With 8.5 Mn registered users and 5K paid subscribers, OnlineTyari eyes cracking subscription across Bharat

Securing government jobs is the best option considered by most of the students in India. And it has been continuing for ages.

Students in tier II and III cities and rural areas tend to prioritise public sector job as it gives a sense of security, dignified social life and enhances the chances of getting desired life partner along with hefty dowry.

To gauge the craze of government job, just look at the number of aspirants for positions opened for railways. Of 90,000 vacancies, about 25 million (2.5 crore) have applied for vacant positions. It essentially means that 277 candidates competing for a single post. For a comparison, the success ratio for IIT JEE is approx 100:1.

While this craze must die to get rid of unemployment and prosperity of the nation, it’s an opportunity for tech-oriented education startups to thrive. Scope for companies who are helping students in preparing government jobs is phenomenal.

Amongst several startups who are making test preparation and assessment easy for government job aspirants, there is OnlineTyari. Currently, the Gurugram-based company claims to have 8.5 million registered user base along with 7 million app downloads.

“Banking, SSC, Railways, and insurance aspirants are primary users of our platform as they consistently require to assess and track improvement curve,” says Bhola Meena, co-founder, and CEO, OnlineTyari.

For cracking such highly competitive exams, students need to identify their area of strengths as well as weakness. “We simply solve the assessment part and help aspirants in covering holistic preparation cycle for various exams,” adds Bhola.

Exam preparation cycle includes study plan, practice tests, and simulated mock tests, among others. Importantly, its predictive ranking modules assist students to know their probability of making to the merit list.

Cracking subscription becomes easy for edtech startups

During early years (2012-15 period), users response for paid courses were slow due to multiple factors such as low trust, greater familiarity with traditional study methods and lack of online payment infrastructure.

But this trend has started changing for edtech platforms since early 2017. This can be understood with the spurt in the adoption of paid users of platforms including Unacademy, NeoStencils, Byju’s and OnlineTyari as well.

Last year, it launched ‘TyariPlus’ for giving students a year-long access to unlimited content for preparation. Besides, subscribers also avail services such as tele-counseling, weekly performance report, video solutions of papers amongst others.

Subscription of TyariPlus is priced at Rs 1,499 that can provide access to over 1,000 mock tests worth Rs 5,000.

The company claims to have over 5,000 paid subscribers.

Making a dent in Bharat: Patna, Lucknow & Jaipur are sweet spots

“Over past 12 months, assessment submissions have gone up by 5X and we aim to cross 10,00,000  monthly assessment by March 2019,” says Meena. It aspires to reach out to 25 million users by 2020.

The company claims to have over 3 million monthly visits on its platform while 500,000 use the platform’s material as well as 640,000 assess their ability through OnlineTyari’s test-based offerings every month.

“Unlike other tech platforms, OnlineTyari is dedicated to ‘Bharat’,” emphasises Rajveer Meena, the other co-founder, and COO, OnlineTyari. Majority of users for OnlineTyari hails from cities such as Patna, Jaipur, Indore, Lucknow, Ajmer, along with large metros such as Delhi and Pune.

At present, it offers preparatory material in Hindi, English, and Marathi and soon plans to add three more languages.

Apart from Railway and SSC, OnlineTyari targets aspirants across UPSC, State recruitment (e.g. Bihar Police, Rajasthan patwari, MP Vyapam).

Size of opportunity, competition, and funding

Based on a report published by KPMG and Google, India's online education market is set to grow to $1.96 billion by 2021 and test preparation is expected to grow at a CAGR of 64 per cent.

On the competition front, OnlineTyari competes with NeoStencil, Unacademy, Gradeup, Add247, Oliveboard amongst several others. The company primarily focuses on revenue through subscription.

So far, it has raised over $4 millions in two rounds of funding from the likes of Mohandas Pai, Vikram Chachra, Aloke Bajpai, Tracxn Labs, Dell Foundation, Contrarian Drishti, and 3one4 Capital amongst a few others.