This edtech startup is making learning a fun activity for kids

Jaipur-based edtech startup Tinkerly provides online coding courses blended with hands-on STEM toys for kids of grades 1-12. Now parents understand the need for more awareness towards learning beyond exams. They also understand that "In a career, the skills matter the most," says Sharad Bansal, co-founder, Tinkerly, in an exclusive interview with Bizz Buzz.

How do you see the future of edtech?

The Covid-19 Pandemic has proved the usefulness of the blended learning model. This blended learning approach is used by many edtech companies as well as educational institutions to get better learning outcomes. In my opinion, the Edtech sector has its own segments which will work on different models with different types of demand and supply, taking a few examples:

1. Academic - As of now, a majority of schools get reopened. So offline learning will continue to be a part of the future for academic subjects taught in schools. Sustaining the growth in models that were substituting schools or tuitions will be challenging.

2. Test Prep - Some major edtech players like Byjus have opened offline centers, Unacademy opening their experience centers, both have acquired a fair share of the digital market and are now going offline for deeper penetration to the grassroot levels. So this is the segment that will grow in blended form.

3. Co-curricular K12 - online – Quality solutions are not available locally (no local competition). In tier-2 city like Bareilly, it is very hard to find a coding teacher in your locality. Thus, these courses are a good way to learn online from expert teachers from any part of the world. The students can learn online through Video conferencing and get the finest solutions from experts across the globe.

India has one of the youngest populations globally with an average age of 29. Now parents understand the need for more awareness towards learning beyond exams. They also understand that in a career the skills matter the most.

The evolving online k12 co-curricular learning models will make India the epicenter of global edtech. The abundant supply of budget-friendly and quality STEM teachers in India also attracts foreign students' interest in the courses offered by Indian startups.

Take us through the Tinkerly journey.

Tinkerly's journey starts with myself and my batchmates Om Prakash and Kapil Arya at IIT-Delhi. While studying at IIT-D, we observed that practical sessions pepped up our engineering coursework. One thing common among us was that we favor the practical sessions over mugging up theory when it comes to learning. Thus, we had a realization that this approach should be used for the betterment of the younger generation. In a survey carried out by us in the starting days, it came out that the majority of schools did not have the bandwidth or know-how to push practical teaching throughout the curriculum. So, to overcome this problem, we joined hands with Vivek Pathak, a common friend of ours, and set up Tinkerly in 2015 for helping school-age kids by preparing them for futuristic skills.

Since then, our company has completed six years and has benefitted over 150K students across India, the Middle East, and North America with its unique pedagogy and personalized learning.

Could you take me through some of the processes of Tinkerly?

I would like to share two actually, the first is our Teaching process, and the second one is our talent acquisition process.

Teaching process: As per the learning pyramid, the majority of children remember only 10 per cent of the information gathered from their academic textbooks. Whereas when they are introduced to the hands-on learning approach, they have an information retention rate of about 75 per cent. We have developed our content and pedagogy at Tinkerly following the learning pyramid, from live online instructions to revision modules, assessments, and STEM kits for practicals. Further, the same theory suggests that when students share their knowledge with others their information retention will reach 90 per cent, and our online community of makers across the globe brings this peer inspiration to enhance learning interest and retention.

Hiring Process: When wisdom meets fresh unbounded perspectives, interesting things happen. We like to hire a mix of freshers and experienced candidates. While hiring freshers, we like to first hire them as interns/fellows. After that, the best performers will be offered full-time placement offers. Among experienced candidates, we like to see entrepreneurial abilities, and the willpower to hustle. We welcome the referral and inbound candidates.

What inspired you to be an entrepreneur, especially to work on this edutech startup?

Personally, the one thing that I hated most in my childhood was mugging up. I always dreamt, what if learning could be more fun? Later, I along with my fellow founders, realized the relevance of what we learn in school is very limited to higher education and the same is the case between college and industry. So making today's education relevant to the industry's needs is one of the key missions of Tinkerly.

These things motivate us to start Tinkerly. We introduce coding as a hobby among young minds. We have observed that in 70 per cent of careers, the role of tech is blended with hardware. Thus, we added STEM kits as a part of our course curriculum and introduced it in the early years in the form of a hobby class.

Enumerate the challenges that you've faced along the way.

Challenges faced: As such, every day is a new challenge in startup life, but I would like to share one incident that turned out to be the biggest turning point.

In April 2020, we had a plan to launch our AI and robotics kit, which couldn't happen because of Covid induced lockdown. At the same time, our school's revenue funnel was also affected. So, while we needed to leverage the edtech disruption, we had limited runway to just survive.

Then we identified the need for hands-on learning in the exponentially growing demand for online courses. We observed that there is a gap in learning as most online classes are using only the theoretical mode of teaching via live online classes and missing the practical aspect of learning like experiments/labs etc. Thus, we launched our new product which is STEM online classes blended with kits. Given limited budgets, we tried different marketing channels such as retail distribution and school connections. This worked out efficiently. We not only survived but also started growing exponentially. The feedback from our customers also generated interest from newer investors such as Navneet Education.

How big is your company now? Is Tinkerly going to expand in the near future?

We are a team of 40 full-time employees, and additionally, we provide indirect employment to more than 500 teachers and business partners. Our future plans include growth in the affordable segment via small/regular batch type classes and development of our courses from current English and Hindi to 4-5 more languages. To be on the realistic side, in the next 4 years, we aim to have 3 million paid subscribers from India and abroad.

What was your last fiscal year like and what are you expecting?

The FY22 has been phenomenal for Tinkerly's direct-to-consumer offerings, we have grown our D2C revenue 4x despite a tough beginning of the covid second wave. Especially in Q3 and Q4, we witnessed our highest growth, as a result of school re-opening and the trust of our customers in our hands-on model of teaching. Key highlights of the year were the launch of our new app across platforms, Hindi budget courses launch, strategic partnerships, and investment from a leading education group from the country. Now we have bigger goals for FY23, and we are sure that 12 months later, I will be sharing a 10x growth story, and many more exciting developments that this year would have witnessed.

What is the current market scenario? Who is your direct competitor in the same business model?

The disruptions in learning caused by subsequent lockdowns due to the Covid-19 pandemic have led parents to look out for other means of tech-enabled learning solutions. In the year 2020, the Indian edtech industry was valued at $750 million. There are speculations that by 2025, it will reach $4 billion at a CAGR of 39.77 per cent. There are two main reasons that contribute to this growth:

1. The growing demand for non-academic courses from tier-II & tier-III cities post-Covid.

2. The crucial need for personalized learning in the edtech space.

Our indirect competitors are Whitehatjr (now Byju's), BrightChamps, Codingal, Campk12, etc. Our unique offering of blending STEM kits as a part of our play-based course curriculum gives us a competitive edge.

The next few years in India's education system (K-12) are going to be interesting to watch. It used to be all about coding; now that STEM toys are more widely accepted by parents, what is the main difference between them?

STEM toys are an excellent tool to teach young minds about innovative technologies through hands-on learning mode. They add a flavour of fun and excitement and keep the students hooked on learning. These toys encourage the natural curiosity of children and teach them fundamental concepts of STEM in an easy and interactive manner.

The main difference between STEM toys and traditional toys is that a STEM toy enables active play and the student engages hands-on with it. STEM toys enable students to experience practical applications in real-life scenarios.

Leading edtech startup Tinkerly has blended STEM toys as a part of their play-based course curriculum. This way, the child gets the best of both theoretical and practical knowledge. These STEM toys take the students' journey beyond the screens and limit their unproductive screen time.

Are you adequately funded now? Will you look at another round of funding this year?

Till date, Tinkerly has raised about $1.5 million from a clutch of angel investors groups including Sucseed Ventures, Keiretsu Forum, and Rajasthan Angels, and raised a seed round recently from India's leading publication and content provider- Navneet Education. Backed by an exciting growth (80 per cent MoM) journey, we are in talks with VCs to close our Series A round soon.

What exciting things can we expect from Tinkerly in the next 12 months?

As also referred to in previous answers, one of the main objectives of Tinkerly is to make online coding courses accessible to every child irrespective of their socio-economic status. In India, only 17 per cent of students study in English medium schools, while around 49 per cent of students study in Hindi medium schools.

We launched courses in Hindi a few months back and brought them under Rs 100 per class, making it affordable to the masses. These courses are gaining massive traction from tier-2 towns, and with our distribution network, we are all set to expand our market share among Bharat learners. In the coming months, we are planning to make our global expansion as well with regional languages and distribution networks. We plan to focus on product development, increase consumer awareness about our products and services, and plan on expanding our business in new geographies with the power of vernacular content. It will help us to create a strong global (global with localized enhancements) brand.