About Byju Raveendran
Founder and CEO of Byju's The Learning App
He grew up in Azhikode in Kannur district of Kerala. His parents were teachers at the Malayalam-medium government school he attended, but always made sure he wasn’t in any of their classes. It would have been awkward, you see. Raveendran had a habit of bunking classes to play football, cricket, badminton and table tennis.
“From 7th class onwards, I spent a lot of time outside, playing games. Played multiple games at university level. Almost all of them at college level and school level. Represented state at school level and university level, captained most of the teams. It’s all those things, if you ask me, the reason for what I am able to do today,” he says. “I just capitalized on two of my strengths—the logic which I got from my love for math. Math is still my first love, and the real life skills, that extremely positive attitude which you learn from games.”
Byju Raveendran, founder and Chief Executive Officer of Byju"s The Learning App, says that he is building a fan base which is a very strange thing for him“I believe when you take sessions in auditoriums, you’re creating a kind of fan following. You can’t do a math class in a stadium. It has to be a math performance,” says Raveendran, 36.
How the journey started
The journey started in 2007, unpredictably.
He was working for a UK based shipping firm Pan Ocean Shipping Ltd., when his friends came to him to teach them for CAT.
“They came to me for help in CAT because they knew me as someone who’s good in cheating in exams. They don’t use the word but they knew me as someone with short-cuts and exam hacks,” says Raveendran.
He decided to also give the test just like that. “They were taking it like this is the end of it. For me, it was just like another Sunday afternoon. Went and took the exam and that’s the reason I think I did well, just like how I used to do well in almost all the other exams,” he recalls.
Along with his friends he gave the exam and got 100 percentile.
A small start to great journey
Raveendran got calls from various Indian Institutes of Management(IMMs) but chose to return to his job. After couple of years his more friends came for help in preparing for CAT.
He took CAT again, and got 100 percentile once more.
He was astonished with his performance and decided to take six months leap and decided to build a structure to see what happens . He build the structure to teach students.
Raveendran started taking classes on weekends and soon students flooded. When a room was not enough to accommodate he decided to book an auditorium with seating capacity of 1200.
“If you are copying someone, maybe thinking big is not that important because you need to copy it very well and you need to execute it well but if you’re doing something new, thinking big is 50%. From a classroom of 40 I thought of going 30x without ever worrying... I was sure that if I’m booking 1,200 I will fill it. Sixth or seventh week the auditorium was full. Then I never looked back,” says Raveendran.
This was the peak time when students were coming to him.
How Raveendran build the company
Byju’s initial offerings were all centred around test-preparation, and these were much more low-key than the jazzy, high-production-value videos and content that it currently generates for the K-12 (kindergarten-Class XII) segment, with more than 500 members in the research and development team.
This content is what’s helping Byju’s accelerate growth and be one of the top education start-ups in the country.
There are about 20 million children between Classes VI and XII in India who have access to the Internet and take private coaching classes, which translates to an addressable market opportunity of about $2.5 billion, according to research by consulting firm RedSeer Consulting.
Since launching in 2015, Byju’s claims its app has had more than six million downloads. It had 320,000 active users as of November last year. The number of people who buy its premium service is growing every month, claims the firm.
“A great company will be converting anywhere around 8-12% of people who try out their app. 8-12% is a fairly high number given the fact that in education your ticket sizes are larger as well. You’re no longer selling a Rs500 product or a Rs200 product, you’re selling a product which runs into thousands of rupees. Also, with education, unlike most of the sectors, the repeat rates are very high. For example, a student would start with Byju’s in the sixth standard or seventh, so Byju’s is looking at a four-year or seven-year timeline in certain cases, where they can continue to tap into the same user,” says Kunal Walia, founder and managing partner at Khetal Advisors, a Bengaluru-based investment bank that has worked with multiple education start-ups.
Byju’s has grown exponentially in the last year. Its team of 200 has grown to 1,000.
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