How This Bengaluru-based Edutech Startup is Helping Students to Prepare for Upcoming Exams Using Social Media

Sookshmas is an initiative serving the education industry; it is the only social media platform that allows students to exchange thoughts, notes, study materials, doubts, and everything else related to education. It is playing a major role in uniting the entire education industry by allowing every element to connect with another thereby taking students understanding and reach beyond the physical limits of classrooms. Founded in 17th April 2017, Sookshmas allows students from every part of India to share their thoughts related to education and learn new things as well. In allowing such exchange, Sookshmas is breaking all barriers. We are publishing an interview with Mr. Kamlesh Jang Bahadur Singh, Founder – Sookshmas.

Q.: Please tell us about the founders
Ans: We are three founders Kamlesh, Ripika and Pradeep GS, where Kamlesh manages all technical, finances and core project operations, Ripika manages project designing and cosmetic work and Pradeep GS handle accounts.
All three of us are working together from the beginning of the project. We all met as professionals during our first project 2012-2014

Q.: What is the problem you are trying to solve?
Ans:
• Education domain does not have any organized social media platform
• Dissimilarity in the learning opportunities and exposure between urban and rural students
• Communication Gap between teachers and students
• Additional platform to create interest in academics.
• No balance between skills and qualification

Q.: Can you share with us any insights that led you to believe that this is a big enough problem?
Ans: Education is the most powerful way to transform anyone’s life but the process of its conduction is still not modernised up to the extent. In this time of internet era or precisely social media era where it gives us the power to remain connected to our friends and relatives, to express and share our day to day life and beyond this it also gives us a power to our voice.

We see social media in our life in almost every domain either in staying connected to friend and relatives, sharing your photos and videos, staying connected to your favourite celebrities and politicians or your overall daily entertainment.

But when we talk about education there is no such platform that serves the complete requirement of education industry. A platform where the students can connect to teachers without any hesitation, where they can discuss on academic topics freely, where teachers can post their notes to make their reach easily to their students in an organised and controlled manner.

Q.: Tell us about the Product / Solution. Explain how you went about the Product-Market Fit Process.
Ans: Sure.
About the Product / Solution:
Sookshmas provides tools for both students, teachers and institution for their better digital learning, teaching and connecting experience. At Sookshmas we allow four kind of postings e-Notes, Quizzes, Questions and calculations with the discussion, sharing and scoring features under each type.e-Notes are mainly focused for teachers so they can post there notes/ lectures to share them with their students and allows them to do discussions to clear their doubts.

Posting quizzes helps teachers and institutions to provide playful learnings for their students in academic studies, but mainly useful for competitive preparations where the question papers comes in objectives form.

Sookshmas currently is more than 1lakh + centralized quiz questions collection collectively developed by IAS, PCS, IIT-JEE, Engineering and One-day exams aspirants, helping students from every layer of our country to connect and prepare for their exams.

Sookshmas also provides self-evaluation tools for students where they can check their performances with respect to subjects, courses, exams or time.

About the Product-Market Fit Process
Sookshmas is continuously being verified on grounds since from its incorporation in both competitive, academic education segments. We were always closely working with students, teachers and institutions during this process and have crafted Sookshmas to fit their needs.
In this journey we are now 6000+ students and teachers’ network and counting, who are taking this journey to the next new level…

Q.: What is your USP?
Ans:

1. A novel education social media platform; the first of its kind.
2. Provides a complete controlled, managed and disciplined learning and teaching environment.
3. Focuses on Gamified and playful learnings to attract students focus into studies by their interest.
4. Making quality education easily available, accessible and affordable.

Q.: What were your assumptions when you entered the market, learning that you have? Who in your mind is your ideal customer? Do you have at least one of them signed up?
Ans: We have planned to keep our platform free for students as our vision is make education available for all, every student must be able to express their ideas and share their knowledge. But yes, we have developed institutes version as well for which we will bill in future.

Q.: What has been your biggest failure as an entrepreneur and what did you learn from it??
Ans: Our first project which we have launched in 2012 was an e-commerce website called as SORMS got failed was my biggest failure. From that project my biggest lesson was “Do Right Things In Right Time”. As in that project we have realized that we were unable to execute many plans when they were actually required which results in huge loss of time and money.

Q.: How are you pricing the Product? What is the logic behind it? What is the model you are following – Free / Freemium / Premium etc. ? Explain your thought process.
Ans: We are not billing students and in this point of time we providing free premium version for institutes and teachers. Our current focus is to grow network and gain market trust before we start billing for premium accounts.

Q.: Please tell us about the investors (if any)
Ans: We are self funded.

Q.: Is there any interesting success story? If yes, please write about it. ?
Ans: As our first project got failed, we have lost our whole team which were about 40-50 members, that was a time where everything was dark all-around. We were in into huge debt but we have never lost hope and started a new finance project(S-Ledger) with four-member team. These next two years was a greatest teacher for us in every respect. S-Ledger manages small segment finance/banking companies and currently we are serving more than 120+ clients.

Through our S-Ledger establishment we have slowly cleared our debts and also started working on Sookshmas.

Today we are more than 15 Members team (full time) in Bangalore and more than 40 members students/teachers who are associated with Sookshmas.
S-Ledger is all in behind of Sookshmas and its till success.

Q.: What is the big picture of your startup? Is this Product/service leading to something bigger? If so, how?
Ans: The big goal of Sookshmas is to fill the slot of
SOCIAL MEDIA FOR EDUCATION

Q.: Since inception, give us a sense of the value of business done by your venture?
Ans: Last one year traffice on our website-
Total Visitors : 6,78,541
Total Reads: 2.3 M
Registered Users : 6337 (as on 28th June 2019)

Q.: What is the insight that you have about this market, which no one else has? Uniqueness about your Startup.
Ans: Education is the most fundamental requirement on any nation and in India it is one of the fastest growing segment. But this growth is still revolving around the traditional ways of teachings even after adopting some of the modern technologies.

Basically, we know that education works on “When One Teaches, Two Learns” principle and it’s a never-ending process. Keeping the same principle in mind we vision to give power to every student To Share what they are good in and To Learn from others what they are sharing.

Sookshmas believes that no idea is good or bad, just it needs to reach right person and this can happen only when every student will be connected to each other and discussing to take their understandings deeper. There may be 100 ways of answering same one question but one person will be knowing only one way and when these all 100 students comes on Sookshmas answering in 100 different ways is now have created something greater. This is why we says KNOWING IS JUST NOT ENOUGH as there is no end or limit to any knowing and this process of connecting unlimited knowing’s, unlimited sources of knowing’s, we calls as SOOKSHMAS.

Q.: List all the names of the core Team Members, along with their Designated Roles.
Ans: Sure. They are:

1. Kamlesh
   Roles: Management, Project Planning, Development Planning, Server and Database Management.
2. Ripika
   Roles: Project designing and cosmetic work.
3. Pradeep GS
   Role: Accounts
4. Vivek G
   Roles: Technical Developments
5. P. Divyashree
   Role: Technical Developments
6. Vishal Singh Tomar
   Role: Technical Developmets
7. Aditya Chawan
   Role: Support, Digital Marketing
8. Saritha
   Role: Support
9. Sudhanshu Kumar Mishra
   Role: Content management and quality control (Competitive)
10. Niranjan Kumar
    Role: Content management and quality control (Acedemic)

Q.: Who do You Perceive as Your Competition? How do you differentiate yourself with them?
Ans: Facebook, Quora, Stackoverflow. These all social media platform serves at some level to education domain. But the biggest problem is that they do not have controlled and organized content flow to keep the student focused. Also, they do not connect students and teachers in organized manner. Above all currently available no social media platform is serving dedicatedly to education industry.

Q.: What would be your goal to accomplish in the next six months?
Ans: 1 Million network of students and teachers form across the country as a token of revolution in education.

Q.: What message do you want to convey to fellow entrepreneurs?
Ans: When there is dark all around close your eyes and start watching you will start finding the new ways!

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Thanks Kamlesh. Best wishes!