Edustoke bridging parents' need for information and expert advice on education choices

Edustoke was formed with the sole objective of alleviating the issues of access, quality, and affordability of K-12 education and after school activities and engagements, for parents. Led and managed by a team on K-12 industry veterans, in the last four years, it has helped over 11 million parents make the most appropriate decision about their child schooling options. In the process it has proven the revenue models having generated revenues more than Rs. 40 million.

Edustoke is today India's largest online platform in pre-school to K-12 space, bridging parents' need for information and expert advice on education choices and the critical need for schools to market themselves and gain enrolments in an increasingly competitive environment. Over the past four years the brand has served over 11 million parents and listed over 17,500 + preschools, day schools in over 10 cities and across India for boarding schools.

Here, Pawas Tyagi, Co-Founder, edustoke, tells us more. Excerpts from an interview:

DQ: What problem is Edustoke solving and what is its unique offering?

Pawas Tyagi: Admission into a school is the first and necessary decision that parents must make concerning their child’s education. School is also the place where the child would spend most of her time in development years, parents will end up spending the most money. Hence, the decision must be well thought through keeping in all the available options and the unique circumstances of the family.

In this phase of our journey, Edustoke is striving to get that decision right for families. We are trying to bring to bear all possible technology and human expertise to make sure that parents can take the best possible decision and complete the admission in the most convenient way possible with financing options available if required.

DQ: How is Edustoke alleviating the issues of access, quality, and affordability of K-12 education and after school activities and engagements, for parents?

Pawas Tyagi: There are three aspects.

Access: By making sure that all the necessary information options are available to parents when they are looking for schools and any other K-12 education-related activity, at the same time they have the tools to engage, make a sound decision and conveniently apply and admit a child into a good school.

Quality: By ensuring that the information available is of the highest integrity and there is scope for reviews and feedback. Also, parent journeys and behaviors and experiences are captured to ensure that subsequent sets of parents benefit from preceding sets. This feedback loop enables the quality providers to gain more and others to keep improving on delivery.

Affordability: It is addressed in two different ways. One, the preferred method is to help parents out with options that are within the budget and provide them full information about fees and expenses ensuring they don’t spend on more expensive options when affordable once exist. Two, in case a parent does require financial support – making available the best financing options for her.

DQ: How has Edustoke achieved unit profitability with revenues of over Rs. 40 million?

Pawas Tyagi: Our admissions operations have been unit profitable from day one. With an experienced team leading the business, we know that nothing gets done unless something is sold, and at a profit. We have managed to do this in large part with a robust model, financial discipline during customer acquisition and keeping the costs under control.

DQ: What is Edustoke's plans on scaling admission support to 45 cities and realize over 20,000+ school admissions?

Pawas Tyagi: We are entering a very exciting phase of our journey and the next few months and the year in general is going to be momentous for us. With the corona-induced lockdowns behind us (hopefully), we are gearing to expand the admission services both in scope and geographies. By the end of 2022, we would have served parents and schools in at least 45 cities.

We are eyeing to increase our parent traffic to 10 million this year with more than 3,000 schools tie-ups for services ,enabling us to achieve at least 20000 admissions in the academic year 2022-23. The admission product would also get more intelligent with better features and enhanced user experience for parents and deeper more sophisticated admission and lead management for our schools.

This year would also see us operationalizing and piloting at-least five distinct services in K-12 sector – taking Edustoke one step closer to realizing its vision of a one stop platform for quality and affordable education.

DQ: What is Edustoke's overseas expansion plans for 2022?

Pawas Tyagi: Edustoke has plans to both list services locally as well as provide K-12 education opportunities for Indian parents seeking admission outside, as well foreign parents seeking education in India. These plans are in the advanced stages of implementation, and we shall announce launch dates soon.

DQ: What is Edustoke's YoY Growth and expectations?

Pawas Tyagi: We expect to grow both horizontally in terms of the number of services in our fold and vertically in each service offering. We expect school admission to grow 5X in terms of parents served and similar multiples in revenues. We will also add 5 more services this year, of which, at least 3 should yield significant revenues.

DQ: According to you, what are the changing scenarios of schooling with the current situation?

Pawas Tyagi: There are two factors at play here. One is what changed in schools because of the pandemic, and two what near-and medium-terms factors are at play that may fundamentally alter schools as we know them today.

Pandemic-induced changes have already been touched upon. It has forced technology into schools and all facets of schools. Adoption to technology from online teaching to dissemination of information to collecting fees was not “an option” – it was the only available option during the last two years. This gate crashing by technology has created a lot of converts, trained teachers/staff and changed behaviors all around to ensure that tech would be considerably more welcome in schools today than it was in 2019.

But, schools are also undergoing a fundamental metamorphosis. It has now become clear that the systems designed two centuries ago would no longer be able to serve expectations, aspirations, and demands of the future. Technology has changed everything fundamentally and K-12 education would have embraced it. Curriculums would have to be revamped – and, NEP is a good start.

More flexibility must be built in the delivery structure, more options on what to study to what depth must be put on the table. 10-15 years from now schools should morph into last mile posts for physical delivery of education, hub of sports and games and local knowledge clubs.

DQ: What is the process of broadening and deepening engagement with parents?

Pawas Tyagi: Boarding of engagements would entail offering a more services in the K12 education space besides school admission. Deeping the engagement would mean offering more features and tools to ensure better user experience and more convenience to parents using each service – like registrations, demo bookings, online engagements and payments, to name a few.