'Trying to build everything on your own is where most companies slow down': WhiteHat Jr's Karan Bajaj

Historically, growth-stage businesses have faced the build-versus-buy question.

While 'product-first' companies take pride in building every new tool, feature, vertical, and so on by themselves, several others either take the 'buy' route or simply, partner.

That's what coding startup WhiteHat Jr did to become a $150 million revenue run rate company in just 18 months before it got acquired by BYJU'Sfor $300 million.

"Trying to create everything on your own is where most companies slow down and are not able to scale," WhiteHat Jr Founder Karan Bajaj said at Resurgence TiEcon Delhi-NCR 2021.

WhiteHat Jr always knew what it was good at and what the platform's "core speciality" was.

"We knew we were good at creating a curriculum, pooling and supplying high quality teaching talent, and had the ability to connect them with students using a complex scheduling algorithm... that is the core speciality we built," he explained.

The rest, it left to collaborations and partnerships.

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Karan went on to share how WhiteHat Jr leveraged the prior expertise of its partners to deliver a compelling product and content experience to its learners.

He said,

"Every company needs to know what its complete core is. We knew we wouldn't need to build our own video platform or coding platform. So, we partnered with others who had built expertise in it. We built the content and the curriculum. The best scenario is when content and product come together to deliver an outcome."

And outcomes have been good for WhiteHat Jr in terms of growth. At present, it conducts 30,000 to 40,000 live classes per day, the founder revealed.

The coding platform also stressed on the importance of 1:1 learning in edtech.

"In a standardised offline curriculum, every student's learning is merged into one. At WhiteHat Jr, we are connecting 1:1 and that helps deliver a very customised and individualised experience to the kid that is not possible in school," Karan stated.

And that is the "wonderful part" of edtech, he said, where "content and pedagogy delivery is possible through a custom technology platform, and the experience is unique" for every student.