BeyondExams in 2022: A Review
2022 was a year focused towards financial growth and user satisfaction.
“A business has hit a goldmine if people are ready to pay for it and then also recommend it to their friends!”
So in 2022, with a clear realisation of our niche, we took steps to grow our sales and satisfy our customers above and beyond what they expected.
What follows is a series of milestones that sum up our journey in 2022. Use the index below to move to the relevant section:
We identify our niche stronghold!
Paid skill training cohorts take off
Quality control for BE content takes priority
MoreThanMarks goes into hibernation
Our sales expertise has grown, but we still have miles to go
A new approach to Talent discovery at University level!
Our users helped shape our product journey
Features that we ditched
Major Learnings from 2022
Conclusion
We have also released a shorter, quantitative summary as a separate post. You can check it out here.
We identify our niche stronghold!
The problem: There is very little support and mentoring available to students when making the transition from a marks-oriented school setting to a skills-oriented college setting.
Our solution: 3-months & 6-months skill trainings with lifetime internship support
Paid skill training cohorts take off
A total of 127 students have registered for our paid cohorts since July.
We started with just 5 students learning WebDev in our first batch and have now expanded to Flutter app-dev and Digital marketing cohorts as well!
Many of our recent cohort graduates have already secured well-paying opportunities in the industry!
Find out more about our paid cohorts on our Instagram page
Quality control for BE content takes priority
Back in 2021, we had created automation tools to auto-curate the most popular content on Youtube for each domain on BeyondExams. On top of this, hundreds of teachers had created half-baked courses while exploring BeyondExams for the first time. All this meant that most domains on BeyondExams contained ill-conceived, raw content.
So this year, we spent painstakingly long hours connecting with domain experts, identifying the top content, and finally filtering out over 1,800 courses from the platform.
The result? Every category on BeyondExams now only shows relevant courses that students would be interested in exploring!
Start learning with us! Visit BeyondExams
MoreThanMarks goes into hibernation
We have had a “Fail fast and learn fast” mindset as we ventured through the last two years. We knew many of our experiments may not lead to desirable outcomes even if they seemed like important problems to solve. MoreThanMarks was one such project. Even in the 21st century, most parents and schools still consider securing good marks the one and only true metric of their child’s success. This meant that even though the students loved our “more than marks” approach to learning, it didn’t have many long-term buyers in parents and schools. So in April’22, we closed down MoreThanMarks.
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Another such experiment was Homeschooling through BeyondExams. Lack of credibility and society’s over-dependence on the current schooling system meant that we could not excite even a single parent or organisation to start homeschooling their kids through our content mapped to NIOS curriculum.
Alternate narrative: We realise that we cannot accomplish everything at once. So it is quite plausible that we may not have spent enough time and manpower to iterate on the shortcomings of these projects and may have drawn faulty conclusions. Moving forward, we plan to take on only as much as we can handle without compromising on quality of such analysis.
Our sales expertise has grown, but we still have miles to go
No one in our team has any prior experience in sales. And not spending more time and resources on hiring a senior sales mentor may probably have been the biggest mistake we made in 2022.
The year started with us exploring B2B University partnerships but we didn’t spend enough time building individual relationships with the administration even though in retrospect, we realise that there was decent interest from them. Then we moved to D2C sales through campus ambassadors programs and Instagram ads. Over the last 4 months, we have converted over 350+ students to join our paid programs, out of which 127 students were part of our skill-training cohorts.
But our sales strategy is still pretty much a trial-and-error approach mixed with online research. Not having a sales expert, a clear funnel and workforce training process in place is creating a BIG vacuum. A plan is in place to address it with 2023.
A new approach to Talent discovery at University level
In 2022, we made conscious attempts to limit the number of experiments in education that the BeyondExams team was directly involved in. Instead, we launched two experimental talent discovery initiatives to address these issues:
ThinkBeyondExams challenge:
We partnered with Delhi University’s Cluster Innovation Centre to launch this 6-months challenge. The Aim - To encourage 1st year Engineering students to transform into entrepreneurs, and solve some of the problems in education mentioned in Dr. Malpani’s reverse pitch. Over 50 students with no previous experience or knowledge worked on 4 themes, shared their progress in public every single day and built really innovative solutions. Some of these teams will now be working alongside BeyondExams team to deploy their solutions for public use.Hack2Educate:
With ThinkBeyondExams’ success, we decided to invite even more students to join our movement in education. So in November, we launched Hack2Educate - India’s largest 48-hours eduTech hackathon that saw over 1000 students registering for the event. With support from Major League Hackathon, 12+ startup mentors, and our mentor - Dr. Aniruddha Malpani, we received over 50 unique solutions from students from all over India trying to solve various problems in the education space.
Read more about our Hack2Educate journey here: Series on Medium.com
Our users helped shape our product journey
We added in-course quizzes, hands-on projects, reading materials, doubt solving sessions and more! This helped students engage, interact and self-evaluate on a whole new level!
We brought in Teacher Superpowers!
Real-time progress tracking, more intuitive submissions and evaluations UI, cohort-view, user-view, and so much more!BE Chat was one of the most game-changing additions to the platform.
It has added a whole new layer of support for students as well as teachers.We integrated advanced early-bug-detection and error reporting frameworks at every break-point.
This enabled a more reliable, robust system that helped us identify and fix issues before users faced them!Our revamped navigation system helped users find our extended services and their tutorials much more easily.
Many more small improvements and feature upgrades were brought to life!
Check out our longer-form changelog here. We have PICTURES!
Features that we ditched
Auto-translate Youtube videos to local languages.
Student Dashboard
Schedule live sessions
Daily Challenges for students
Android and iOS app
If you would like to know more about why we ended up ditching these features, please share your feedback in the comment section.
Major Learnings from 2022
Our organisation-wide priorities moved towards sales and user experience.
But the individual departments continued to work pretty mutually exclusively with very low inter-department communication. This led to significant delays and alienated teams.Trying to figure out everything on our own instead of hiring experts meant that we were reinventing the wheel a lot and faced many avoidable pitfalls. This was especially true for the Sales Department.
Running all our experiments under the BeyondExams brand name was a bad idea. Everyone - our users, advisors, supporters felt super alienated about many fundamental questions - what were we trying to build, who were we building it for, etc.
We were doing more for our investors than we were doing for our users. This is a bad idea for long-term sustainability. We finally learnt to focus on our users first.
Conclusion
2022 was our second year in existence. We saw our fair share of missed opportunities, exponential growth, and increased organisational maturity. Taking forward these learnings, we move to 2023 with new energy, but the same resolve - To build a more educated world.
If you would like to contribute your time or donate to our efforts, please reach out at pankaj@beyondexams.org. Thank you for reading! We would love to hear from you in the comments section!