Building a Terrific EdTech Venture in India: Pallav Pandey, CEO of Uolo (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Education is the only passport to get to the next level.

Pallav Pandey: Absolutely. Everybody in India is very clear that if I have to go to the next level, it is my child who can take me there if educated properly. People are spending on education. If you are able to do EdTech in India at a thousand rupees per annum, then every single family is going to buy. We didn’t know how exactly it will play out. Blume got excited, so they put in some money.

We said, “Let’s not make money with schools as customers. Let us have schools as partners.” They want incremental revenue. They don’t know how to make money beyond their school fees, but they can do a lot more. We said we will not take money from schools’ bottom line. We will do a business that adds to the school’s top line and get a cut out of that.

The base software became free for the schools. We padded that software with a lot more stuff like report card, admissions, and fee management. These are the mass market schools of India. They are getting digital. In COVID, all of them have learned that they can go outside of the box that they’re confined in. They can go online. That is the stuff that we’re bringing to schools that we have.

Sramana Mitra: How did this play out? You started this in 2021, yes?

Pallav Pandey: 2020.

Sramana Mitra: You had a base of 700 schools. Did they all adopt this general principle?

Pallav Pandey: Schools are slow. When we inherited them, COVID happened. Nobody was willing to listen to anything. We just hung in there. It was hard. Children will go back to school after COVID. We kept adding more schools free of cost. As of today, we have about 11,000 schools. This is 4 million students that we have reached out to. Every month, we add about 400 new schools on the platform.

Sramana Mitra: Your thesis of these schools promoting these extra accessories, is this working?

Pallav Pandey: Yes. We are not at $3 million ARR. People want to do it not only for the money but also because the schools look very good in the local market. Schools are also a mini-brand business.

Sramana Mitra: Prestige.

Pallav Pandey: Right. The school needs to create a pull in the market. That pull gets created when you do something that makes sense to the parents. We have two things that we make money from right now. One is an English-speaking course. Children are able to speak into the app and the app tells them whether their pronunciation is right. They can act out certain situations.

Let’s say you are describing your family: basically, just talking to the app and record videos. The videos go to a teacher who is then able to browse through that stream of submissions one after another. The teacher will do activities and encouragement in the classroom. Then the children will go home and work on this EdTech product. We sell this product to children at 600 rupees per year. At this price, we have a 40% cut for the school. Schools are quite excited to be partnering with us.

This segment is part 5 in the series : Building a Terrific EdTech Venture in India: Pallav Pandey, CEO of Uolo
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