Portal helps students ace exams

Khyati Dharamsi

If someone claimed he could predict the questions in school and college exams, they would probably be the laughing stock of the student community. Not 18-year-old Angad Nadkarni, whose portal might just be the answer to maxing examinations. Incredible?

Well, Examify.com, the portal Nadkarni has co-founded, uses a predictive algoritham that trawls through a vast bank of question papers and throws up topics and issues that are ‘trending’. The upshot is, it can assess a student’s strengths and weaknesses and suggest areas where he or she needs to buck up. Moreover, the site offers tons of practice.

Out With Coaching Classes?

Nadkarni says Examify.com is hopefully the answer to the most hated words in a student’s lexicon, ‘tuitions’ and ‘coaching classes’, which have turned education into big business. “Apart from money, students waste another precious resource while trying to crack exams, which is time. They spend a lot of time discovering how to study, rather than what to study. Examify.com is the answer to this challenge,” claims Nadkarni.

This teenager should know. He’s an undergraduate at BITS Pilani, Hyderabad, where he is studying Computer Science Engineering. “When business is booming, I have my own exams,” laughs Nadkarni, at the irony.

Competing With Paper Setters

Examify.com was launched in January 2013 and is currently in public beta. It covers the gamut of school syllabi as well as competitive exams like the IIT-JEE. “When I say I am trying to predict questions, I am aligning my studies according to what the paper setters expect me to know. By looking at various question papers across time and at different schools, we are trying to make sense of the concepts that examiners are trying to test,” reveals Nadkarni, who set up the portal along with former GMAT instructor Samudra Bhuyan.

Crowd-Sourcing Data

Examify.com analyses a question paper and crowd-sources the best answers to a question. “So instead of one person having one awesome answer, students log in to our site and can access multiple answers to the same question and different ways to answer that question. It is like Wikipedia, where everyone adds a sentence and you gather information contained in an encyclopedia,” says Bhuyan.

Nadkarni and Bhuyan started working on their portal in September 2012. “We have all felt the need find to better ways to study rather than mere mugging for an exam. Our application software helps students find a better way to study and is not content-centric,” explains Bhuyan.
 
Scoring With Students

The co-founding duo must be doing something right because their portal has generated interest in the US, Thailand and even Africa. “We have quite a few thousand registered students and many requests to connect from others. But since we are in beta mode, we are restricting the count at present,” explains Bhuyan.

And it’s not only students but parents who are asking to connect with the site, which gets about 400-500 emails a day. “We have not spent a single rupee on marketing or advertising. We created an initial buzz through a closed preview at TEDxGateway 2012 in Mumbai. We have also had two articles published in an English daily and a Telugu newspaper, which created a lot of interest,” he adds.

Finally, word-of-mouth clinched it for them. “You need to have a good product and constantly innovate to stay in the market.”

Mentor on Board

Examify.com was lucky to have Vishal Gondal on board as an investor and mentor. Gondal is a guiding light for many a digital and Internet-based start-up. “I met Vishal in connection with a similar exam preparation start-up I had in 2010-11, which looked at a different category of exams. Once I met Angad, I realised this was a much better approach and Examify.com had a stronger value proposition,” says a candid Bhuyan.

Promoted To The Next Level

The young entrepreneurs are constantly refining their program to take their portal to the next level. Thus, the five-month-old venture will soon incorporate changes attuned to the needs of students. “We are including new features and changing the product every day. People have been demanding ‘study with friends’ and we will include that,” reveals Bhuyan.

Also, algorithms are being put to work on an ever-increasing database. “We have managed to get some school papers through crowd-sourcing. Sourcing directly from schools is difficult as they are sceptical of Internet platforms,” says Nadkarni.

The team is also expanding globally. “Some of the people working on our site are stationed in Melbourne and Singapore, to make it diverse. We have added some coders to the team and have three developers,” adds Bhuyan.

Revenue Model

Examify.com’s main investor is Vishal Gondal. The rest came from the co-founders’ personal savings. Rather than focus on money, Nadkarni and Bhuyan are concentrating on the user. “We are not thinking about monetisation. We have plans but we haven’t spent even five minutes building a revenue model right now. Finances are not a constraint at present.

Nadkarni says once the user base attains critical mass, additional features will be added to the site to earn revenue. “We will add premium features, where we plan to tie up with teachers to explain concepts better and maybe also provide study material. Students who want to access these features will have to pay for them,” he says.

Customers First, Product Later

With thousands of pending requests and customers waiting, wouldn’t it have been more prudent to develop the platform completely and then launch the venture? “We didn’t want to wait because it is only after the product is introduced that we will know what people require,” explains Bhuyan. 

Although the need for such a platform was never underestimated, its popularity took even the co-founders by surprise. Laughs Bhuyan, “I once received user feedback at 1 am from a guy who liked the product. I told him, ‘You have your board exams tomorrow. Get some sleep!”

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