The Beginning of Unacademy
Gaurav Munjal, Cofounder of Unacademy in 2010, was doing engineering in the computer science branch from NMIMS University in Mumbai.
He posted a video on variables in programming language on YouTube; after that, he regularly posted some videos related to that. Soon, he began to get a positive response on those videos from students all across India.
Till then, he had no idea that he would go on to found an Unacademy. He founded another startup, flat chat, alongwith Himesh Singh, who later became another cofounder of Unacademy.
They were moving onto another essential aspect of a startup: team making. Another cofounder Roman Saini cleared the AIIMS exam at the age of 16 and then cracked UPSC. They both became friends and started to upload videos from their same channel on YouTube.
After sometimes, flat chat, the startup of Gaurav Munjal and Himesh Singh was acquired by the common floor, giving them a profit of about 50 lakh, hence giving exit to both of them.
They both began to talk and started formulating the idea of the Unacademy and later on convinced Roman Saini to join them to make a highly skilled team of intellectuals.
After that, Roman Saini left his job as an IAS officer, seeing the immense potential and influence he could cause due to teaching students from all over India.
View of Unacademy Founder
“Execution of the plan is one of the most crucial plans to start any startup from the point of view of cofounder.”
Unacademy was one of India’s biggest educational YouTube channels by this time. Now they started to work upon having a website for Unacademy and launched it in 2016. Now they planned to target the Entrance Exam.
So, one must wonder how Unacademy differentiated itself from different paid competitors like Udemy etc. They had a vision that any good teacher should use their platform and teach students all over India. Hence, they made simple software that is convenient for teachers from all over India and to upload videos from their homes.
Due to some funding from different companies, they started to pay the educators based on their views. But despite all this, their platform was free for students for a long time which helped them build a large network of students.
Students had the advantage of study from home by using any device like mobile, laptops etc. Another advantage was that suppose you cannot understand a particular topic from a specific teacher.
Then you can switch the teacher for that specific topic and continue to study from both of them without even paying a single penny. Their educator taught students in many different regional languages also rather than Hindi and English Only.
Some general facts about Unacademy :
1. Their revenue in lockdown is now more than their entire revenue for 2017 and 2018 combined.
2. They saw 10X growth in the last 12 months.
3. They conduct 20,000 free live classes every month.
4. Their subscriber jump from 1 lakh to 2 lakh in the last 3 Months
5. Daily active users 7 lakh.
6. Watch time: 1.9 billion minutes
So, in the last, if you want to build a huge company out of nowhere, then you should have a proper foundation laid in the beginning. Appropriate planning, good team, dedication, patience, and things will turn in your direction.
And you will never regret it once in a lifetime. Even if things don’t go your way, you will never regret it because you gave everything that you could, and that’s more important than anything else.
