Solo Entrepreneur Building a Venture Scale EdTech Company from India: Cuemath Founder Manan Khurma (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: You had to develop a new methodology of online learning that would capture some of the nuances of your physical learning and translate that into a methodology that would work online.

Manan Khurma: Not some nuances, but all nuances. Lots of custom development work had to be done. It took us two years to get that right. By the end of 2019, we were in a situation where the online platform was working pretty well. We hired a few hundred students to learn online with us. Our offline student back then was really large – about 40,000 students. Our online was still nascent.

Sramana Mitra: The online model was still driven by a teacher?

Manan Khurma: Yes, a teacher would be running a small group.

Sramana Mitra: You could go to your existing teacher base and give them these tools.

Manan Khurma: Yes. That’s what we did. Our first set of online teachers came from our existing teacher base. Towards the end of 2019, our online business was still small. We were feeling confident and excited that the online model would scale. What happened was next March, you had this Covid lockdown. 95% of our revenue was still from offline classes. Only 5% was from online.

We had to take the decision to transition our entire customer base to online. We had to do that over the course of just a few days. What was initially planned as a paced out exercise would have to be done in two weeks. You have this macro chaos. On the other hand, we had an entire customer base we had to transition. It was a hectic two weeks. We got all our teachers trained on the online platform.

Instantly, we had 5,000 teachers come on the online platform. At the same time, we created a team that started acquiring from outside India. This component scaled rapidly. In 2020, the entire world was in lockdown. We started seeing massive growth in the United States.

Sramana Mitra: It was through Google search engine marketing?

Manan Khurma: Yes, SEM and display ads. We used all channels we could. We also relied heavily on referrals. By quarter three of 2020, the business was scaling nicely, especially the international part of the business. That meant that we started seeing huge investor interest. By the of end of 2020, we closed our Series C round which was a $40 million round. That was led by Lightrock. It was a challenging year.

Sramana Mitra: The 40,000 students that transitioned from brick-and-mortar to online, what was the grade spread?

Manan Khurma: These students were spread across kindergarten to grade 8. A student can join the Cuemath program at any point.

Sramana Mitra: They stay with it.

Manan Khurma: Yes, they stay with it. In fact now, they can go up to grade 12. We expanded our curriculum all the way to grade 12.

Sramana Mitra: The lifetime value of a customer is very high.

Manan Khurma: Yes.

Sramana Mitra: It is with the same teacher?

Manan Khurma: That’s correct.

This segment is part 6 in the series : Solo Entrepreneur Building a Venture Scale EdTech Company from India: Cuemath Founder Manan Khurma
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