Testpitara aims to be India’s best C2B2C knowledge management portal
With Prime Minister Narendra Modi working towards a stronger skilled manpower, online education and knowledge management systems are growing in the country. And both organised and unorganised players are entering the space. Testpitara is one such knowledge management portal, which is a combination of content management, e-learning, and a test platform. It also acts as an e-commerce site for knowledge, where different groups -- coaching and learning institutes, SMEs, and coporates -- can share or sell knowledge to users.
The Indian education market is estimated to be worth INR 5.9 trillion by this year end. With the increasing penetration of internet and mobile devices and half of the population being below the age of 25, the online education space has tremendous market potential. In fact , it is estimated that the education market size will grow to USD 40 billion by 2017.
WizIQ, a platform that helps tutorials and individuals build their own online education, and Vedantu, which recently got funded, are some such online portals. However, Testpitara say that they are a complete model of building and sharing content, and evaluation and analysis. And claim to be a one-stop solution for small to big enterprises and institutions to accessonline training and evaluation.
The Team
The idea came to Prashant Singh when he was pursuing his masters in Information Technology and Management from E.P.I.T.A in Paris. He saw that there were knowledge management systems for students across the intranet. “It was very convenient; whatever was taught in the classroom would be uploaded and the content could be accessed easily,” says Prashant. After putting in a lot of R&D for the Indian market and creating an e-commerce model, Testpitara was born.
Prashant met Sanjay, who has worked over 25 years in the IT sector,through a common friend and the duo decided to work on the project together.Sanjay focused on technology and Prashant took over business development, branding, and overall external making of the model.
The initial team was selected from reputed engineering colleges in and around Pune. Testpitara’s technical team comprises resources from engineering,computer applications and CDAC. The team has received angel funding from Sabhajeet Singh,a serial entrepreneur who is noted for his work in energy management.
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Workings of Testpitara
“Testpitara is India’s answer to something that is largely known as courser or an open platform for free courses,” explains Prashant. There are paid courses available as well, and users can also run their own virtual classrooms on Testpitra. Revenue sharing is done with the instructor whose content has been uploaded on the portal and is being bought by relevant users. “Thus it works as a win-win situation;the instructor gets to run a class free of cost and users get the relevant content at cost effective prices,” adds Prashant. Testpitara uses a C2B2C model,where apart from reaching out to institutions it even reaches out to tutors and consumers.
“This is done by acting as an e-commerce site for knowledge. While there are several who are already registered as free users of Testpitara, the B2B model has few users in the pipeline for different courses,” adds Prashant.
For the B2B model, the pricing is INR 1999 per candidate per year, INR 199 per candidate per month, and INR 49 per candidate per test for HR, training and screening of candidates. For the e-commerce portal, there is no sign up fee for the instructors. A space of five to ten GB along with the platform is given free to tutors to host their online courses. The course fees is to be decided by the instructor.For every purchase of the course by a user, 30 per cent of the revenue is shared with the instructor.
The main challenge the team faced was in educating potential clients to leverage technology to their advantage. In the near future, Testpitara is looking to create a mobile app, and planning to expand their marketing and business development side. “We are also looking to get Series A funding along with a good mentorship to organise the model into a firm eco-system,” concludes Prashant.
