Will a zero setup fee get more schools to do things online? The launch of JumpDQ
Pradyut Bafna has been with MicroStrategy, a business intelligence firm based in Washington, USA for a good seven years. He moved to India a couple of years ago to setup the pre sales for Micro Strategy in Sout East Asia and has now moved on to startup on his own with JumpDQ (a play on Jump The Queue). Having been in the field of business intelligence, Pradyut has always been toying with ideas that make sense from data. Landing on education, he thought of the space as a great place to begin.JumpDQ wants to build a network of teachers, students, parents and alumni who're all on one platform but this is a vision that Pradyut wants to achieve with time. To begin with, JumpDQ is a product which the educational institutes can sign up for accepting fees and applications online. “Selling to schools has been a huge problem and so we thought of cutting down this step,” says Pradyut. JumpDQ wants schools to signup and start accepting payments and JumpDQ has no setup fees here. The idea is to get schools using this and the revenue model would be built around the commissions per transaction.
JumpDQ has been developed on RubyOnRails by a few developers whom Pradyut has hired. Still in very early stage, Pradyut is on the lookout to hire a couple of sales folks to push the product out. “We're doing a pilot with three schools and a college at the moment and we're just about a couple of months away from the application season when we'll be able to validate the product,” says Pradyut. Based out of Chennai, JumpDQ is completely bootstrapped at the moment and is also looking for funds to hire and scale up. It'll be interesting to see if the schools lap up to the idea.
The education space along with healthcare have been right up there on everyone's list and the momentum is heartening. Technology has the potential to be applied in various spaces within education and a growing number of startups plugging themselves will help move the area evolve faster. Edustars is one of the initiatives by YourStory that recognizes education startups (Knolskape is the latest one) and helps foster the culture of entrepreneurship to innovate in education.
Website: JumpDQ
