Building a Terrific EdTech Venture in India: Pallav Pandey, CEO of Uolo (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: I have coached and mentored hundreds of thousands of entrepreneurs. As a rule, I advise people not to follow this principle of releasing a free app or any kind of free service thinking that we will figure it out later. I want you to hypothesize that you are going to do a free app and it’s going to get a number of users. What is your premium service?

I don’t actually like freemium. I like free trial. Something you use for three months for free and then you pay for it. If that is a viable go-to-market strategy, do this business. Otherwise, don’t do this business. This is my mantra.

Pallav Pandey: I should have met you earlier. Lightspeed had funded that business. We were sitting and thinking what to do. We tried a bunch of things. Nothing was working. We realized that real estate is much more physical a business. The amount of leverage that you have as a pure technology player was less.

We gravitated towards the rental market. Rental market is exciting. Transactions happen very fast. The crowd is young. They’re looking for a better experience. We have this massive broker network. We can get hold of the customer on one end, then we become the demand-side broker. That was the plan. In the early days, we got very good response. We pivoted entirely to doing this. That was FastFox. We realized that it’s a very hard market. The brokers get smarter over time. They know how to game the system.

Ola and Uber are able to intercept the transaction much before handing the lead over to the driver. Our business was much harder, because we used to get paid after the guy finds the property. Our broker friend will find creative ways to bypass us. It was a real problem. It was a structural problem actually.

Sramana Mitra: This structural problem exists in a lot of two-sided marketplaces.

Pallav Pandey: Right. You look at Ola and Uber. The driver will come and then they’ll say, “Why don’t we cancel your booking and I can take your directly?” It’s a problem of the marketplace remaining in control of the transaction. It was worse in our business. The number of transactions was less. You might as well bypass us in that transaction. It was clear that we need to find something else.

We managed to get housing.com guys excited about what we’re doing. They bought us. The idea was that they had an in-house lead engine. We had the know-how about transaction fulfillment. Then we could possibly have a full-stack service rather than trying to be a marketplace. The investors got their money back. I worked with them as Chief Product Officer for a year and then moved out to do Uolo.

Sramana Mitra: That was what year?

Pallav Pandey: 2020 was when I moved out.

Sramana Mitra: What is the genesis of Uolo?

Pallav Pandey: It goes back to 2014. I was thinking about the unsolved problems of India. Over time, I realized that I’m an India guy. It came down to two things – education and real estate. Both are unsolved. I thought let’s do education. I made angel investments in these companies. Somehow, the guy who was doing BroEx moved out. I thought maybe that’s the divine intervention.

The other company that I invested in was Uolo. That company was started by two guys. One was my elder brother Ankur. His co-founder was another guy called Badrish. These two guys said, “Let’s do a software company for schools.” Think about ERP for SME all over again. They made that nice cute software. I wanted to do something in education. They built a community of 700 schools that were using the product. The venture guys hated it.

Sramana Mitra: By this time, the venture guys have learned that selling to Indian SME is very slow growth.

Pallav Pandey: This was actually 2015 to 2020. These guys had a very tough time. They kept arranging small money from micro-VCs. Eventually Badrish said, “I’ve done enough. I quit.” Ankur dragged it for another six months and then also quit. This was 2018 now.

This segment is part 3 in the series : Building a Terrific EdTech Venture in India: Pallav Pandey, CEO of Uolo
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