PushInterview 10:
The journey of how Zeeshan and team built MyCaptain- An EdTech startup generating $200k per year staying bootstrapped.
More than 1.5M students graduate every year in India.
How many students out of them actually pursue their passion? What do you think?
There is as such no data regarding this but, I am sure the number would be low.
As a teenager, discovering and following your passion is difficult in India as neither the education system offers ample time, relevant knowledge, and right motivation nor the society supports it.
We are judged based on our ability to memorize content and attend classes, aren’t we?
This is one of the core problems in EdTech that Zeeshan and team are trying to solve through MyCaptain.
Read through this interview to know:
How Zeeshan and team built MyCaptain- An EdTech startup generating $200k per year staying bootstrapped.
This is the tenth interview of the series “PushInterview: Interviews that help you Pushstart” powered by Pushstart.
Check out our previous interview on “How I built one of the most active startup communities in India” if you happened to miss it.
How I built one of the most active startup communities in India_My journey of building a startup community from zero to one_hackernoon.com
🕴 Who are you?
Hey Pushstarters! I am Mohammed Zeeshan, co-founder, and CEO of MyCaptain. I did my graduation in mechanical engineering from SRM and worked as a vice president with SRM Enactus.
Yep! That’s me.
My startup journey began during my college days when I was 19. I was studying engineering but was interested in becoming an astronomer, one of my friends wanted to become a journalist and other an economists.
This pattern of studying something which doesn’t interest you pushed me to figure out the real problem and find a solution in the form of MyCaptain.
🤔 What’s the deal with MyCaptain?
MyCaptain is an online mentoring platform where, young achievers from across the globe, mentor school and college students in their fields of interest and passions.
Mentors conduct one month long online, live workshops for students to help them learn the basics and get an idea about the career opportunities in their interest field.
Apart from this, we also organize physical meet-ups, events, and conferences across India. Our mentees volunteer for such meet-ups to stay connected with us and help other mentees.
All mentors are under the age of 25 who have gone through a similar phase and emerged victorious.
The regular online sessions are one-to-many, but separate one-to-one sessions can be scheduled in case of extra queries. Any such extra session is free, and students can discuss their questions even after the program is over.
💯 What motivated you to start MyCaptain?
The idea of MyCaptain was born out of a hostel room discussion.
My friends and I were discussing astronomy, economics, education, politics and Sunny Leone (I am not kidding!).
Through this discussion, we realized that we all wanted to pursue a different field and not engineering. We never got a chance to choose the field we wanted to pursue.
This is a core problem that every youth in India faces. We faced it, our seniors had faced it, and our juniors will face it. We wanted to go out there and do something about it. That’s how MyCaptain started.
We had multiple products and initiatives like a magazine for school students, events and conferences till we finally ideated MyCaptain in December 2014.
We launched MyCaptain in February 2015, and all our workshops got sold out within two days of the launch. This validated our idea.
🛠 What all went into building the initial product?
Invest time, not money in building the MVP.
We started mentoring by delivering live online sessions on the free version of WizIQ (E-learning delivery platform) and used Whatsapp groups to communicate and interact with the mentees.
We use to share videos and other such learning materials via google drive.
MyCaptain has evolved over the period of two years, and now we use our platform with a lot more added features and customization that suits the needs of our mentees for the live sessions.
There was no money spent on the product till August 2016.
🤝 How did you get your initial customers?
We got our first 200 paying mentees within two days by putting a stall at SRM during the Entrepreneurship Festival.
From 200 to 12k paying mentees has been a long journey and we have experimented a lot to reach the scale we are at today.
After the first 200, the next set of mentees came via referrals from existing mentees and personal contacts.
After a lot of brainstorming, we decided to start campus ambassador programs to pace up the growth of mentees.
I was part of AIESEC, a non-profit organization that provides leadership and development opportunities to youth across the globe. I leveraged their network to get campus ambassadors from various colleges in India.
The campus ambassadors promoted MyCaptain in their schools and colleges by making students aware of the benefits of joining us. They use to get monetary incentives based on their performance.
Campus ambassador program worked because of our clear vision and culture.
Apart from focussing on offline channels, we ran campaigns on Google and FB.
Till we had the product in place, we used Ads with Google Forms to acquire new mentees. We used to spend 15k rupees a month and generated close to 1.2L in revenue.
Now we use Facebook lead generation forms to capture leads. We spend 30 rupees per lead with a 5% conversion rate. It costs us 600 bucks to sell a product worth 4k.
💰 What is your business model and how have you grown your revenue?
MyCaptain has been generating revenue and profitable right from the first day.
Students pay us 1000 rupees for a month-long workshop. Mentors get a part of this amount, and we get the rest.
Rest of compensation for mentors happen by helping them get mentors for their research or work. They are also given LORs, and we even help them get funds for their research or startup.
The mentors are helped in pursuing their passion, be it photography or coding. We cherish the interests of all the people associated with us.
We also organize physical meet-ups regularly for which participants pay between Rs. 200 to Rs. 1000.
An example of one such event is the engineering conclave which consists of sessions that help students in gaining useful insights into their field of interest. The event spans over a couple of days and covers topics from various domains.
MyCaptain is profitable clocking 13 lakhs monthly recurring revenue. Revenue for FY 17–18 was 1.5 cr.
📉 One incident where you failed miserably, but got up and started once again?
We went bankrupt and were in heavy debt before starting MyCaptain as our magazine didn’t take off.
At the end of 2014, we had subscribers for our magazine, but we did not have the resources to cater to them. We were liable to print 12 more issues of the magazine, but we didn’t have the funds to do so and were in debt of around 2.5L.
The idea of MyCaptain was born during this phase. The revenue from first few months of starting MyCaptain helped us clear the debt.
🏁What are your future goals and how do you plan to achieve them?
We plan to build physical spaces where students can come together and learn more about their interests and passion.
These spaces will be present in multiple localities across major cities and students will be connected to each other through the MyCaptain app.
The first step to achieve this has already been taken in the form of “MyCaptain Connect.”
This program promotes meet-ups between mentees and mentors to enhance interactions.
🌋 The biggest challenges you have faced till now?
Managing cash flow is a big problem when you are bootstrapped. You don’t have the luxury to experiment or spend on pilots.
It does slow down things a bit however it also helps drive a constant hustle. There is no time to relax and no excuses for not delivering quality work.
Apart from this, the entire situation where we had incurred debts was a huge challenge for us. During that time, the team was breaking apart, and it felt as if I had nothing left with me.
The value of just not giving up and going ahead, kept me striving and I finally could get back on the track and think of solutions. After a lot of brainstorming and failed attempts we came up with MyCaptain.
The attitude of never giving up brought me till here.
🗒What is your advice to Pushstarters starting out?
- Chase Customers, not Investors.
- Focus on getting the right co-founders with complementary skill sets.
- If you are a collegepreneur, make sure your startup tends to generate revenue and is profitable from the start.
- If you are bootstrapping, focus on cash flows. With the right cash flow management, you can remain sustainable for a longer time.
✉️ How can we get in touch with you?
You can reach out to me on Linkedin or Facebook.
— By Anjali Arora and Neeraj Joshi.
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Hey! Neeraj here, the founder of Pushstart, India’s most active entrepreneur community. I release interviews with successful entrepreneurs every week. Feel free to reach out to me on Facebook | Linkedin | [email protected] | Twitter.