Edtech startups in India have received billion dollar reviews, and experts expect the entire digital learning business to grow four-fold in the next five years. So if another edtech start-up jumps into the fray, it’s not surprising. However, Spayee’s business model could disrupt existing digital learning models.
On the one hand, companies like Byju’s have made huge investments to become India’s second unicorn in the market by offering K12 classes online. At the other end of the spectrum are global players like Udemy and Coursera who list course materials from content generators.
Spayee follows the latter model, but with a clear “make-in-India” mentality, where each content creator and educator is supported in creating, promoting and managing their course materials with a single suite of services powered by the platform on one SaaS model. The Spayee platform was launched in 2018.
The lock helped
Founded six years ago by four first-time entrepreneurs, Sandeep Singh, Gourav Kakkar, Aniruddha Singh, and Vijay Singh, Spayee provides a white-label course platform that educators can use to digitally create, market, and sell their academic products. The platform, which is offered as a SaaS model, protects both data and course documents under security levels.
The lockdown after Covid-19 made the company profitable within two years. Although Spayee Labs itself began the journey six years ago in 2014, the product launched in 2018, which according to co-founder Sandeep Singh was a blessing. “Nobody could have predicted the lockdown and its impact on education,” he says in a chat with TechRadar.
Today the company has more than a thousand paid customers who generate more than Rs 200 billion (approximately $ 27 million) in revenue from the sale of bespoke course materials on the platform. The lockdown since March 2020 has sparked an onslaught of educators and other content creators as Spayee’s paid customers have grown from 200 to over 1000.
Educators were reluctant to go online
According to Singh, the idea of creating such a platform came six years ago based on the understanding that content creators needed an all-in-one platform that could help create course materials, market them and support payments at the push of a button . “We found that content creators need a simple solution to create and manage their own portfolio,” he says.
In fact, early adopters of the platform found the ease of use so easy that one of them even gave Spayee start-up capital. The client was using a global platform that was not optimized for the Indian audience until they came across this localized platform. “It has helped them and the money has helped us improve our product and bring it to market,” says Sandeep.
While business growth was phenomenal during the pandemic, it resulted in robust six-month growth that the co-founders had planned for two years. “However, this also posed a number of problems as we weren’t prepared to support the growing customer base. Since this was the first time educators were digital, they had to do a lot of manual labor.”
Spayee’s growth challenges
We didn’t have bandwidth to train and support the educators and their clients as we were adding 150-200 clients every month during the lockdown. When scaling, we also recognized the need for additional functions, for which we were prepared with a development team.
The company is not involved in creating any content on the platform, but has a built-in way to market the user-created content. “We offer you a white-label solution that is branded according to your wishes. Spayee is nowhere available and works from the backend.” In fact, the company is also providing a white label website to content creators as part of the business.
In fact, the company operates in the B2B2C market, and its clients can be educators or companies looking to create their own training and development programs on a platform that employees can use and reuse as often as they want.
The company, which enjoys a top-of-the-mind recall among Indian educators, is now hoping to go global within the next six to eight months and is pursuing investments to that end. “We are in discussions with some investors and should hopefully complete a round in the next two to three months,” concluded Sandeep.
Since the Covid-19-led pandemic hit Indian shores in late February, nearly $ 1.5 billion has been invested in Indian edtech in the past nine months. It seems that it is time for another disruption in this emerging market.
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