BYJU’S envisions to become the leader of ‘learning at home’ category; targets ₹3000 crores revenue this year

• Since the beginning, BYJU’S secret has been to focus on engagement and effectiveness. It has made learning fun for students by adding videos, interactive media, and gamification on its platform.
• It all started when Byju Raveendran, Founder and CEO, identified a gap between how the concepts are learned and how it should be learned by students in India.
• BYJU’S plan now is to ‘expand to international markets, achieve scale and build a global brand while simultaneously working on creating learning programs in regional languages to provide access to quality content and teachers to the students even in the remotest parts of the country.’
• Mrinal Mohit, Chief Operating Officer and Head of Sales and Marketing, BYJU’S shares his vision for making the platform an industry leader, content marketing mantra, and revenue goals for the year.

For a relatively non-existent segment that started shaping up a decade ago, BYJU’S has come a long way in a short span of time. India has around 3500 edtech startups and BJYU’S has an edge for it is the fourth-highest valued company -- placed at $5.7 billion.

BYJU’S added 40 million registered users onto its platform and 2.8 million paid subscribers this year; nearly doubling from 1.26 million in June 2018. It also became profitable in 2018 – cut down its losses by over 76% to ₹8.8 crore from ₹37.1 crore. It is now eyeing to be a ₹3000 crore brand by end of the fiscal year.

It is all set to become the leader of edtech industry. The company plans to do so by adding more regional languages, spreading awareness around its platform with omni-channel approach, and deeper penetration across India.

Mrinal Mohit, Chief Operating Officer and Head of Sales and Marketing, BYJU’S – The Learning App shares the secret of achieving fame so soon, advantages of tying up with cricket tournaments, developing a brand from scratch on the back of strong marketing tools, leveraging the strength of population by going deeper in markets, revenue goals, and much more.

Excerpts:

How has the year been so far for BYJU’S? Earlier in the year you announced that you had become profitable, a first in the consumer internet start-up space. What helped you achieve this, which is no mean feat?
At BYJU’S, we understood the challenges the ecosystem faces and one of the key challenges we could address immediately and effectively is the method with which students consume knowledge and information. We began the journey with conviction and understood the potential to bring in transformational change with respect to the format for interaction and learning. The core challenges traditional education formats face are (a) good teachers are hard to find at scale (b) ability for personalization is limited (c) format of learning (rote memorization vs. wanting to learn).

Our approach from a content creation perspective has always been to focus on engagement and effectiveness i.e., if it will be useful to students and it will be used by students. We approach subjects by first identifying concepts and curriculum that need to be covered and then identifying the best mode to teach these concepts be it through video, gamification or interactive media. With over 40m downloads, 2.8m paid users, and average engagement time ~ 71 minutes, our approach, both in terms of engagement and effectiveness, has been received positively by students, parents and education providers which is helping propel our growth. We have been fortunate to reach scale relatively quickly due to our student and learning-focused approach and are increasing year-on-year which is helping us achieve progressively higher earnings, enabling us to invest more organically in improving engagement and effectiveness in the product.

There is no real playbook for success here and our approach has been based on first principles, especially since this was a relatively non-existent segment a couple of years ago. Everything we learnt was first hand – from business model tinkering, expansion, to raising funds.

BYJU’S has been aggressively marketing itself in the recent past, be it the advertising during this year’s world cup or replacing Oppo to find a place on the jerseys of Indian players.

As a learning company, we have always recognised the critical role that sports play in a child's development. They teach you unmatched life-skills and crucial lessons like teamwork and collaboration. Cricket is the heartbeat of India and as a platform, gives us unmatched reach to even the deepest parts of the country. Our focus is to go deeper into India and make better learning experiences accessible to students who need it the most. We are thrilled about being the jersey sponsors of the Indian Cricket Team. Just as cricket inspires a billion budding dreams across India, we too as a learning company hope to inspire the love of learning in every child's heart.

What kind of investments are you keeping aside for marketing this year? Your FY18 advertising spends was up 77% at Rs 188.5 crore. What kind of money did you spend in the current financial year? What was the percentage increase?
During our campaigns around cricket matches, we have noticed a big spike in the number of downloads we see. In fact, our last set of advertisements with Shah Rukh Khan received the highest recall among celebrity endorsements during the 2019 ICC World Cup Cricket, according to a survey by the Indian Institute of Human Brands (IIHB).

Our daily organic downloads are close to 50,000-60,000 and the marketing expenditure has gone up over the year, on the back of an increase in revenue. However, the cost of customer acquisition has dropped to 25%. For digital, we use a combination of channels including display, banner besides advertising on YouTube. Additionally, we also use TV, print and outdoor.

What role has advertising played in cementing a place in the hearts and minds of Indian consumers?
Our advertisements celebrate the power of visual learning and is aimed at helping our end users understand how it could be beneficial for them. TV has helped us reach out to our primary and secondary customers - i.e.; children and their parents, across geographies. Advertising on TV has primarily helped us with customer acquisition, i.e. increased downloads, while we have specifically used print medium to explain the how and the why of the app to our target audience.

From the very beginning, we were able to measure the ROI from our ad campaigns, through downloads, subscriptions, etc. Our campaigns were based solely on where the product stood at a certain time and if it made sense for us to scale up or reach out to a wider audience then. We are very paranoid about the performance of an ad; if we see it performing well, we are ready to invest. There is a direct link in how downloads spike with ad campaign releases. With regards to mediums, we have seen that TV when used simultaneously with social media amplifies our ROI. Hence, we also share timely and relevant communication across our social media handles to reach out to a large set of audience and create awareness about our brand offerings.

Considering you had taken on Shah Rukh Khan as an ambassador pretty early on in your journey. You also roped in actor Mahesh Babu to target Telangana and Andhra Pradesh. How did this help in winning your consumer’s trust?
It was great to have Mahesh Babu and Mohanlal associate with us and spread the message that conceptual and life-long learning is far superior to learning by rote. We believe that every region, especially in South India, is really unique and it is crucial that we customize our message to truly gain mindshare here.

Both the ad campaigns highlighted evolving learning habits of students and celebrated the long-term benefits of conceptual understanding. Our TVCs were specially targeted at the Telangana and Andhra Pradesh and Kerala respectively to connect with parents and help them understand real, tangible benefits of technology powered learning. The core objective of our TVCs was to address the apprehension among parents and show them the real advantage of learning through a product like the BYJU’S Learning App. Mahesh Babu and Mohanlal’s immense popularity and credibility amongst parents and children in the respective regions made them a perfect fit for our brand.

What kind of uptake has BYJU’S been seeing among parents and children? Can you share some user figures with us, and where do you aim to take this number to, in the next few years?
Today we have over 40 million registered users and 2.8 million paid subscribers; nearly doubling from 1.26 million in June 2018. The average number of minutes a student spends on the app has increased from 64 minutes to 71 minutes everyday from across 1700+ towns/cities. More than 60% of our students are from outside the top 10 cities.

But there is still a long way to go before we call this a learning revolution. India today has the largest K-12 education system in the world, with around 300 million school going population. Going forward, there will be a strong focus to further accelerate our reach and create awareness about digital learning in deeper parts of India. This is one segment where the real fun is not in creating a billion dollar company, but in creating a billion thinkers and learners.

When you launched the platform, what was your vision? How has that vision evolved over the years? What BYJU’S stands for now for you and what is the BYJU’S of the future?
The main idea behind starting BYJU’S was to make learning accessible, effective, engaging and personalized for everyone. We noticed that there was a huge gap in the way students learn and how concepts should be learnt. In a traditional, face to face learning set up, access to high-quality education and personalization of learning has always been an issue. In our system, children are still getting trained to solve questions and not ask questions. Learning happens because of fear of exams, and not for the love for learning. Students memorize and forget after exams. The need of the hour is for a product that brings the childlike curiosity back in students and makes them look forward to learning something new everyday.

When we launched, learning was not actively taking place through digital media, even though children were browsing on the internet and watching videos online. This medium was not viewed as a reliable learning source. We have managed to change that and have created and established the ‘app learning’ segment. Our vision is to now be viewed as not just a ‘digital learning’ medium but the leaders of the ‘learning at home’ segment. By 2020, we would like to transform into a learning at home platform. Everything a student needs to learn at home, BYJU’s will be able to provide that.

You are looking at expanding to international waters now. Can you throw some light on your strategy to navigate these markets? When can we expect you to launch and are there markets other than the US and the UK that you are considering currently?
We are in the process of building a product for international markets. Our recent acquisition of Osmo, the US-based award-winning playful learning system, is also aimed at bolstering our international plans to innovate, explore and set new benchmarks for tech-enabled personalized learning solutions. Currently, there are no products like the BYJU’S learning app which can reach out to such a large number of students and create great engagement at the same time. We strongly believe that such a product can come out of India. The market opportunity is huge and we believe our product can create the kind of engagement one has never seen before

What kind of growth have you been witnessing? What kind of growth do you hope to achieve this year and what are the factors that will help you achieve it?
In terms of revenue, the company has been growing at 100% year-on-year for the last 3 years and have tripled our revenue to INR 1430 crore in FY 18-19 and also turned profitable on a full year basis. We are estimating a revenue of over INR 3000 crore this year. Today we have over 40 million registered users and 2.8 million paid subscribers. Our numbers and growth over the past few years speak for themselves.

Where will the next phase of growth for BYJU’S come from?
While our focus is to expand to international markets to help achieve scale and build a global brand, we are also working on creating learning programs in regional languages to provide access to quality content and teachers to the students even in the remotest parts of the country.

We have also launched language switch option in Hindi, that will not only help in on boarding the platform but also help gain a better foothold in English.

Going forward, there will be a strong focus to further accelerate our reach and create awareness in deeper parts of India. We are also working on creating learning programs in other regional languages. The availability of BYJU’S learning programs in multiple vernacular languages will make quality learning accessible for children in every nook and corner of the country and fulfill their aspirations of building better lives.

Tell us a bit about your partnership with Disney and what more can we expect out to this partnership? Can we expect some more similar partnerships with other global players too?
The Disney.BYJU’S Early Learn app is specially crafted for young children aged between 6 to 8 years old (classes 1- 3) in India. This app offers personalized learning programs while entertaining them with Disney’s timeless stories and characters from Disney Princess, Frozen, Cars, Toy Story franchises and more. BYJU’S pedagogy and content expertise are enhanced by the compelling storytelling of Disney in this app and provides a strong head start to the way young children learn their first concepts in India. The Disney. BYJU’S Early Learn App offers a first-of-its-kind integration of offline to online learning experience through BYJU’S acquired Osmo platform.

Where do you want to see Byju’s three to five years from now?
Our vision is to be one of the largest education brands in the world. While starting a mission company is easy, sustaining a mission-led organization is challenging. The market needs standardized education and new methodologies/formats to be introduced so as to engage students. To move from the traditional classroom system where teaching is one-way traffic to the one where teachers are facilitators of learning and also, mentors for discussions in classrooms is essential. At BYJU’S, we have made small strides in this direction and with increased traction we believe this is possible in the near future.