I know you are seeing too many startups in the online education space but if you observe each one is different in its way and approach and it all boils down to you the user on which approach you like? what’s your style of learning?
Today we look at Coach Pal a simple and intuitive online learning platform which keeps you motivated for learning by sharing your learnings wth friends and also find out what others are learning and track your own progress.
We had an opportunity to talk to Surbhi, Co-Founder at Coach Pal and know ore about the idea and the people behind.
Tell us how this idea came about. What kind of preparatory work went in to launch Coach Pal?
Coach Pal is the brainchild of its co-founder Brahm Kiran Singh. The idea behind Coach Pal excited the team for a few reasons:
- The founders wanted to give back to the student community.
- We saw an opportunity for innovation in the education space in India.
Both Surbhi and Brahm have been strong proponents of the Lean Startup Movement by Eric Ries. What started out as a “Pal” to “Coach “ you for your entrance exams evolved into one of the best testing platforms in India. A majority of the preparatory work for Coach Pal turned into days of need discovery with students and teachers, many papertypes, and brainstorming sessions; rinse and repeat.
KhanAcademy is one of the leading providers for educational videos on the web. In what ways does your product differentiate from KhanAcademy and others in the similar space?
Preparation for an entrance exam comprises of multiple components:
learning concepts, practicing questions asking doubts and finally, taking exams. KhanAcademy pioneers in delivering video lectures to the student community. Coach Pal, however, caters to the entire workflow for the student, all tailored to the Indian student community.
Currently, CoachPal hosts Physics, Chemistry and Mathematics. What is the content strategy? Would the content be organized by Classes ( Class IV, Class IX, Intermediate , Engineering 1st year) or the content be organized by topics? Also, is there a plan to add more subjects apart from the ones currently on the website?
Our goal is to make content available to students in a clean, indexed, searchable fashion. At present, Coach Pal caters to the Non-medical/Engineering Entrance Exam community. We are in the process of scaling to other competitive exams.
Being free to all the users of Coach Pal, do tell us how you plan to earn revenues.
Coach Pal works closely with big players in the industry to cater to their custom needs. Our free platform is our tiny way of giving back to the community.
Tell us about how a teacher can apply to create content on Coach Pal. Also, is the content creation dictated by the website managers or the teacher herself?
Teachers are extremely busy so we enable them to upload their content very easily. The needs and approach vary from teacher to teacher. If you are a teacher and want to onboard with us, do drop us a line with your contact information on coachpalme@gmail.com
Tell us how a typical day looks like – what are the major things coming up?
Each day brings newer challenges. Being a dynamic team, we wear many hats each day. Our day is, however, incomplete without daily Sync-up and Reflection meetings.
One biggest learning’s so far in Starting up Coach Pal?
Prototype, prototype, prototype. We strongly believe in the “..test first, code later.” approach with the user being your biggest and most valuable critique. You will be amazed by what you uncover with this approach.
Tell us about the founders of the company and details about them.
Brahm Kiran Singh, is a rockstar engineer with a B.Tech in Computer Science from IIT-Bombay. He is a coder at heart and worked at both Google and Microsoft prior to founding Coach Pal. When not working, you can find him at a Robotics meetup, a sailing lesson, taking a guitar lesson or scouring the area for the next best food joint.
Surbhi Dangi graduated as a Software Engineer with a focus on Entrepreneurship from Carnegie Mellon and has worked on multiple web and mobile products. In her spare time, she organizes hackathons, floods her twitter with UI/UX posts. She is the product person for Coach Pal.
Feel free to connect with us on LinkedIn, Twitter or Facebook or simply email us at coachpalme@gmail.com
What advice you would like to give entrepreneurs entering the education space? Or in general?
- If you haven’t already read it, grab a copy of Eric Ries’s Lean Startup.
- The user is God. Build a product that the “users“ need and love. Building a product in vacuum is like digging your own grave.
