“It was in the month of January 2017 that I found out that Joint Entrance Examination (JEE) study
materials are expensive for middle-class students in the tier-2 and tier-3 cities. Coaching centers in these
areas are expensive and unaffordable for many aspiring JEE students. Many students crack JEE by self study but they do not have access to the right JEE material so I teamed up with some of my like-minded friends and collaborated with bookshops and solved their doubts through the phone. Initially our idea seemed to work out but then as time passed there was no market for it among our target sector.
In March, there was a great buzz about MELVANO SARATH S INTERVIEW WITH TARAN SINGH Entrepreneurship Cell is credited with yet another accomplishment in its undulating moto of promoting start-up culture in the surreal campus, as the peer education-based start-up “Melvano”, founded by a fourth-year aerospace undergraduate Taran Singh is all set to be incubated into the ‘IIT-M incubation cell’. This team who were the finalists in the last year E-Cell’s flagship event ‘Bootcamp’, owe a lot to ECell for transforming their dreams into reality.
Let us hear more in the words of Taran as he narrates his
adventurous yearlong entrepreneur story. the E-Summit, a haven for future entrepreneurs. We decided to give it a shot and pitched our idea in the ‘Bootcamp’ and luckily, we moved up to the finals. It was during our evaluation sessions that I found out where we went wrong as one of the judges on the panel pointed out precisely. Before that we believed all aspiring students will be interested in our book lending
service because these were the problems, we faced during our JEE preparation. We were happy that we
had found a solution.
Nevertheless, as it turned out that we were selling something that was incredibly old and not consumer friendly. Many students do not want this kind of service. At once, we realized that this was the moment we had to pivot. We decided to capitalize on technologies, as the reach of internet is now blooming in remotest places. We went into the market and did extensive focus group studies and
depth interviews with more than a hundred students and we followed it up with a judgmental sampling. Our initial survey irrevocably yielded poor results and was misleading. It turns out we have made a basic mistake in offering choices.
This way of conducting the survey was very detrimental to our progress. We did not get great outcomes from them. It was a painful and fruitless process. Therefore, we refined our
approach. Our assigned mentor Srinivasan Viswanathan, IIT-Madras Alumnus, mentored us and illustrated your flaws. In that way we have devised our own solutions. Let me illustrate with an example how to conduct a survey. Imagine that you are starting an anti-dandruff shampoo company. Therefore,
the wrong approach that you will take is by asking people if they will buy your product (anti-dandruff shampoo).
However, the right way of determining the pinpoint problem is by asking the target segment what are their hair problems rather than asking whether they will buy your product. So, the most important principle here is to find the root problem and then develop your product and not the other way around. We rejected all the general perceptions and assumptions. The survey yielded that student wanted to learn at a flexible pace. Furthermore, they preferred their friends to teach and solve their doubts rather than approaching their teachers.
Moreover, the key issue we found out was solving
doubts instantly. Therefore, we decided to put forward a platform where people with sufficient knowledge in a specific topic could teach and solve doubts. Access to good study material and an engaging platform that provided a plethora of JEE content collaborated with different coaching centers and tutors and instant doubt solving services became an important target for us.
Anyone after registering can access our database, which includes a lot of free JEE content and exercises to boost the
concepts and understand the fundamentals. Any college student can take a test on our app and qualify to become a tutor and even start earning online. We have a strong customer care team that responds swiftly and are always on their toes. Our work ethic is to take care of our customers well and our motto is to make education a more fulfilled learning process.
My message to budding entrepreneurs is this,
“Failure is a very underrated thing in the society. We do not acknowledge fear and see it as an embarrassing thing. But failure is a part of success. It helps you in figuring out one more less way that works and facilitates you to get closer to your success.”