A Decade in the Learning Technology Industry

At 36, he is a veteran in the education technology business. Vivek Agarwal started his first company egurucool in 1999, a few years after graduating from IIM Calcutta. The company attracted investments from Chris Capital, News Corp. and IFC (W) and was sold to NIIT. Vivek is now managing his second venture in this space: Liqvid.

I caught up with Vivek to discuss how the last decade in this industry has unfolded.

SS: Vivek, so tell me a bit about the business of egurucool.

VA: Sure. We were in the online test prep business. We provided courses to help students prepare for the CBSE examinations.

SS: This is very interesting. You know that there are still several players in that field. There is Career Launchers, who have an offline/online model and then there is Vriti, funded by Intel Capital, and Catura Systems, funded by DFJ India which are mainly in the online space. Then there are larger players like Edurite with its coaching centers. Tell us about some of your experiences in running this business.

VA: Obviously at the point I was running this business, the main challenge was to get users online. We tried several techniques including cold calling of schools and parents. In one particular year, we actually visited 30000 homes and demoed the content. We had great conversion ratios (post the demo) but obviously it was very expensive. Now ten years later, we have many more internet users in this country but there is still likely
to be resistance in purely online learning.

SS: And justifiably so. Learning has to be blended into a seamless online/offline format.

VA: That’s what we also figured out. It was important to use the internet to develop communities and to have assessments but we also started learning centers. I think it is important to be able to empower the instructor with the appropriate use of technology and thus improve the quality of learning.

SS: Given that there are still many folks out there trying to build a nationwide big brand in this area is there anything that you would share that you would have done differently if you had been running the business today?

VA: Actually, yes there is. We invested a lot of effort in working with teachers and developing content. If I was running the business today I would try and figure out if there was a way of making existing content available without duplicating the creation efforts.

SS: Well said. Let’s talk of Liqvid your latest venture. You actually started in the services industry by outsourcing elearning projects.

VA: Yes you are right. We worked with customers like HP, Motorola and Cisco outsourcing elearning content development. We covered the entire gamut of sales training, product training etc. We transform the technical material that clients have into learning material with the help of in-house instructional designers who work with subject matter experts from the client or with subject matter experts from outside.

SS: I used to run a company in a similar business: Aesthetic Technologies. I think that it was fun working with a team of varied talents but I think scaling up was not easy given that these projects come with fuzzy specifications.

VA: Well, you are right. The team consists of instructional designers, content writers, programmers and graphic artists. And that’s kind of fun. And over the years we have developed methodologies that help in rapid prototyping so that we can have customers engaged. Also most of our customers have elaborate content development standards.

The bigger challenge we faced was in global sales. We tried tele-calls, local hires, working with sales accelerators and so on. Our experience has not been satisfactory. I think for all start ups the key founder has to be located in the geography of the main customers.

SS: Precisely, Which is why it is so exciting that the Indian educational business is large enough for you to be based here in India and work on products for the Indian market. Tell me about English Edge.

VA: English Edge is our product to help students learn English. It arose out of our partnership with BBC. The main objective of the product is to help students learn English not by way of the traditional “grammatical approach” but in a “conversational manner.

SS: Tell me about your partnership with BBC.

VA: We started by using the BBC material (audio clips and exercises) and developed it into instructional product which comes with the instructor multimedia software, instructor manual (providing background reference), screen-wise cue cards (to help navigate the software) and a student workbook.

This is a complete product that helps instructors improve their teaching skills.

SS: But you have gone beyond this initial partnership.

VA: Yes, we have. In a couple of key ways. First of all to cater to the broad Indian market we have extended the offering into 4 levels. Our first level is really meant for people who are seeking their first exposure in English, our second level is for people who are trying to string words into sentences, our third level is for students who are trying to learn correct grammar. Level 4 (based on the original BBC product) is meant for more polished users.
We have developed the content and instructional material for all these additional levels. The other way we have tried to develop this product is to develop “domain specific learning”. In doing so, we have developed content partnerships with Outlook Money, Outlook Traveller for BFSI and Hospitality domain learning.

SS: Tell me about you go to market strategy

We believe that we can provide the best value in embedding our product in vocational learning courses (for the travel, hospitality, retail, apparel ….industries). We are trying to work with educational institutions to make English learning a part of the ongoing process at these institutions.

I want you to remember one thing. We are trying to target what we would call the SEC A in marketing terminology, we are targeting students who have completed twelve years of schooling and have learnt English as a formal subject. Even then the language skills from an employability standpoint leaves much to be desired.

SS: So Vivek, this has been a fascinating journey. Where do you go from here?

VA: Sanjoy, the potential is enormous. If you take the universe of private schools, professional and degree colleges and vocational training institutes, you probably have an universe of 9 million learners out there. We aim to reach 2-3 million learners in the next few years. If we can develop the product further to be able to incorporate learning English with the help of Indian language learning aids we can take our product to more rural settings. Finally, there is no reason to believe that we cannot take this product to countries like India and China.

SS: Surely that is an exciting goal to help India reap its demographic dividend. Thank you Vivek and all the best.