Impact vs Top-line: Scaling personalised attention in education-technology products
Education technology startups in India have indeed shown promise. Over the last 5 years, Indian Ed-tech startups have raised close to 2 Bn dollars, creating impact not only in terms of building big and potentially lasting companies but also in improving the quality of education. Would their effectiveness improve or at least stay consistent as they scale, is a concern that remains unanswered.
The reason for this concern is based on examples of the past. Many successful teaching businesses have roughly similar starting stories, a passionate teacher with an unorthodox but effective teaching methodology starts-out by delivering promising results through student-level improvement. The style of teaching and successful results lead to the organic growth of the brand through word of mouth. However, as things scale and the brand gets established, the problem shifts from training to filtering. The incentive is no longer aligned to work on every student, rather it shifts to creating a success story at an aggregate level. For this, it is important to filter and attract top students and focus attention on them. In the Indian context, this narrative has played out most clearly in the JEE coaching industry — remember the ‘banker vs ranker’ comment from the founder of one of the most successful coaching institute?
With this context, we need to ask: what are ed-tech start-ups doing differently to stay effective over the long term? This is a very serious question. Taking it lightly, treating it as a concern that can be ‘cured by growth’, is failing to realize ed-tech businesses are more like services than pure technology businesses. If they cannot maintain/improve the quality of customer experience as they scale, it raises questions on the sustainability of their growth.
Let me pose this concern in a more operational context. Let’s try to break down the key components that contribute to a better student outcome and see how the equation changes when the start-up scales. The core ingredients are:
- Curriculum quality (study material and teaching plan)
- Teaching experience (quality of teaching in terms of clarity, engagement, and depth)
- Personalized attention (the ‘mentor’/‘coach’ aspect of the teacher with individual guidance)
Curriculum quality is easiest to scale. Using technology, it is easier to even modularise it and introduce some form of path dependency based on the individual journey of a student. So this part is not a challenge. In fact, many ed-tech startups have done great work in this area.
The same is not the case for point no. 2. As you scale, especially with live teaching, it becomes very difficult to maintain the quality of teaching experience. The overall supply of quality teachers remains fundamentally constrained with top players focussing more on attracting top teachers instead of producing them. In the absence of a work-around, the growth of live teaching platforms will clearly be constrained by the availability of quality teachers, and they’ll struggle to deliver long term improvements.
Evidently, the most difficult thing to scale is personalized attention. This is the service aspect of the business. As you move beyond the top 5–10% of students (who already have strong fundamentals and are self-driven), personalized attention makes a world of difference in learning outcomes. This is where many startups have created features such as 24x7 doubt resolution or phone-based mentoring. Still, results from 1-on-1 attention from a quality teacher are in a different league.
This is where the impact can be created at scale. Platforms that can enable teachers/mentors to deliver effective mentoring experience, be it in the exam-prep or in the skilling space, can produce systematic improvement in the student outcomes over a wider base (essentially more inclusive). Without a ‘personalized-attention’ first approach in the design of product/system, the business will quickly shift to an aggregate outcome focus and a brand based differentiation, focussing more on selecting the right students (essentially becoming more exclusion-based).
In my view, start-ups in the skilling industry seem to have a higher alignment with this idea as the incentives are more tightly aligned with the individual student level outcome (especially in the case of ISA players). Over the last 4 years, I haven’t seen many players focussing in this direction. Perhaps because of the pressures of scaling quickly, and maybe also because it is a harder problem to solve. Or it might be because they are asking a different (maybe even a better) question and getting a different answer (eg: gamified and engaging content). Credit must be given to the engaging products created by the team at Byju’s and Whitehat Jr.
Clearly, the future of education is online. The more personalised it is, the more inclusive it will be. Another thing worth mentioning is the impact on the future of work this changing education format would bring. I feel that remote work will get more common once we move from classroom based teaching as primary form of learning.
As I try to give more thought to this idea, I remain curious and invite you to share your views. The closest example of such a system is a french company called Open Classrooms. Mayank and his team at Outscal are also trying to follow the same philosophy by focussing on scaling mentorship quality, instead of focussing on just brand-driven differentiation.
