Rishabh is a published author and has acumen of a businessperson. He has done his B.Tech and M.Tech in civil engineering from IIT, Bombay. Mudit has always been entrepreneurial in nature stepping ahead to take initiatives. This has helped him garner diversified learning abilities, which span through accounting, analytics, operations, technology, sales, marketing, team building, client management, HR and other business aspects. He has a B.Tech in Electrical Engineering. Both of them came together with an idea and launched a startup called Qriyo Infolabs Pvt Ltd. Qriyo is a leading platform for courses by freelance instructors (at customer’s home) in the field of extracurricular, academics, co-curricular and fitness
What is Qriyo? What you are doing?
Qriyo (www.qriyo.com) provides Qriyo Guru (home tutors) for 300+ courses at home. We cater to academics, fitness and extracurricular categories, providing courses such as dance, music, foreign languages, yoga etc. We are currently active in Jaipur, Jodhpur and have digitally expanded in Mumbai, Delhi.
What inspired you to build the above product/ service?
The inspiration came from a dream and an existing problem. Qriyo’s inception took place when Mudit (Co-Founder & CEO) was looking for a Yoga Instructor at home. Even after numerous searches & going through countless listings on the Internet, he was unable to find a suitable instructor. There were constraints like time availability, Quality, Pricing, Trust etc. Also it took 6 hours of his time which resulted in nothing. With market research he found that this problem is prevalent, across categories and across geographies. Finding a right Tutor/ instructor for home based learning is not at all easy. Also he had a dream of generating 500 jobs someday. This synergy worked beautifully in shaping idea of Qriyo. Mudit met me (Rishabh, Co-Founder and COO) and we both started this venture from Jodhpur, a small city in western Rajasthan. Now after one year, we have already crossed our milestone; we aim to generate a million jobs by our venture.
What was the most challenging part of your journey till now?
The most challenging part was to break a myth that great companies cannot be built from small cities. Typically, startups flock towards Bangalore, Delhi or Mumbai irrespective of demand, need or operational challenges. Investors too have it in their checklist. However, we wanted to create jobs at grassroots level. 90% of India still lives in Tier II, Tier III Cities. We found great talent and support in Jodhpur and now we are running successfully in Jaipur, Jodhpur with further expansion planned in coming months.
Please provide a brief overview of your product / service?
Qriyo provides you a perfect Home Tutor (Qriyo Guru) for 300+ Activities in domain of Academics, Fitness and Health in less than 24 Hours. That is our USP. To achieve this was a great challenge. We worked on three different technologies to achieve that.
First, to ensure the ‘Quality’ we have created a complex evaluation test which tests Subject knowledge, behavior, language proficiency and rate a teacher on 17 different parameters. Only the best amongst all those who have registered becomes Qriyo Guru.
Second, ensuring timely delivery was biggest challenge as there are several parameters in finding a perfect tutors, including time, price, location, expertise etc. To overcome this we created a ‘matchmaking algorithm’. The matchmaking algorithm goes through 1000s of teachers in Qriyo’s database and selects best Qriyo Guru from the list. Using this we are getting a 95% Demo to booking conversion rate, which is thrice the industry standard. We want to take it to 100%.
Third is support, service and scale. We have partially automated 20+ processed included in single sales, support cycle. For this, we have created our own CRM, Guru App (www.qriyo.com/guru) and Customer App (www.qriyo.com/app). We are improving it every day.
Share some details about the investments that you have been able to fetch for the business till now.
After bootstrapping Qriyo for the first six months, we got our first round of investment of $160,000 from UAE based Idein Ventures in January this year.
How did you overcome initial mindset challenges?
In India most graduate face steep resistance from their family and peers to leave a job and start a business. This makes jumping into a startup even more difficult. If your family and friends are supportive of what you are doing and why you are doing, you get a huge moral boost.
According to you, what are the three qualities an individual must have to achieve success?
First, Know their strengths and weakness,
Second, never shy away from hard work
Third, have faith, good things will happen
Which online tools/ services/ apps do you use the most and would like to recommend as well?
At Qriyo, we use Google Apps the most. Google Apps makes everything easy for us. Be it making a new spreadsheet or creating a new Calendar event on our phones, Google Apps has everything sorted out. Highly recommended for startups.
Share any one habit, which you think, makes you more productive.
I believe planning things beforehand can help anyone to be more productive. We have this culture at Qriyo too – where each employee, be it the founders, managers or even the office boy are urged to make a to-do list at the start of the day.
Answer in less than 50 words
One tip to success:
To All young entrepreneurs, If you are willing to work for 12 hours a day. Get a Job, If ready to work for 20, then only start your venture.
One mistake you believe every individual must avoid:
Overconfidence, always keep on introspecting and keep on finding mistakes in yourself, your venture. Nobody can be perfect; you have to keep on improving.
One most important lesson that you have learnt till now:
For service industry. Understanding the customer psyche is vital. Create and deliver what they want, Give customer support very high priority.
What are your plans for next 3 years?
We are seeing constant growth in both Jaipur & Jodhpur. We plan to launch our services in Mumbai by February 2017. Apart from that, we plan to launch in three 2-tier cities by end of 2017, with global expansion in pipeline as well.
Share a quote that inspires you the most.
“if you want your name to be remembered after your death either do something worth writing or write something worth reading” Abraham Lincoln
What are the key differentiating points of your venture that makes it better from the existing or prospective competitors in the market?
What differentiates us from most of the other service providers is the way we evaluate and bring teachers onboard and how we use this data to find the perfect match for a customer query.
We keep a list of teachers in our database. Before putting them in our database, we do their thorough evaluation. We note their location, experience, salary expectation once they pass the evaluation. A learner can book a course with us via phone or using our website. We ask the customer about their requirement, location etc. As soon as we get a request, we start doing matchmaking based on several parameters and find out a list of suitable teachers. Then we select the best teacher from the list. An algorithm we have built performs the matchmaking.
Necessity is the mother of invention. We launched Qriyo to provide quality learning, which is flexible and is based on trust. Tackling employability problem & giving a launch pad for talent to show itself are the other and even turn it into a career opportunity.
Who are your biggest competitors?
The biggest Competition comes from the local home tuition agents. They are present in every nook and corner of country. However, they are not using technology the way we are. They are neither using data, feedback nor any technology to scale up the operations, we are automating many processes, which will further improve our performance and diminish the human errors. What we provide is one to one personalized training by well-matched teachers, which certainly is better than large classroom coaching. Our quality, trust, and flexibility create word of mouth publicity for us, which is helping and will help us immensely in getting ahead of the competition.
We keep a tab on our competitors. However, we are more worried about what we should do and what we are doing rather than focusing on defeating competitors. We are in a race with ourselves. Startups do not win by attacking. They win by transcending.