Chalkpad: Cloud Based Campus Management System
Chalkpad has an ensemble of products under the PAD title- CollegePAD, SchoolPAD and UnivPAD- all of which strive to make education management easier. Kabir Khanna, the founder, is a Computer Science graduate with more than 16 years of experience in IT industry working with companies of national and international repute. Having launched Chalkpad back in August 2008 with the aim of helping the Education sector leverage technology to improve efficiencies and extend possibilities, the initial products take a huge step in this direction.
Talking about their journey, Kabir says, “The first year and a half was mostly product development phase (products are completely built in house from ground up). The next one year was a little tough marketing the solution as we are educating the customer on the benefits of a ‘Campus Management System’ as well as the SaaS model of selling. I am happy and also relieved to say that since the last one year, the awareness of such software as ours has increased exponentially and now we regularly get enquiries from many new customers wanting to consider and evaluate our software. We are also talking to some very large organizations who can become channel partners of a solution like ours in their own geographies.”
Chalkpad has a motivated team of 40 people right now with people from high-profile companies who’ve joined the fold along the way. “The team at Chalkpad is very passionate about our mission to help leverage technology in the education sector and that clearly reflects in the success of our products.” says Kabir proudly. Education as a sector has still not been fully able to leverage technology to it complete advantage and this is what Chalkpad aims to change. “In the last 5 years, India has indeed seen a lot of awareness and growth in this area but still a lot is left to be desired. In the broadest sense, I think the three key areas in which Technology can make a huge impact in the Education space are “Information Access” (Internet, wikipedia,open courseware, iTunesU, etc.) , “Collaboration and networking” (facilitators: skype, niche social networking , Piazza ), “Education management”(Lecture capture systems, Campus management systems ). Immense opportunity exists in each of these areas and we should be seeing much more and healthy competition here for the next 4-5 years.” says Kabir.
The revenue generation for Chalkpad is straightforward- It charges a per student/per month fees from the institution. The amount varies depending on the strength of the institution as well as the number of functional modules they wish to take. “Our module cover the complete breadth of functions like fees, hostel and fleet management, time tabling, grading, attendance, appraisals, communication, SMS integration, academic analytics, reporting, etc. Some of these are core modules and some optional.” adds Kabir.
As lead generation through online marketing is a part and parcel or the marketing strategy, apart from direct marketing, word of mouth publicity matters a lot in such cases. “Since a solution like ours touches not just a few in any institution but rather the complete breadth of users (right from your fees admission office clerk, to a senior faculty member, to the parents) and there is often staff movement among institutions in a region, a lot of our leads come from word of mouth references as well.” he explains.
Having made good inroads in the states of Punjab, Haryana and Himachal with higher education, the road ahead looks bright. Sometimes customization to a minute detail is required and scaling up in this sense is a problem but with a very high focus on academic analytics which lets you track each and every students’ performance and other powerful features like Parent engagement, tilts the balance on the positive side. Chalkpad has recently launched SchoolPAD 2.0 and are bullish on this front.
For more information , visit Chalkpad. For other education starups doing exciting things, you might want to check out Eduora and MySuperBrain.
