Revisiting NurseryAdmissions.com: Making life easier for parents

Sriram Mohan | YourStory | 26^th October | BangaloreLast year, we had profiled an extremely interesting startup website called NurseryAdmissions.com (read the story here: http://www.yourstory.in/entrepreneurs/non-tech-entrepreneurs/2603-puja-and-rajan-arora-founders-nurseryadmissionscom).  The founders, Puja and Rajan Arora, set out to create a single-window resource, online, for all information pertaining to nursery school admissions in Delhi. As parents, they had been through a harrowing time when seeking admission for their son. This incident brought out the entrepreneurial streak in them and led to the creation of this pioneering website, featuring everything from reviews of schools in the locality to fee structures and deadlines.

We caught up with Rajan again recently and spoke about the progress that they’ve made in the interim period.

The last time we spoke to you, you had close to 11,600 members. Where do you stand today?

As of today, we have around 26,500 members. This is a number that we’ve achieved without any marketing effort from our side. It’s happened entirely due to word-of-mouth publicity.

How have things changed in the last one year?

We’ve managed to get into tie-ups with some schools. We’ve not gone down the traditional path of offering web banners or space on the website alone. We’re trying to create a platform to engage the school and the parents in direct interactions. In fact, some school principals post directly on our website. The tie-ups are a big boost for us, as we’ve been funding ourselves since inception.

Share with us an incident that made you feel proud to be an entrepreneur.

As entrepreneurs, we’re immensely proud of the faith that parents have reposed in us. This doesn’t come easily. We revalidate all information received and take great pains to ensure accuracy.

But one success that we count as a feather in our cap is getting our members together to create a Parents Charter. This charter was then shared with the Directorate of Education, Delhi which passed a circular asking all schools to adhere to a common admissions schedule. This ensured that all schools declared their results on the same day, thereby enabling parents to find out where their ward had been selected. This has helped parents save time, money and effort. They no longer have to battle it out for refunds at schools which were not their first choice.

Has expansion happened as planned? What next?

Certainly. Originally, we were covering schools only in Delhi. Now, school all over the NCR region come under our ambit. That includes Gurgaon, Ghaziabad, Faridabad and Noida.

We had participated in this call-in program called India 360 on CNN IBN where we had a number of parents calling in from cities like Bangalore and Pune, asking us to start something similar there. We are working towards that.

Next up are playschool and class I admissions. We intend to leverage our existing user base to take this forward. Going ahead, we’re looking at the post-class X space as well.

NurseryAdmissions.com is a classic example of entrepreneurial quality, where adversity has been replaced by the opportunity to fill the gaps created by unmet needs. We at YourStory wish them continued success in the years ahead.