MapMyTalent: A career counselling product that has helped 70,000+ students
“In this age of the internet, it is common to hear of technologists coming together to solve a problem. With MapMyTalent, it is the other way around,” says Rohit Sehgal, co-founder and CEO of MapMyTalent (MMT). There are firms trying to build a product and outsource domain knowledge but MMT has the expertise and the offline product which they are now bringing online with the help of technology.
MMT has built a product that helps students identify their strength and counsels them for a bright career. Rohit is an IIM alumnus with 14 years of business development experience and he has co-founded MMT alongside Dr. Anubhuti Sehgal and Dr. Itishree Mishra. Anubhuti is a PhD in Human Resources while Itishree is a PhD in Applied Psychology. They have provided career counselling to students for more than a decade and have researched for converting 'career counselling' service into a mass deliverable product.
MMT is primarily a product that helps students choose the right course and guides them in the correct direction. “It is the aptitude (the potential that one is born with) that is the most important factor in helping decide what should be the course/career choice of the student,” says Rohit. The product is built for students in the age group of 13-18 and this is the time frame when 'interests' are very floating. “The important hierarchy that one must follow is first the aptitude of the student, followed by his or her personality and then their interest,” believes the team at MapMyTalent.
Anubhuti and Itishree have had a lot of learnings over the years which they have incorporated into the product. “Money remains the most important criterion for students to pick up course/career but knowing ones' own strength is steadily gaining ground,” says Anubhuti. The students are increasingly questioning age-old choices of their parents in the last two-three years and have also become much more open and aware about career decisions.
MapMyTalent began with a B2B model (schools) almost 24 months back and entered the B2C (online retail) about six months back. “So far there have been more than 70,000 students who have registered and a good percentage of these have gone on to take our paid products,” says Rohit. MMT has worked with close to 40 schools as of now.
Real testimony for this kind of a product can only happen over a period of 25 to 30 years, however, MMT's proprietary Assessment has been standardized and tried over a large set of students. The company has also been backed by Anand Lunia's IndiaQuotient and Sasha Mirchandani's Kae Capital. “MapMyTalent has an exceptionally talented team and they had the product ready when we decided to invest. Our main value addition was when we took the product online and scaled it up,” says Madhukar Sinha, one of the investors from IndiaQuotient.
There are others like MultipleNatures, MeraCareerGuide, etc. who are present in the space but MMT is relying on their domain expertise and the initial traction they've managed to build.
Read more about the investors who've put money in MapMyTalent:
“I would rather get the size of market wrong, not the entrepreneur” – Sasha Mirchandani, Kae Capital
Anand Lunia's IndiaQuotient- A Fund That Will Invest in Early Stage Pre-Revenue Startups
