Solo Entrepreneur Building a Venture Scale EdTech Company from India: Cuemath Founder Manan Khurma (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What is the sweet sauce of your curriculum? In the market, we have Khan Academy. There’s a lot of curriculum out there. What is it that you bring to the table in your methodology that is different?

Manan Khurma: The biggest underlying trait is what we call learning by reasoning, which is understanding the why behind the what. Every fact and algorithm that the student is expected to learn, they also need to understand the why behind it. For example, if they’re in grade four and they’re being taught how to add fractions, they also clearly need to understand why their algorithm works. They also need to learn why it’s true.

The reason the why is important is when you learn the why and not focus exclusively on the what, Math becomes far more easier to understand. That’s one thing. The second thing is through my years of teaching, I have internalized this fact that students learn best when the material is presented to them in a very visual manner.

If you bring in the right kind of visuals and connect it to learn world context, that makes the learning process easier. The deep belief is that every student has a deep and strong capacity to be a master at Math. It was through that poor traditional teaching that they ended up not doing so well.

Sramana Mitra: What about form factor?

Manan Khurma: The first version was physical workbooks complemented with physical objects. If you were to learn decimals, you have various models. These are physical objects. The first version was all physical. The way it was delivered was we were not setting up our own centers this time. We were getting individuals with strong Math backgrounds to partner with us as teachers and run Math learning centers out of their homes. These individuals were mostly women who we onboarded as our teacher partners. We provided the physical workbooks and materials to them to run these Math learning centers. They would teach their neighborhood kids.

Sramana Mitra: How did you find these women?

Manan Khurma: We started in Delhi. We went through a network. We tried to find a few individuals who were not working but who had strong Math backgrounds. The peculiar thing about India is that you have a vast pool of such individuals who leave the workforce every year because of family. They’re highly-skilled and talented. We recruited our first hundred teachers from Delhi. Recruiting this set of teachers was pretty hard. We were just starting off.

This methodology was entirely new. In some cases, it was different from how students learn concepts in school. Some of these individuals are skeptical in terms of how this will be perceived. We spent the effort and we co-created the product with them. That was a pretty intense phase.

Sramana Mitra: You were still a solo entrepreneur?

Manan Khurma: When I was creating the first version of the curriculum, that was solo. As we started recruiting and as we started getting these teachers to run real classes, revenues started flowing in. By then, a small team had come up. There were people who were handling teaching recruitment. There were some people who were helping the teachers acquire students from their neighborhood.

This segment is part 3 in the series : Solo Entrepreneur Building a Venture Scale EdTech Company from India: Cuemath Founder Manan Khurma
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