Edtech startup takes its real test in local lingo
nBENGALURU: Shabana Nurudeen lives in a village in rural Kerala. She’s the mother of two toddlers, cares for her sick mother, and runs the house. She works as a freelance counselling psychologist at various educational institutes in nearby towns. It’s an offand-on gig that gives her no steady income. She dreams of cracking the public service commission (PSC) exam and getting a government job. But there are no coaching institutes in her area, nor does she have the resources to travel to attend classes.
Nurudeen had earned her psychology master’s degree via distance learning from IGNOU. So it was natural for her to go online in search of exam coaching. She stumbled upon Entri, an app that coaches PSC aspirants in their local languages, while attending on her mother who was in hospital after a heart attack in 2017. “I would do the practice tests on Entri whenever I could while waiting at the hospital. I had no other study material. When the exams’ results were announced, I was in the supplementary list. That boosted my confidence,” she recalls.
She is now preparing for this year’s LDC (lower division clerk) exam. She’s also coaching other homemakers who want to take the exam. “They have a hectic schedule—kids, home. So I give them flexible time slots. This teaching and learning method feels right for me,” she says.
ADDED OFFERINGS
Entri, too, has evolved over the last two years. It started in Kochi with Malayalam study content for Kerala PSC exams. Now, it offers coaching for 65 government exams in Malayalam, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, and Hindi. Besides practice tests, it has added other content for exam preparation, including videos, quizzes, and study cards.
Spoken English via the five languages and upskilling courses on entrepreneurship are among Entri’s 135 courses. It claims to have 1.6 million users, adding around 7,000 new users every day.
“Only 5% of the world’s population is native English speakers. So we figured that if we provide content to people in their own mother tongue, especially learning material, they would grasp it a lot better,” says Entri co-founder and CEO, Mohammed Hisamuddin, who calls himself Hisam. Hisam is from rural Kasargod on the northern border of Kerala. His roots made him empathize with the aspirations and culture of the people in towns and villages of his state. Hence Malayalam was the first language in which Entri became available for PSC exam-takers.
Less than 2% of aspirants who take government exams in India get a job. Around 3,000,000 candidates appear for Kerala’s LDC exams. Only 35,000-40,000 are selected. For a national-level recruiter like the Railway Recruitment Board, 4 crore aspirants competed for 70,000 vacancies in the last exam.
Entri used to have tie-ups with offline coaching centres to create study material. But that didn’t last long because the app didn’t get the right content for online learning. So, it moved to sourcing content from freelancers overseen by a team of 35 academic heads who work full-time with Entri. It’s their job to manage and verify content generated by around 5,000 teachers. “Even after the content goes live, students can spot errors and get them fixed in minutes,” Hisam says.
This is one of the features that delights Anand Ravikumar, who started using Entri last year. “They take user feedback proactively,” Ravikumar says. He used to send his feedback over email. Then Entri’s customer support reached out to him, asking if he could message them on Whatsapp to make the process faster.
Like Shabana, Ravikumar found Entri through Facebook. He liked its clutter-free design and ease of navigation, compared to other apps. “I used several other test prep apps before choosing Entri,” he says. Ravikumar is a B.tech grad, who quit his IT job to prepare for civil service exams. He has been using Entri for the Service Selection Board (SSB) exam coming up in February.
DRAWING FROM EXPERIENCE
Hisam started Entri with co-founder Rahul Ramesh in 2015. The founders and all their initial teammates were engineers. They had gone to coaching centres while preparing for engineering admission tests and disliked the experience. “That’s why we decided to tackle this problem after we graduated,” says Hisam.
They first tried to do it for engineering entrance exams but that didn’t get traction in a highly competitive environment. So they pivoted in 2017 to local language learning content for government exams.
To begin with, they published a short video course for Kerala PSC’S LDC exam in Malayalam. It was a set of mock tests, where users could attempt to answer an unlimited number of questions.
They charged ₹300. “That really took off and we figured local language was the right track,” Hisam says. Entri is now a subscription service. Users can subscribe to individual courses for different durations or unlimited access to all courses in a particular language.
Hisam and Ramesh started the company with ₹25 lakh from friends and family. They soon ran out of money but not before getting into Learnlaunch, an edtech accelerator in Boston. This helped them to raise $70,000 from a bunch of investors in the US. And recently, the startup closed a $1.4 million seed round led by Good Capital.
Entri now has an active revenue stream from its users, but Hisam says the capital infusion will help the company get into new states with vernacular content and grow faster. “If you take Kerala alone as a market, we would be breaking even. But we have added more states because it is a huge opportunity and we have already cracked one state well,” he says.
But aren’t regional differences a stumbling block? India is quite like multiple countries stitched together, Hisam agrees. The challenge of entering new states is adapting to different cultures. For example, marketing material that works well in Kerala could fall on deaf ears in Telangana. “What’s funny in Kerala might not be funny at all in Andhra. Conversely, a joke in Telugu directly translated to Malayalam would draw no laughs.” Hisam and his team are learning about local festivals and other aspects of life in each of their new markets, apart from hiring locals to head regional teams.
Entri isn’t alone in the vernacular edtech game. Data tracker Tracxn counts five others, including a Bengali startup Allexamhub. The remaining four in the Tracxn list mostly focus on Hindi language content and are yet to reach the scale of Entri. Overall, there are about 150 edtech startups in India offering coaching for competitive exams to get jobs. Many have raised a few million dollars and some like Mockbank have got acquired as well.
But Hisam is optimistic. He believes Entri’s success so far with vernacular languages is an ace up his sleeve. Also, the narrow focus on jobs would draw users in.
The author is a consulting editor with
Mint. She tweets @vmalu.