Exampur- How a youtube channel went on to become an ed-tech startup

A computer engineer, Vivek Kumar started a youtube channel for providing training for government and competitive exams by the name of Exampur. The platform runs under Learning Closet Pvt Ltd, offers courses for government exam preparation, with a hybrid model that provides offline and online teaching facilities to aspirants from Tier II, III, and IV cities. It began as an online platform Exampur has notched up to 10 million subscribers across 26 channels and provides prep for UPSC, MBA and other competitive exams. Launched in 2018, it offers a vast range of over two hundred courses for government exams preparation catering for a hybrid model of the education system wherein they provide both offline and online teaching facilities with exclusive study materials in 2,3 and 4 tier cities.

 It has a unique way of providing education with lots of live sessions and frequent doubt solving sessions. Providing regional language course instructors for a better understanding of students has led to the establishment in many cities. Both the founders come from different fields, Vivek Kumar the C.E.O. of the startup has an M.Tech background with experience of 6 years in teaching whereas Varun Gandhi the co-founder comes from a background in the online teaching community with 4 years of experience. 

The team also includes Sarin Gandhi who has forty-two years of experience in business and handles the finance of the startup and lastly the CTO Sameer Sadana has over five years of experience in Technical Consultancy and has served in many MNC's and even in the govt and is currently administers the Technical aspects of the company.

Just with a whiteboard, a marker and the target to provide an easy platform to the students Vivek Kumar established Exampur. “Accessing good quality education has always been a challenge in small towns of India. Exampur is looking to solve just that,” said Vardaan Gandhi to Yourstory.

Initially, the views were coming in double digits and the response wasn't good but slowly and gradually it increased as students were able to understand the lectures and word of mouth promotion. 

"Teaching on YouTube was not at all easy. By the time I joined, Vivek had already figured out methods to improve his teaching. All I had to do was grow the business and get more students. But Vivek faced many challenges when he started. The internet connection was a problem. Sometimes there would be a lot of background noise as most lessons would be conducted in one room,” Vardaan said to Yourstory.

As the views on the channel started increasing the team relocated its base to Delhi in October 2018, it also launched a website and app with a different range of courses. Currently, it has four lakh subscribers for paid courses and 3 lakh daily active users of the app. 

They are also training their faculties to provide quality education to the students. In total there are at least 500 members with 150-160 teaching staff. who prepare the course materials including the online data as well as books and notes.

The future

The demand for online education increased during the pandemic when the schools and tuition had to be closed temporarily due to lockdown, so students didn't have much choice but to depend on the internet for education. Edtech unicorn BYJU’S raised $460 million in Series F round at a valuation of upwards of $13 billion. Another competitor in the exam prep space, Vedantu, raised $100 million in July 2020 as demand for online teaching platforms grew.

According to two top Capital Ventures, the education industry would increase 6.3X to create a 1.7 billion dollar market, between classes 1 and 12. The post-K12 market is expected to grow 3.7X to create a $1.8 billion market.

Exampur, which was launched with a total investment of 2.5 crore rupees, is claimed to be earning revenue of 5-6 crore per month. The profit rate is said to be increased by 5X TO 6X times touching the line of 100 crores in comparison of the current 4X growth.

At present, it operates in Haryana, Bihar, Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan and plans to soon start operating in Maharashtra and strengthen its foothold in Uttar Pradesh. It has plans to expand its course by introducing training for exams like CAT (Common Aptitude Test), CBSE, and SSC board exams.

 Exampur has also been competing with Soft bank-backed BYJU'S which has also raised 398.5 million dollars according to CrunchBase among many giant techs. However, Exampur is looking forward to growing in both sectors of online and offline education. 

“We work on feedback from our students, and they want us to start teaching offline,” Vardaan said to Yourstory. This means offline tuitions are next in line to be launched. Currently, it has plans to launch centres in eight states of its operation in the next few years.