was one limitation. For me, there was a more fundamental problem with the test prep space as a whole. Over those years, I ended up teaching more than 10,000 students. I managed to build a really deep understanding of how students learn.

The biggest takeaway was the fact that by the time a student reaches their senior years, it’s hard to course-correct and have them learn effectively if they don’t have a strong foundation. Every year, we would have hundreds of students coming to the center. In just a few minutes of conversation, I would be able to say if this kid is not going to make it to a good college because their foundation was poor.

Even if I made the maximum amount of effort, there was just so much I could give. The biggest takeaway was if you really need to have impactful learning outcomes, you have to start much earlier. That nudged me to think. I might as well focus on earlier grades. We sold that business to another test prep player. It was a modest exit.

This segment is part 1 in the series : Solo Entrepreneur Building a Venture Scale EdTech Company from India: Cuemath Founder Manan Khurma
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