Edvicer does not have the fancy story of being created in a garage or for that matter, being founded by college dropouts of Stanford or MIT.
We are final year students at IIT Delhi trying to solve a small but relevant problem in a field which we are extremely passionate about. As I took a small break from the usual hectic routine of working for my startup and managing college courses and projects simultaneously, my mind drifted towards early 2018 when it all began, when Edvicer’s journey started and when I decided to take a different path than what I had thought for myself over the past 4 years.
I decided to pause for a moment and relive memories of the past year or so. And a thought came to my mind!
Why not document all these memories? Even better, why not share all these memories?
If this article helps someone or is able to inspire even one person to pursue his/her dreams, I would feel very happy. And that is when I decided to share experience of my small journey till now with all of you through a relatively long article by my standards. So, pardon any language/grammatical mistake, sit back and have a read!
My Journey
So where to start? Let me begin this from my 1st year at college. So, I was able to get a seat in dual degree chemical engineering at IIT Delhi with my rank in JEE. I chose this institute over others because the capital city offers several advantages over other cities. Once I selected the institute, branch was pretty much handed over to me. Few weeks into college, as the euphoria settles down, hard work begins again.
Race for that dream job after 4 years starts right from 1st year and I think this is a common theme across all colleges in India. This is primarily because we are still relatively immature and haven’t thought a lot about what we want to do after college. So the natural thing to do is to prepare for the placements or else one would get left behind in the race.
I got extremely interested in programming primarily because I loved it in my 1st year but also because this area generates a lot of jobs and attractive opportunities.
Being a chemical engineering student, I had to mostly rely on online resources to learn coding. I followed the normal path of learning languages, then going into data structures & algorithms and then finally the much hyped but very interesting topic i.e machine learning.
And this was the time when I fell in love with online courses. I realized that there is no limit to the knowledge that I can acquire. There are no boundaries. There are no excuses. Education is not limited to college. Any student in any college in any country has access to the highest quality material of every topic. Availability of these courses meant that one can learn anything and become perfect in it without belonging to the MIT’s or the Stanford’s.
Online courses had opened the floodgate of knowledge for me and I had taken a jump into that flood.
Love for online courses
But, nothing is perfect. Is it? As I jumped into the flood, I realized that there was literally a flood of courses to choose from. The number of choices was overwhelming, even more so when I had to pay for it! I spent a lot of time in finding the best course of the topics I was interested in. Asked my friends, looked for help on platforms like Quora and just googled around to get the right information to help me take a decision. Eventually, I did some awesome courses and some average ones.
I was ready for placements. Meanwhile, I started answering questions related to online courses on Quora and tried to help students who were going through a similar confusion as I had gone through. I wrote a few answers and also provided my LinkedIn profile so that if required, people can discuss the course or any other query in detail with me. What happened thereafter was bewildering. Just for a few answers on 3 courses, I had become a top writer on Quora for the topics ‘NPTEL’ and ‘Coursera’. In a few months, I had amassed more than a lac views on my answers. A LinkedIn profile which was otherwise lying stagnant suddenly became active as I received 1000’s of queries.
I discussed all of this with one of my friends who had a similar journey like mine and was very much into online courses. He had become a specialist in web development and had explored topics like AI as well. We understood that the problem we had faced ourselves while selecting a course out of so many available options is a common problem faced by many students who pursue online courses.
That was our eureka moment!
Idea for Edvicer
I and my friend were excited about the idea of forming a startup. We convinced ourselves, our families and decided to sit out of the famed placements.
It was not easy and of course, we might still fail, but I am happy with the knowledge that in future I won’t have to ask myself…What if…..? There would be no regret. To try is the most important thing.
And yes, we did do a proper need validation, no one can take such a decision based on a few Quora answers. That would be naive. After a lot of surveys, research and even intuition to an extent, we knew that the need is there. Buoyed and feeling confident about a rising Indian startup ecosystem, we registered Edvicer Pvt Ltd a few months back.
To put it in simple words, Edvicer aggregates, compares and recommends online courses based on user preferences. You can take a look at our pre-launch website here. Although workload has been heavy with just two handling all legal, marketing, financial and technical work, we feel extremely energetic and passionate going forward. We had to learn a lot of new skills as well, such as video creation and editing, developing a chatbot, digital marketing, latest advancement in web development etc, guess from where did we learn all this?
Future
Our vision is to make Edvicer the search engine of online education to help students and professionals get the best quality education and to ensure that their time is utilized in the most efficient way. We are also looking for few talented individuals to join us for several positions. If you are a young passionate person and feel excited about our startup, you can comment here or reach out to me or my friend.
PS: We are giving away free credits during pre registration on our website which can be used to avail discounts on online courses. So Hurry Up!
