KidEx, a data-driven edtech startup is focusing on developing skills in children at the early stage, by conducting extracurricular & life skill activities.
When were you founded & What is the product/service you provide?
KidEx was founded in 2020 by Kapish Saraf (IIT Kharagpur, IIM Calcutta, BCG, Rivigo), Amritanshu Kumar (IIT Kharagpur, IIM Calcutta, Blackrock) & Gaurav Sengar (IIT Kharagpur, Doubtnut, Senpiper Technologies).
KidEx is an Edtech platform focused on extra-curricular & life skills experiential learning for children aged 5 to 14 years.
The company offers a full suite of self-learning, peer-to-peer learning & specialist teacher live classes solutions to enable Experiential Learning amongst children for 21st-century skills.
The company’s unique, proprietary Experiential Learning Certification tech stack differentiates it from other companies operating in the same space in India & globally.
What is the company’s long and short-term vision? Where do you see your industry going in the next five years?
The company’s long-term vision is to solve the $8.5 Trillion Annual Global Talent Shortage problem. >75% of missing skills are not technical but soft skills & experiential learning related.
The company aims to nurture better quality talent through its platform & enable their easy discoverability by hiring companies.
In the short term, the company has set the focus on India & sees itself becoming the Virtual Extracurricular & Life skills department of choice for Indian schools.
India has 1.5 Mn+ schools & KidEx is uniquely positioned to service them through its unique, proprietary, Made-In-India tech stack.
The virtual learning industry for extracurricular & Life Skills is expected to grow at a CAGR of 30%-40% over the next 5 to 10 years.
Key reasons contributing towards the same include:
- Government introduced policy changes to the Education system.
- Growing customer awareness about key skill expectations of hiring companies for entry-level positions.
- Growing cost of education.
- Higher weightage on non-academics by universities & colleges for admissions & scholarships.
How did you get inspiration for the Company? How did you go about researching and validating the idea?
When we were starting up, a common feeling which we had was that we should have started up much sooner.
We realized that we committed to things that we were good at rather than things that we wanted to do.
We saw this as a standard dilemma deeply engrained in our society where children overcommit to academics even before exploring different aspects of their talent.
We wanted to improve the system balance & that became our motivation.
Our company’s tagline “Explore. Experience. Excel.” captures the inspiration well.
Researching & validating the idea was easy as multiple developed countries like the US, Japan, etc. have made good progress on this front already.
The challenge was solving for India as executing for India requires novel thinking & what has worked for US & China will not necessarily work for India.
The obsession to do the right thing for customers has been our power bank in this journey as we have weathered 2-pandemic-impacted-years to innovate & create a niche for ourselves.
Is the company funded? If yes, how many rounds & how much funding, If No, then are you open to funding?
KidEx completed their $1 Mn round led by Lead Angels Fund in March 2022.
The round was executed in 2 tranches of $0.5 Mn each. The company sees fundraising as a growth strategy & not a survival strategy and would seek capital infusion regularly to create a healthy, large business.
How does the product work & what problems does it solve?
The product has a rich database of age-appropriate experiential learning activities across all 5 dimensions of holistic development.
Along with the activities, there are relevant video tutorials to watch & learn how to perform any given task/assignment.
The child can attempt the activity from their home as per their convenience in their free time & upload their submission on the platform which then, gets rated by a topic specialist as per a pre-defined grading key.
This helps in profiling holistic development for the child basis which customized LIVE classes in group format are recommended to the child’s family to enable the child to get a high-quality education at an affordable price in their convenient & preferred time slots.
What are your USP and innovation? How are you different from others?
Our tech stack & pedagogy content are the two biggest innovations that enable our customers the USP of quality learning following a defined course curriculum at an affordable price in their preferred time slot.
Most of the competitors are burning money on customer acquisition & operating at the high cost of serviceability as well, whereas in our model we have created a self-usage platform, which is quality-controlled.
While we will make the pedagogy content democratically available, we will be building his barriers to scale & high switching costs riding on our tech stack.
What are some of your competitors & what advantage do you have over them? & Briefly explain your revenue model?
Companies like Crejo.fun, Spark Studio, Allround.Club would qualify as our competitors though they are 100% B2C whereas we are both B2B & B2C.
Our B2B play is the biggest advantage we have over everyone else as B2B play is a testimony for a quality product, critical customer base & brand.
We offer our services to schools for attractive rates & also, offer the same product & services to retail customers without discounts.
What difficulties did you encounter when you started the company & Were you impacted by the Covid outbreak?
We had started out as an AirBnB of extracurricular classes where a parent used to host in-person classes for their own child & a few children in the neighbourhood.
The coach used to travel to the host’s house to conduct the classes.
This model had scalability limitations which naturally got revamped to a scalable, digital play as Covid happened.
Covid did force us as a bootstrapped company to innovate on product & GTM all of which is our competitive advantage today.
The only downside of Covid has been that a lot of players became active in the Edtech space resulting in intense competition, limited ability to monetize customers but that has started to wear off & the best product with a customer-centric value proposition will win.
What are your future plans & launches?
We intend to focus on India for the next couple of years & grow our network to 10,000+ schools making us the largest B2B player in the School Edtech space.
Our existing suite of products are well designed to service this business goal.
In parallel, we will continue to invest in new products to fuel the company’s growth for the next few years.
We already have a very promising product launches pipeline which we cannot disclose right now.
Current company size, work culture, Hiring Funda
We are a team of 25-30 full-time team members, 50-60 freelancers & 100+ coaches on contract.
We have built a meritocratic culture where anyone’s performance matters and not anything else.
If a team member is nailing his roles/responsibilities, delivering on KPIs – they are 100% empowered to operate in a manner that works best for them but if someone’s consistently missing the deliverables, they have to be prepared for micro-management till they improve their personal operating model.
Our hiring strategy is simple.
Look for hunger to grow, willingness to learn & minimum starting level skills expected in the role to be successful.
You will be surprised that such folks outperform the ones with tons of experience.
How did you launch your company when you had just 0 users. Which channels/ tools/strategies worked the most for acquiring the first 100 users?
Simple, pitched the idea to a few probable customers.
Zero became a few customers.
Serviced them & better understood the customer pain points. Solved them better & pitched to new customers again.
The number of customers converting increased. The same cycle continued. Sometimes, it’s all about getting started.
Whatsapp messages & posters were sufficient to get the first 100 customers.
Post that, Facebook paid marketing became relevant.
After that, we moved to a B2B model & email marketing and referral marketing came in handy.
A piece of advice for the readers.
Starting up is fun but difficult.
Nothing is an overnight success. If you wish to startup, be ready to commit 2-3 years at least and make sure financially, you have planned things such that your business build is not dependent on external capital or you are sitting on a ticking time bomb.
Unless you are deeply passionate about something, you will always discover multiple reasons to throw in the towel but you need to have that one real reason for doing it which can be our power engine.