GetMyUni is a social college search platform launched in February 2015 by Upneet Grover & Hardik Thakkar (Founders). The startup is currently helping students choose the right college via exhaustive student given ratings and reviews, engaging forums and alumni connect.
The company has covered more than 11K colleges and has more than 40K students written reviews.
The company is considered as the India’s largest student review portal and also generates 1000 student leads on daily basis.
GetMyUni not only helps a student but guides, with the most important decision of their life i.e. which college to join. The company enables this decision by allowing students to search for colleges by domain and then further use our advanced filters like fees, university, approvals.
Sujata Sangwan Interacts With Upneet Grover, Founder, GetMyUni and Spoke to HimAbout StartupWe are disrupting the college search space by bringing in a social element to an otherwise dull classifieds space. Our growth numbers are a testimony to our user love. We've grown ~12% Week-on-Week [~60% Month-on-Month] over the ~5 odd months and are now doing ~35K user sessions a day [A million sessions a month]. Our user engagement metrics are off the charts as well.
Initial challenges included our ability to scale user generated content and encouraging students to write college reviews without having to spend money on it. As a result we created campus ambassador programs, strong referral and in product marketing programs and were lucky to have a good word of mouth going around. We were surprised by the number of students who were willing to help aspirants and hence wrote long, unbiased reviews.
The next major challenge was money - investors were looking for more traction before funding so we decided to focus on product and revenue equally. We came up with a new revenue stream wherein we were enabling brands and companies reach out to students via competitions and that became a raging success. We were making enough money to support the business till we finally got the funding from Times Internet [Tlabs]. With that funding plus our revenues increasing month on month we've been able to scale to a million users per month on the platform, something we are incredibly proud of.
Idea Generation While choosing our post-grad colleges, both Hardik and I struggled to get relevant peer information and communicate with fellow students/alumni to understand the pros and cons of each college. There was scattered information available on different forums and we mostly had to rely on our personal connections to get peer information.
Even today, students only have sites like Shiksha, HTCampus etc. at their disposal which provide aggregated college information which is collected from the college websites. Also, every college claims to be the best and hence the decision to join the right college becomes extremely difficult.
To solve the aforementioned problems both Hardik and Upneet quit their jobs in Dec’14 to start GetMyUni.
Team Background The current core team consists of:
Upneet Grover - Computer Engineer from Pune University, FMS Alumnus, Ex-Deloitte Strategy Consultant , Ex-Strategy Office of the CEO and Vice Chairman -TimesGroup
Nirmanyu Arora - BE from Jodhpur Institute of Engineering and Technology and has a lot of hands on experience with creating products in the EdTech domain
Manish Gupta - MBA in Business Analytics and heads our database management and leads delivery.
Tushar Mehta - BE from NSIT and heads marketing for us. Has helped many startups previously as a growth hacker and campus connect consultant.
Traction Details1. We have grown significantly and have a traffic of 1M+ sessions monthly growing at 60% MoM since December 15.
2. We receive 300 student questions on our student forums everyday and are growing to be one of the biggest student forums in the industry.
3. We enjoy unparalleled engagement on colleges with reviews with a user spending an average >5 minutes on the page - highest in the industry.
Revenue ModelThe classifieds space is traditionally a boring one, which has purely been built to generate leads. Poor information, black hat seo techniques driven platforms, zero user generated content have defined the industry and same was the case with education space also. We saw a huge opportunity in the user generated content space in education, given that there were clear winners in other industries and they all had one thing in common - they had UGC at their core eg; Zomato for Food, Tripadvisor for travel and glassdoor for jobs.
So, in short, our user generated content and the whole social element sets us apart from our competitors because we believe that the college search decision, one of the most important in a student's life isn't typically taken in isolation, but is taken by considering hundreds of small data points. We want to leverage the power of UGC and peer opinion to help a student make this decision easier.
Our user metrics are a testimony to the same - our reviews page have unprecedented engagement with users spending upto 10-12 minutes on a page, a number which is unheard of in the classifieds space.
Our revenue model includes:
Student Leads - Generating and selling High quality, verified, student leads to colleges which are the right fit
Ads - Both vanilla and native advertisements to boost visibility and branding
Student Enrollments - Having a student fill out applications directly via our platform and taking a fee per student enrollment
Funding
We have been funded by TimesInternet via their incubator TLabs. We raised $50K and are currently operating profitably. But, we are looking to raise a seed round of $1M to be able to have a strong sales team and beef up our product to start monetization of the traffic we've been able to build.
Future PlansThe future plan involves a three pronged strategy :
Fortifying our position as the best college search destination and kickstarting sales for domestic colleges.
We also want to tap into the study abroad market since that still lacks a portal with quality information which students can peruse
Our third and final goal - a rather ambitious one - is to build the strongest college recommendation tool. We believe that currently a lot of students are being misguided by offline consultants to suit themselves, and if there is a fair portal, which, basis a student's background, marks and abilities and using advanced algorithms can present them with the right set of college recommendations, that product will be a super success.
BW Reporters
This is Chitrakshi Suneja currently pursuing graduation and diploma in journalism and mass communication. She is crazy about Writing stuff on Startups, Entrepreneurs and reading as well.
