AptiDude - academic social networking site
Mayank Satkar is a founder of AptiDude, an online platform for students where students can compete with each other by conducting competitions. It’s also a discussion forum for MBA & Engineering related topics.
They conduct lots of quizzes, including campus placement quizzes. It’s an academic social networking site in itself, as every user who is registered will be notified about all the activities of other members in their network. It provides real-time information about the activities of peers & friends in your network to create a sense of competition among students. Initially he started conducting these competitions offline in many colleges; until he soon realized the potential of taking these competitions online to reach out to the entire country.
Coming from a small city like Bhilai, connecting with good people to work on his idea was one of his major challenges. After having found two enthusiastic guys who believed in his idea, currently they are a team of 3 along with 24 Student Campus Ambassadors from different colleges across India, who help them promote AptiDude through activities in their campuses.
Mayank shares, “From the initial days I wanted to do something in the field of education and since I was born & brought up Bhilai, it’s an education hub in central India. The raw idea was that I will come back from a good B-School and start a coaching related institute, but then I realized that I wanted to do something to connect with the student community in India, scale this idea and then create a forum where students can come again & again to compete with each other. So this was the initial thought that came to my mind”.
After deciding to move on with online presence, they steadily started growing and currently they serve to more than 57,000 of subscribed user base. In next few years, they’re aiming to scale themselves to reach out to 4 to 5 lakhs of subscribed user base. Mayank shares that investment is one of his concerns to scale this up as currently, they mainly depend on word of mouth & they marketing exercise mainly involves social media platforms, email promotions & with the help of Student Campus Ambassadors.
Their revenue model is quite simple, which includes promotions of B-Schools or Institutes through their network, Sponsored online competitions, email marketing, website banner ads. Mayank shares that they are even exploring the option of paid online competitions for students.
He adds, “Pressure is a healthy sign to make best out of you while overdose of it spoils everything too, so keep a sound balance between efforts and pressure”.
Mayank can be reached out on mail.
Checkout AptiDude here and if you want to read about education startups, have a look at EduStars.
