The Success Story of Unacademy

Unacademy is an eLearning company founded by Gaurav Munjal, with co-founders Hemesh Singh and Roman Saini.

Unacademy boasts of a community of three million+ subscribers and 250 million+ views on its YouTube channel. Unacademy now has been able to explore and entered the Indonesian and Brazilian Education markets furthermore.

Even though there are many market players boasting of such numbers, not many of them are able to monetize the business further as Unacademy has. So naturally, it raises the question of what led to the present eLearning company becoming so successful and what other startups generally and eLearning, particularly, can learn from them.

There is something that sets the Indian Education System aside from others.

Along with mainstream education, one of all the foremost revenue eaters within the country (which is additionally taken more seriously) is that the parallel education system which has been very conveniently named because of the Coaching field. There are a plethora of coaching classes available to assist the scholars to learn the concepts they need already learned in schools and revise for his or her exams. There are towns and areas which have developed purely because of this coaching mania (We all know Kota).

Any revolution in education, to launch in mainstream education needs to start and penetrate within the parallel education system. this is often where Unacademy has been ready to make a difference. they are doing not replace the college or the school. They augment it. they’re here to switch the parallel education system. Their very concept of learning at much lower rates, from home, from the simplest educators out there, makes them a really attractive proposition for the scholars.

Historically, anyone who tried to exchange the standard classroom teaching model or the teacher, for that matter, has been teetered to its fall. So they’ve made it very clear – they’re not here to exchange the teacher, they’re here to reinforce the teaching and learning process.

Because our culture still has the profound importance of a tutor and a physical learning process, it’ll take us plenty quite a startup – a profound cultural shift and a generational change would be so as – to switch this learning process with a virtual learning environment.

Index:

Background Of Founders

Gaurav Munjal, the founding father of the corporate, incorporates a successful history of building, scaling up, and selling businesses earlier. (He was the founding father of a flat-sharing company called flat.to which was later renamed Flatchat and brought over by Commonfloor)

Gaurav had parallelly launched Unacademy initially on Youtube while functioning on flat.to.

His principal content creator and co-founder within the earliest days of the educational platform is Roman Saini, who had a reputation of being one of the youngest persons to clear the IAS exams.

Concentrating heavily on courses which require relearning

Gaurav brought Roman on board because the cofounder, and that they started creating high-value intensive courses just like the preparation for IAS concentrating on certain subjects.

In a country like India, where there are lakhs of aspirants for the civil services exams, the recognition of what they were offering was guaranteed to increase given their background in education and achievement.

A free YouTube offering by a young IAS officer is like finding gold for the scholars.

In addition, they targeting courses which required to stay in contact with the topic, so people would keep returning. For e.g. English courses and Coding courses.

Disseminating out the burden of making Content

Understanding the growing popularity of the platform, the team quickly brought more educators on board as collaborators. it absolutely was easy for each educator to form their own content and put it up for the scholars to work out it. These educators acted because of the influencers and marketers for the Unacademy by acting as collaborators.

Monetizing By Launching A Premium Service

The most crucial part of launching anything free is the ability to monetize at the correct time. the largest drawback of other popular education channels was that they monetize their popularity at the correct time.

The founders of Unacademy were smart enough to make an app and push their faithful followers towards the app and their own website (keeping the YouTube channel because the sidekick) making it simpler to push the subscription-based model on the app and website.

Deleverging the associated risk

In the initial time of the launch of the Unacademy plus – Unacademy’s subscription-based model – the team had also made sure that some selected courses of quality collaborators are launched on the Plus Premium Model. As far as my memory goes, they launched with a people speaking course.

Unacademy Plus.

They still had their hottest UPSC training videos on youtube as a free for all. They gradually nudged their users to start out using the app and go browsing their own websites frequently.

Low cost of Content Creation

What makes Unacademy an awfully attractive partner is that the Unacademy educator’s app which makes it easier for the educator to record his or her lectures on the phone at the very least.

As compared to other eLearning ventures like Byju’s which require to speculate heavily in creating attention capturing content (purely because of the target age) and other education companies which invest heavily in infrastructure and studios, thus making it difficult for a little educator to provide his own content. Unacademy has democratized content creation.

As visible from the composition of educators, many contributors are young pass-outs or teachers who have recently completed the identical exams successfully.

This has kept the price of content creation and onboarding of teachers at a lower rate which I feel gives the corporate enough space to burn cash for marketing.

Scalability of their offerings

By choosing to venture into India’s postgraduate entrance exams as an entry point, Unacademy hit the proverbial gold mine. the character of the content created by the educators is definitely replicable and scalable to be rechristened as multiple offerings.

For example, if some content is being created for the IIM – CAT exams, more or less it may also be replicated for the 30 plus other management exams for states and personal universities, the identical content is additionally applicable to the Banking entrance exams.

Thus, what makes Unacademy a current darling of the VC/PE funds is that the easy scalability of the content it’s created for the market. This makes it the earliest among peers to face an opportunity for profitability.

One factor I would like to simply mention here is Luck! Yes, Unacademy has been one of all the lucky ones to urge all the combinations all along with being present at the proper place at the proper time. Whether it’ll have a sustained advantage or another player is going to be ready to overcome it, are a few things that we’ll wait and see.

Do Share Your Thoughts

Do tell us all your thoughts in the comments section below, we look forward to reading all the comments in the section below.

Also, do check useful Startup Resources and Tools below(👇) and do join our newsletter for free for more interesting Business case studies, Startup knowledge, and Startup founders podcast delivered to your inbox every Sunday morning.

Do follow us:

Who is owner of Unacademy?