One Stop Shop for Education in India Is Looking for Investors

The idea of free educational resource stemmed from the fact that education as a sector has received huge attention from private players. Extragrades.com is equipped to become largest repository of educational content.

Our mission is to help students make sense of confusing schoolwork.

Why online tests when there are so many?

Each course covers the topics in detail. Our course material is self-explanatory and the chapters in each course are largely self-contained. However this guide gives a list of easily available books as recommended reading to give further insight into the subject. This is something that is missing from other so-called competitors.

Maharashtra Board:

Maharashtra board was a natural choice since we are based in Mumbai, besides there are statistics that compel us believe that this is an attractive proposition. Around 1.44 million students from 13,835 schools gave the SSC examination and over 800,000 students from 3,581 schools/colleges gave the HSC examination. This figures are just for class X and Class XII students, the figure is mind-boggling when we include the students in the group of class VI to Class IX. Our estimate clearly shows that by just focusing on Maharashtra board alone we have potential clientele of 5 million students.

Why there is a need for us?
Education as a sector has witnessed explosive activity in recent years with active participation of private sector. Sadly corporate sector is focusing its attention on establishing international schools and smaller private player’s sole focus is to sell the tests or test-series, none of which solve the problem a student faces.

Seeking answers to questions that puzzle them, our vision is different, it not only provides comprehensive notes (that too free) but it would also provide a testing platform where a student after revising a lesson can take different tests, what we mean by different tests is that each test is prepared on different parameters, a fill in the blanks tests only objective reasoning, while multiple choice may test his understanding, we even have short answers test where a student can input a short answer, this will test his understanding as well as his skills of writing a paper, presently the companies that are engaged in online education have tests based only on MCQ’s or fill in the blanks, this has very limited scope of testing a student’s knowledge.

We intend to be a step ahead.

Another fact that has prompted us to believe that we must have presence in Maharashtra is the fact that leading study guides publisher Navneet Publications Ltd. derives more than 100 crores of its turnover through the sale of study guides, this clearly demonstrates that there is a need for our products.

The arguments for C.B.S.E. and I.C.S.E. are same as above though I.C.S.E. has lesser number of students compared to SSC, yet C.B.S.E. and I.C.S.E. offers us an opportunity for international exposure since numerous students are located abroad, another argument for C.B.S.E. and I.C.S.E. is that they both have literature as a subject, literature guides have international demand since Shakespeare and other novels are prescribed in curriculums world over, this gives us tremendous edge since there is not a single website that offers comprehensive literature content, having a presence in international domain can benefit the company in terms of creating brand equity, something that will drive the value of the company.

Competitive exams:

Competitive exams present huge opportunity, in MHT-CET alone around 2.95 lakh students appear every year.

We strongly believe that revenues would follow. Investors can contact us for more information.

When we conceptualized the project little thought was given to monetization, in fact the revenue model was completely absent, we just wanted to become repository of largest question bank on internet, and our aim was to have a question bank of 100,000 competitive exams solutions and an equal number of school sections.

We strongly believe that revenues would follow, yet one stream which can generate considerable revenue is advertising, companies are ready to take advantage of the booming student community needs, the educational accessories market have expanded and everybody are vying to reach the potential customers, it is here that we can bridge the gap between manufacturers and end users, advertising can generate considerable revenues, enough to recover costs and yet offer the content free.

Another way of monetization could be to offer the study materials at nominal fee say Rs. 120 for unlimited access of content, this would require expenditure on advertising as well preparation of content before adoption of this model, and while Rs. 120 or $3 may seem miniscule the logistics can be mind-boggling. In competitive exams alone one can easily target 20,000 students, on most conservative note this is easily achievable so revenues can be generated easily.

Another way to keep site free but have the user register, while this may not bring immediate revenues, this will equip us with a huge databank which can be utilized to sell as leads to manufacturers and service providers. For example justdial.com, a local search engine sells the calls it receives in form of leads at the rate of Rs. 30.00 per lead, being in a niche field the value of lead increases even more, by keeping the site free it is not impossible to generate 100,000 leads in a year and there is a definite market waiting to tap the leads.

Content Licensing:

One area that holds tremendous promise in terms of revenue is content licensing. The licensing can be done in following ways:

[1] Content licensing to commercial entities like coaching institutes can be hugely profitable, given the fact that most coaching institutes do not enjoy economies of scale and thus find it very difficult to prepare study notes, most of these coaching institutes source their content requirement from small publishers like Unique Solutions, our strategy is to offer content license where a coaching institute is free to use our content in their institutes for a fee, besides this we would also provide a test portal where the students can attempt online tests, thus the coaching institute not only saves money but it offers them an opportunity to re-brand themselves using online testing platform.

[2] The introduction of 3G has seen surge demand from telecom companies that are vying with each other to provide content that is useful to their users, besides gaming and other entertainment applications, education too is witnessing huge demand. Companies like NOKIA have already jumped the bandwagon by launching education in Mera Nokia app. Companies like Onmobile Global, that act as content aggregator has seen surge in demand in education through mobile learning.

We require the investment for creating content, presently we have data bank of 4000 questions and we intend to scale the same to 50000 questions and solutions. We intend to offer mock-exams to students of MBA and engineering exams.

Our objective is to become one stop shop for education.