Now for everything ask Teacherji

A venture which will surely find favours with anyone and everyone looking at learning something new and needs to find a Teacher for it, Teacherji (www.teacherji.in) is one stop shop for all the Teachers (institutions, trainers, experts, solution architects) to list their offerings and get connected to prospective students and also one stop if you are a user looking at learning new course/programme.Like all meaningful ideas, Teacherji was born out of a need, when entrepreneur Santosh Kelvani .. needed to list the training programmes of his wife (who incidentally is a successful entrepreneur and we will bring to you her story in a shortwhile) ..as many people/institutes were trying to get in touch with her and did not no how to do so. Moreover, she could not list her new offerings etc in any one place. Similar issues were being faced by many trainers across India and this gave Santosh the push he needed to jump the entrepreneneurship bandwagon.

Santosh,an IIT Bombay alumnus, quit his high profile job at AOL to pursue his business idea sometime back and there has been no looking back since then. YourStory in a quick conversation with entrepreneur Santosh Kelvani

You did not have prior business experience, how did you go about translating your idea of Teacherji into a reality?

Santosh: Yes, I did not have any business experience but both my parents are in business and from very early days I was attuned to the dynamics of working for yourself. More over, I believe my prior work experience in the corporate world trained me to handle the different business nuances. Teacherji is a simple concept yet a powerful one, because in India, trainers and institutes do not have a common platform to showcase themselves and get business. Moreover, as consumers still we do endless googling if we need a trainer, be it a Yoga instructor near our house or a PHP programming course in our locality.

Now with Teacherji we aim to address this issue in a simple and structured manner.

What are the business differentiators of Teacherji?

Santosh: We are the first one to bring such a comprehensive platform for trainers and learners in India and are continuously building our repertoire of data. More over, there are a lot of offerings in the pipeline – discounts and special offers for all the Teacherji users, premium listings etc. Also we are soon launching offline training centres, which can be a plug and play model for trainers and workshop organizers. So if you want to organize a business plan workshop etc you can use these training centres. So moving forward, we will work on a hybrid model of being online and offline connector between trainers and learners.

How do you plan to scale up here on?

Santosh:We have built our own custom-made online platform, which is an extremely scalable platform. We have covered most of the major cities in India and will keep on adding newer cities. We are concentrating on giving an organized voice to the unstructured training market in India and once we have sizeable data we will create opportunities for trainers to better market and position themselves. We will also build more offline training hubs for various experts/trainers and institutes.

Challenges so far

Santosh:When you are on your own challenges are humongous, its definitely not an easy path but the beauty of it is that I am loving every moment of starting up and building something from a scratch. In just a shortwhile, we have been able to create value for a number of instructors’ /trainers and when they call to thank me, it’s very fulfilling.

We at YourStory wish Santosh the very best as he continues to build meaning with the Teacherji  story, we would like you dear readers to check the website and see how it helps. Do tell us if you got your answer.