We are publishing the interview of Mr. Rishabh Jain, Founder & COO, Qriyo.
Please Tell us about the founders.
Qriyo was founded in August, 2015 by Rishabh (me) and Mudit Jain, both IIT Bombay alumuni. Rishabh is the COO while Mudit serves as the CEO.Building a product because you can’t find it somewhere else may be a cliche. But sometimes it is the truth. You understand things when you look at it. We did understand the problem when we personally needed it.
Mudit was looking for yoga courses to take. He did what most of us do today. Went online and started the search.
What the search gave him was dozens of phone numbers. Some didn’t respond and other responses were not fruitful. Some didn’t want to come at his house and some other wanted a hefty sum of money. A seed was implanted, an idea was born. The problem was broken down into pieces and was studied. When there was no catch found, we started to build it in august, 2015. Now, we are arranging and rearranging those pieces together.
What is the problem you are trying to solve?
For the consumers we are solving the problem of discovery, evaluation, reliability, quality instruction, community and also provide many more valuable features. We aspire to be the de-facto go-to place for consumers and providers for the learning based services.
All learning based services are provide at customer’s home as home tuition For the home tutors and freelancers, we help them get better at their skills and get business for the fields they like. According to a survey by ASSOCHAM tuition sector was worth 23.7 billion dollars in 2013 and was expected to grow to 40 billion in 2015. Also, 87% of primary school and 95% of high school students take private tuition. In early times people took tuition mostly for academics and other areas like music, dance where confined in few houses. But in current times dance, music and a whole lot of courses have gone mainstream. This occurrence makes this industry bigger than ever and growing. The teacher-student ratio of 1:40 is not helping the students and we are promoting 1:1 personalized teaching session.
This model apart from helping students to perform better will also create a large number of jobs for deserving freelancers and teachers. More than 90% teaching today is being done in schools and overcrowded tuition. While we fully understand not everyone can pay for personalized one to one private tuition but a large number of parents can. If suppose 40% of parents can, not more than 5% is doing it. This 35%, at worst is the size of opportunity we are eyeing to crack.
Tell us about the Product / Solution. Explain how you went about the Product-Market Fit Process.
We are a platform providing evaluated tutors more than 400 courses in academics, co-curricular, extracurricular and fitness segment. We keep a list of teachers in our database. Before putting them in our database we do their thorough evaluation. We note their location, experience, salary expectation once they pass the evaluation. A learner can book a course with us via the phone or using our website.
We ask the customer about their requirement, location etc. As soon as we get a request we start doing matchmaking based on several parameters and find out a list of suitable teachers. Then we select the best teacher from that list. The matchmaking is performed by an algorithm we have built. The selected teacher is sent for a demo and if the learner likes the demo we start the course or else we send another teacher from the list. The teacher goes to the home at a time that the learner prefers. Necessity is the mother of invention. We launched Qriyo to provide Quality learning which is flexible and is based on trust. Tackling unemployability problem and promoting offline freelancing and giving a launchpad for talent to show itself are the other and even turn it into a career opportunity. We launched Qriyo to fill a gap that demands to be filled. How to find a teacher who can teach? A listing site? Finding a quality and trusted teacher on those sites falls down to luck. You get a dozen of numbers. You call and verify. Someone will not be able to come at your home, someone will ask too much money and how can you agree on that without even knowing about the teacher; the trust factor. With us, you get a chance to know the teacher with a demo.
Everyone of us wants quality education and when we can’t find we get content with whatever we get our hands on. Our teachers are evaluated. We do the evaluation for you. Only the teachers who pass evaluation gets onboard with us. Thus with us, you get the quality.
What were your assumptions when you entered the market, learnings that you have?
The venture looks very easy on the paper but is very complex to implement. Our venture is driven by tech. But technology is not the only thing. We need evaluators, personality experts to help us in our teacher evaluation process. Also People who are multilingual and can talk to and guide our customers. And finding those people was not easy in jodhpur. As much as we liked jodhpur, we had to move to jaipur to get the right people build a team. In jaipur too we had to face problems like punctuality, lack of professionalism, language barrier etc. But in due time we have been able to overcome a lot of those problems and subsequently build a distinct company culture. . yes we have at present more than 3000 customers.
How are you pricing the Product? What is the model you are following – Free / Freemium / Premium etc. ?
Our revenue model is commission based. We take a percentage based on the course fee. The customer pays the fee as listed and we take a cut from it and give back the rest to the teacher. The cut is predecided and agreed upon by both us and the teacher.
Our Pricing strategy is not absolute. You can say our business model is similar to Amazon seller. You go to amazon and list your products amazon.com and where your customer sees it and buy it. For this, you give a percentage of your profit. Because amazon themselves have to pay for technology which is very expensive. We work on a revenue sharing model. Now, our model will work almost everywhere. Because it is a flexible model. Our rate changes according to places. For achieving this flexibility, we do thorough research before entering a new market
How did you get your first customer?
We got our first customer through our website qriyo.com.
What is the big picture of your startup? Is this Product leading to something bigger? If so, how?
We are going to create millions of micro-employers (who will employee themselves). We will not only greatly affect education sector but also put a significant dent to the unemployability problem. Whatever you can teach, we can provide home tuitions for it. Offline freelancing will become huge and will be a decent source of revenue for millions of our gurus (teachers)
What is the insight that you have about this market, which no one else has? Uniqueness about your Startup.
What differentiates us from most of the other service providers is the way we evaluate and onboard teachers and how we use this data to find the perfect match for a customer query. We keep a list of teachers in our database. Before putting them in our database we do their thorough evaluation. We note their location, experience, salary expectation once they pass the evaluation. A learner can book a course with us via the phone or using our website. We ask the customer about their requirement, location etc. As soon as we get a request we start doing matchmaking based on several parameters and find out a list of suitable teachers. Then we select the best teacher from that list. The matchmaking is performed by an algorithm we have built.
The selected teacher is sent for a demo and if the learner likes the demo we start the course or else we send another teacher from the list. The teacher goes to the home at a time that the learner prefers. Necessity is the mother of invention. We launched Qriyo to provide Quality learning which is flexible and is based on trust. Tackling unemployability problem and promoting offline freelancing and giving a launchpad for talent to show itself are the other and even turn it into a career opportunity.
List all the names of the core Team Members, along with their Designated Roles.
A lot of us do a lot of different things. Very few of us has designated post. In a growing startup like us we don’t like to bound people saying that you can do only this not that. If anybody has a varied skillset we like to give them the opportunity to test those skills. Mudit Jain- CEO Rishabh Jain-COO
Who do You Perceive as Your Competition?
Qriyo is the only one who is specializing in learning based courses. We don’t have any competitor who is doing exactly what we do. If we look at similarity then other service providers like urbanpro, urbanclap, housejoy come to mind. What differentiates us from most of the other service providers is the way we evaluate and onboard teachers and how we use this data to find the perfect match for a customer query. The biggest Competition comes from the local offline coaching and tuitions.
They are large in quantity. Our biggest competitors are not using technology that we are using. They are neither using data nor feedback the way we use it. We also have started automating a lot of things which will further improve our performance and diminish the human errors. What we provide is one to one personalized training by well-matched teachers with certainly is better to 1:40 ratio performance of other classes. Our quality, trust, and flexibility create word of mouth publicity for us which is helping and will help us immensely in getting ahead of the competition.
What would be your goal to accomplish in the next six months?
We have on a constant growing curve for the last few months. In the next six months we would like to consolidate more and go more ahead on this growing curve. We are always experimenting new things. Testing what works and what doesn’t. We use a Plan, test, feedback loop and would like to continue doing in the near future. This helps us to learn more and serve our customers better.
Any other information you would like to share in the content of story? *
We have been funded by Idein ventures. We believe Qriyo is for all of us. We provide learning based services. Do you want to learn cooking? You may not want to learn to cook today. But there are thousand of others who live out of their home cities and would want to learn to cook. Maybe you want to learn guitar? Maybe Physics?. We have more than 400 courses and when you browse our website, you will surely come across something that you yourself wants to or wanted to learn. Our target is everyone. At Qriyo, we believe that Qriyo is for the whole family. And what is the world comprised of? Mostly families. So, Qriyo is for everyone. Life is about learning. We constantly need to learn to survive. Where there is learning there will be Qriyo.
Your full name: Rishabh Jain
Name of Startup: Qriyo
When was it launched: August, 2015
Your Designation in Above Startup: COO
URL of Startup’s Website: www.qriyo.com
URL of Mobile App: https://www.qriyo.com/app
Location of Startup: Jaipur – 302020 (Rajasthan)
No. of Founders: 2
