Piyush Tiwari, Somil BhandariFounders & Directors at EdufyMe Published On: Thursday, November 26, 2015 Views 3846

"Working smart is more important than working hard. Work hard but smartly."

It is often said that programmers are the best managers for a software product. The startup arena in India is running in its top gear making it easy for developers with an idea to launch a product. Piyush Tiwari and Somil Bhandari come from a technical background with both completing their respective graduations from reputed institutions. They both went on to pursue their careers at prominent companies. While Somil worked at Adobe and Microsoft, Piyush works for persistent systems, Infinera, and Taxiforsure.

As both belonged to a family of scholars, they understood the need for good education right from the start. This is where they understood the gap in the education sector and planned to launch a startup that can take care of the same. EdufyMe is an online learning and hiring platform. It enables developers to learn to program in an interactive way either by taking our course or by solving online challenges in the language of their choice.

Please provide a brief overview of your product/ service.

EdufyMe is a social learning platform with a motto to empower skills to users that are required for good technical roles. We found a big gap between college education and what current companies, specially startups require. To bridge this gap, we wanted to have a skill platform that could help users to enhance their skills, test those skills and finally can lend in a dream job. Our product provides our users to learn and showcase their skills that are most important for their career. Though there are similar solutions for programmers, what makes us different is to value Testers and provide a platform for them as well. Our platform features problems on API testing and UI testing for testers, and on data structures and algorithms for developers to help them grow. EdufyMe rates each developer and tester using our innovative algorithm, provides a discussion forum, social community and fun environment to learn.

What inspired you to build the above product/ service?

Coming from a tier 2 city and college, we always knew the gap that existed between top colleges ( IITs, NITs ) and general engineering colleges. We both ( Me and my partner Somil Bhandari ) being children of teachers and realized what good education do. We started off with a practical learning module for programming languages, launched a beta version and tested with ~100 users. With user feedback and market research, created a skill test platform to solve interesting puzzles and algorithmic questions and launched in April 2015. Since then we have around 1000 registered users, more than 50 puzzles and conducted more than 10 CodeAThons in collaboration with different organizations, and provided jobs to multiple candidates. Meanwhile, realizing another gap that existed was absence of any platform for Software Testers. No product exists in market that can help testers test their skills and learn practically. With this in mind we have recently launched a platform for Software Tester, where they can solve testing problems, test their skills and connect with matching market opportunities.

What is your life mantra?

Build for people, build for society, build for the nation. My mantra is to do something that can bring a positive change in the life of people that can affect society in a positive way. I believe education is something that can empower people to make the right choice for themselves.

What was the most challenging part of your journey till now?

Being startup is facing a new challenge daily. Probably finding the right partner and making a team is the biggest challenge. Somil and I have been lucky to find each other. We are compatible as well as complimenting each other.

When we started building our first course, we were unaware of the effort required. We wanted to create the best quality material in limited budget.

Apart from it other challenges are, getting time from B2B customers to deliver a pitch and speaking with colleges to partner.

How did you overcome those challenges?

When you are an entrepreneur you learn to face and solve challenges. Once you have a correct attitude you overcome all the challenges. Like to create videos, we wanted a Teleprompter to read the script. Market solutions were pretty costly and we wanted to do things in the budget, hence we built one in-house costing just Rs 200. Similarly as we progressed, we built our green screen, proper lighting etc required for high-quality content creation.

Share some details about the investments that you have been able to fetch for the business till now.

We are a bootstrapped startup. Currently, we are focusing our time and energy on building a right product and a profitable business model.

How do you protect yourself from the problem of Brain Drain?

Treat people with the proper respect they deserve, share your dream with them and allow them to make it their own dream and give them autonomy over their work.

According to you, what are the three qualities an individual must have to achieve success?

I think Passion is most important of all to require success. Apart from it are never give up attitude and learning new kinds of stuff daily.

Which online tools/ services/ apps do you use the most and would like to recommend as well?