Sourish Dasgupta, founder of Rygbee, shares his experience with team YourStory.
Sourish says, “I want the youngsters of India to be the crazy misfits. To dare break the spell of ‘I can also do it’ and usher in a new wave of out-of-the-box ideas to build a rock solid foundation before going for the ‘moon walking’ stuff. Most important of all is to be humble and grounded. I want to enable them to unleash the creative beast within!”
Sourish founded Rygbee with Ankush Chander in June 2016. Rygbee is an online smart personal “idea guide”. It is a space where users can keep drafting their thoughts and ideas. Meanwhile the platform understands their thought-process and suggests to them various creative leads.
Some of the key features in the universal version are:
Smart Idea Page: This allows users to draft thoughts/ideas in a rich editor that understands human language. Currently, English is the only supported language.
Rygging Buttons
- Ryg Peers: To discover like-minded peers working on similar/related ideas.
- Ryg Mentors: To discover like-minded mentors who have expertise in similar/related domains.
- Ryg Light-Reads: To discover relevant and thought-boosting content from top-class magazines.
- Ryg Research Papers: To discover relevant and thought-boosting content from research publications.
- Ryg Wikipedia: To discover relevant and thought-boosting content from Wikipedia.
- Ryg Video Lectures: To discover relevant and thought-boosting online courses and lectures.
- Ryg Books: To discover relevant and thought-boosting content from books.
- Ryg Events: To discover relevant and important local events
Brainstorming Channel: To socialise by initiating discussions with mentors and peers.
Privacy Control: To publish ideas and invite comments and discussions (both on Rygbee and other social platforms).
Newsfeed: To read up daily important news from top sources that are related to the user’s areas of interests and ideas.
What is the USP of the solution?
On this Ankush explains,”Very often, undergrad and postgrad students drop their passion and pursue a career that is not satisfying and enriching. This in turn affects faculties who are always on the lookout for genuinely enthusiastic students who can produce high-quality research results. Also, industry professionals are vying for the best-of-the-best interns, seeking the right research group fit for their academic consultancies. Rygbee can solve the disalignment problem by helping students transform their ideas into an invigorating career.”
Market size
Their initial target audience is India and the US. The total number of undergrad students in India is 4.7 million, while in the US, it is 17.3 million. The total number of postgrad students in India, meanwhile, is 1.2 million, while in the US, it is 1.74 million. The total number of professors in India is 0.68 million, while in the US, it is 1.7 million. The total number of MNCs in India is exceeds 4,200, while the corresponding number in the US is over 5,000.
After the launch of their first version on December 14th last year, the team managed to get users from across 79 countries. It has 34 percent return users and more than 1,500 monthly active users. They have a new user weekly registration growth of 3.34 percent.
Revenue generation model
The team at Rygbee is planning to explore online tutoring, an $11 billion market with a growth rate of 11 to 12 percent. This is, at the moment, at the idea development stage within the company.
Here’s an overview of the model:
- Any user can either become a mentor or a mentee while working on an idea.
- Based on feedback and activity, a mentor gets qualified into a potential tutor.
- A mentor has to buy some Rygbee points to activate his tutor status.
- A mentee has to buy some Rygbee points to get tutoring from a tutor.
- Whenever a tutor is contacted by a mentee, the tutor depletes her Rygbee points.
- Whenever a mentee starts an agreement with any tutor, she depletes her Rygbee points and the mentor accrues a certain percentage of those Rygbee points.
- Any tutor can redeem accrued Rygbee points.
They have been funded by DeitY, Govt. of India via DCEI – the Incubation Centre at DA-IICT, Gandhinagar.
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