Solo Entrepreneur Building a Venture Scale EdTech Company from India: Cuemath Founder Manan Khurma (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Why would another test prep player buy this business if you were not going to come with it?

Manan Khurma: We spent a little bit of time there. We essentially managed to build a good brand. We had a lot of good curriculum and study materials. I didn’t start the next business right away. This exit was in 2011. Cuemath started in December of 2013. There was about two years.

In this two-year period, I ended up doing a bunch of different things. I worked with a few schools to help them setup better systems for their Math learning. I wrote some material that eventually got published. I also worked with some government bodies to help them intervene in their math learning outcomes. That was the period between the first startup and starting Cuemath. I was also teaching back then.

Sramana Mitra: What happens after that?

Manan Khurma: The thing with such phases is it doesn’t add up to much. I decided that education is something I love. I wanted to do a business again, but this time, I wanted to focus on Math learning. The other thing was scaling a business. In the first business, there was scale limitation. All of these learnings came together. I actually had a small setup where students were still coming and I was teaching them. I hit upon this idea of starting Cuemath. The idea was, “Can we build a Math learning system that exposes kids to Math the right way?”

The problem with traditional methods is that Math is taught in an abstract way. By the time students reach middle school years, they’ve already become averse to this subject. If you need to win the math battle, you need to intervene early. That was the idea. We’ll turn eight next week on December 22. Why December 22? It’s India’s National Math Day. December of 2013 was when Cuemath got created.

Sramana Mitra: You were going after kindergartens?

Manan Khurma: The challenge with setting up an education business if you aim for scale is that you can’t aim for a narrow slice. While I wanted to start from kindergarten, I was cognizant of the fact that to scale the business, you have to be able to serve multiple grades. I started with taking up the entire segment of kindergarten to grade 8. The challenge was to build out a new Math curriculum over the next year. I didn’t have a team back then.

Sramana Mitra: Solo entrepreneurship.

Manan Khurma: Absolutely. That first year and a half was an intense year of work. I put in 14 to 16 hours of work creating this content and teaching myself. I remember in the first few iterations of the curriculum, I got it wrong. I was used to teaching high schoolers. I had to throw out the first few iterations. That process took about a year and a half until I got to a point where I was confident about the curriculum.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Solo Entrepreneur Building a Venture Scale EdTech Company from India: Cuemath Founder Manan Khurma
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