A father turned entrepreneur while searching for a school for his child
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| Rakesh Kalra, Founder, 3pundits.com |
Sitting in faraway Boston, 35-year-old Rakesh Kalra had two things on his mind. One, he needed to find a school for his son in India, where he would be moving soon. And two, he wanted to start something of his own.
Kalra realised that finding the right school was quite tough: there was no authentic online resource that he could tap. A friend of his also commented on this gap in information. Something clicked! Here was a solution to his problem, and an idea he could work on.
That’s how 3pundits was born.
What’s 3Pundits.com
It is an online community of parents, teachers and students that intends to support all learning needs. Begun in late 2010, the website makes the school selection process easier by offering information on schools, play schools, various educational boards, admission procedures, summer programs, etc.
It also helps parents connect to other parents in the same city, share opinion about a school and much more.
While the target users of the website are parents, teachers and students in the K-12 segment, the target clients are the schools or institutions or any service provider who wants to market its services.
Why ‘3pundits’?
The name 3pundits represents the growing community of the three pundits—parents, teachers and students. It was inspired by the popular Hindi film ‘3-idiots’ where the three protagonists, each one a genius, were labelled idiots by the world.
A Solid Start
Rakesh Kalra’s 13 years of experience in web technologies and building web based services and solutions for technology start-ups in the US made his job easy as a pie.
3pundits.com started with his software development efforts and some external help on data entry.
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Expert Speak Alok Mittal |
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| An Interesting Concept This is certainly a business which, if executed well, will deliver value to users. A key challenge in execution will be to create content that is high quality and offers real insights, rather than just data. Something like this (http://bit.ly/j6LsBY) doesn’t really deliver value beyond a directory – can they build information which can help parents narrow down their list, or make decisions? Can they do this in a manner which is significant in the context of current decision mechanisms (largely referral based)? The second, and perhaps bigger challenge is also on monetization – advertising and sponsorships will only take this platform so far. They might either have to increase the depth of service (for example, by active counselling), or the width (where parents come to them not just at the time of admission but beyond). Ratings by the Expert Innovation element: 3/5 Market attractiveness: 2/5 Execution complexity: 4/5 Ability to build a large company: 2/5 |
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Revenue Model
3pundits.com relies on sponsorships and lead generation for cash inflows. It is in the process of identifying other revenue streams. Kalra believes, “Being in the education space, the possibilities are endless.”
Marketing Tools
While the initial traffic was mostly generated through Search Engine Optimisation efforts, Kalra uses Google adwords too for advertising.
3pundits.com hasn’t so far opted for any aggressive marketing tools but relies heavily on word of mouth, which is evidently doing the trick.
A study in success
Kalra’s plan was to make the website an authentic source of information on schools, which meant involving parents in it. However, making parents write genuine reviews on schools was a tough hoe to row.
To make that happen, the enthusiastic entrepreneur had to reach out to a lot of people—friends, family, strangers and request them to provide feedback on schools where their children go. “We offered to give away an iPod Shuffle to a lucky winner for writing a school review,” says Kalra. And now they have a good database of user reviews, which is continuing to grow.
For the upcoming 2011-12 session, 3pundits.com ran a very successful school-admissions alert program in Bengaluru. It emailed several admission alerts to its community members for schools of their interest. “We still get a lot of parents writing to us about the excellent service we provided,” says a proud Kalra.
3pundits Tomorrow
3pundits.com plans to soon join hands with Teacherji.in, an online resource providing information on out-of-school learning needs of people from all age groups, to come up with a newer, bigger and better offering in the learning space for everyone. The joint portal would provide complete information on schools, colleges, hobby and professional courses, sports coaching, corporate training and anything else that can be taught and learnt.
Spread across 12 cities and with a community base of 10,000 plus registered users, 3pundits.com is growing fast. And hopefully, with the merger it will get the desired boost in terms of its user base and clients.
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written by Rakesh Kalra, June 21, 2011
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