[i10_sanjay]

Here is my story where I have interacted with Byjus for the first & last time. While I was at my first job in 2016, I wanted to pursue higher studies. I had MBA in my mind, so there are numerous exams to clear depending on the institution I wished to join. Naturally there is the default CAT along with XAT, MAT, SNAP, etc.,

Since I was working, my natural choice was towards weekend classes offered by institutions such as TIME, CARE, etc., or self-paced online learning classes such as Unacademy, Byju’s and HKF - Handa Ka Funda (which was later acquired by Unacademy). Unacademy’s was priced higher than HKF while Byjus was the costliest of all. To top it all, Byjus said that their course will be pre-loaded in a tablet which does not need to be connected to the internet. After the course, the tablet can’t be used for anything else as the course contents will be locked after a specific date. They quoted a price of Rs.49,999, and if I opt for it the same day, they can provide me a special offer price of Rs.34,999. Mind you, this was in 2016. That was ridiculous compared to the Rs.18,999 quoted by Unacademy and Rs.6,999 quoted by HKF. I chose HKF, obviously, which had very good reviews. Byju’s didn’t make sense then, neither does it make sense now.

HKF helped me clear the exams with very good score and I went on to do my MBA with one of the prestigious institutions in the country. So, it helped me cement my opinion that expensive doesn’t mean better. At least in this case.

[cdrajeevkumar]

Originally Posted by The Rationalist

I know many parents who took loans for their classes with some tablets bundled along. His company is made on the tears of millions of hapless parents. I hope this crook land up in a jail.

I resonate with this. When my son was in XII we were trying out few coaching centers to hone his skills for competitive exams. We tried on Byjus and the guy came home, gave a tablet and later started ranting that my son's score is below par than many of the national level kids. We were asked to enrol him in their special program that would have set us back by 4L (Approx). We told the sales guy we needed time to think & act. For a week after that we were bombarded with calls to enrol him into the program.

We opted out but not before we got an earful from the sales guy that our son would never be successful!

[stantheman]

Originally Posted by V.Narayan

Byju's ki Kahani

Rs 6838 Crores COSTS
Rs 2280 Crores REVENUES
Rs 4558 Crores LOSSES

Having no oversight on such companies is the real problem. Personally I am not worried abt Rs. 4558 cr of losses. Since they would be bankrolled by investors who are funneling the money for their own greed anyway.

Most worrisome part is the Rs. 2280 collected from the hapless parents who have been fleeced dry in the name of improving their child's education and future. Have heard more than a few cases in close circle regarding their predatory tactics to acquire more consumers.

Originally Posted by LordSharan

Couple of points:
1. EdTech is such a promising sector, with overall market size of more than $60Bn/per year in India. ....

4. Byju's had a sales focused strategy, ......

Why are we still calling these companies as Ed-tech? They are more of a Marketing/sales agency where product doesn't matter, sales does.

Originally Posted by ankan.m.blr

source : https://www.ndtv.com/india-news/byju...report-4634360

Thats just PR stunt. Byju's is almost mastering that to an art-form by now.

[Azalactone]

BYJU's started in a good way aiming to educate students online. I remember in 2012 i had signed up on their app just for knowledge. Byju Raveendran's advertisements in which he would himself pose use to be played in multiplexes.

The thing is all startups start with a good aim. Its when investors start pouring in things go bad. The investors are only bothered about profits and not the product.

It was a bad idea to capitalize on Education. I absolutely despise the advertisements of coaching classes with the kids photos and their scores and the gifts they receive. Even more is the parents feeding a ladoo to their laadla/laadli and the media printing it on newspapers. One should keep these things private. It affects many other kids negatively who couldn't live up to their expectation but were equally good.

All startups are in a hurry to be a unicorn and the founder posing with a fancy expensive car and telling his back breaking story of success on TEDex,Linkedin etc. This culture is being followed by most of the Bangalore based startups and is a bad way as it works only 1% or less.

Most of the people think Startups are the shortest route to success but it is also the fastest way to failure. Once your name goes bad no investor will believe in you ever again.

[Prashant_BHP]

In a 3 sided marketplace that edtech is, it is hard for any company to achieve scale and success. The problem lies in the structure, the seller (Byju's in this case), the customer (student) and the financier (parents). Each have different expectations from the transaction and it almost always leads to friction. It is true for brick and mortar educational institutions as well. Steered away from edtech domain forever as an employment option for myself!!

[sudeepg]

Originally Posted by LordSharan

5. Unncessary acquisitions, stupid promotions (BCCI, hiring Messi) and god knows what, were pre-cursor to this house of cards coming down. Clear signs of a company deviating from it's core vision and mission.

100% agreed. I used to wonder how a startup like this can spend so much cash to bring in the world's top celebrities. It was un-necessary expenditure. It was very clear their priorities were elsewhere. A very good product will sell itself, it doesn't need BCCI or Messi to do the branding. The point also being, given his knowledge and wisdom, he turned out to be an idiot who failed to see his company dwindling away funds and its customers due to bad sales strategies.

I still wonder, why are the employees still working there, risking their career and salaries?

Originally Posted by The Rationalist

His company is made on the tears of millions of hapless parents. I hope this crook land up in a jail.

They tried that on me and some of us in my friend's circle. We didn't let them succeed. To use dubious means to show down a child and the parents is a terrible thing and he should reap what he sowed. I have no sympathy for this company or its founders. They tried to build a company on the tears of parents & fleecing them of their money with nothing in return.

[2nd_gear_7krpm]

This happened somewhere in 2018/19. Hailing from a small town called Sagara in Karnataka, one day I was returning to Bangalore. Festive seasons forced me to select a seat in a twin sharing sleeper bus. We both happened to be getting down at South End circle and it turned out that we were staying within a few roads in the same area, so decided to share a rikshaw from the bus stop. The conversation on a 3km journey really made me lose my mind -
Me: So you visited Sagar for sightseeing or some functions?
Him: No, I'm a (some fancy designation - Student Councellor? Can't recall) at @byjus. I went there to create awareness to parents on the importance of education
Me: 🤔 Okay! Good
Him: You see, people in these small towns aren't appreciating our company and the value we bring in. They only care about the annual fee of some 1 lakh odd amount that they have to pay us. As a B.Tech graduate in mechanical engineering myself, I know the importance of education.

It turned out that he wasn't welcomed with a red carpet and was shooed away. As he couldn't succeed in selling tablets to the innocent parents and loot their hard earned money, blame shifted to parents and people in small towns in general! (and Sagara in specific).

5-6 years have passed. Small towns has produced lakhs of engineers and hopefully none working for con startups like Byjus. If that mechanical engineer is still at Byjus and his salary is unpaid, I have zero sympathy. You cannot be a leach.

Middle class parents whoever hasn't fallen to the trap, you are the unsung heros of the fall of so called ed-tech startups in India. You shall be remembered in the history.

[RunGaDa]

Originally Posted by The Rationalist

Bijou’s is the classical case of greed and deceit! I hope this crook land up in a jail.

Absolutely my sentiment in the two sentences. About 7 or 8 years ago Byju was running city to city renting stadiums to start the concept of his company. The way he did the presentation showed maniac- sque greed and arrogant salesmanship. I quickly left the freak show in middle explaining my kids that such people if at all come up will only care for money.
I am so happy to see him fall apart. Unfortunately in India the govt policies are toothless against non paying employers. In any other country he would be put in jail.
Hope he goes to jail some day.

[abaliga]

If a company or an individual is trying to tell a parent that their kid is below par in anyway, the parents should just end the conversation and send the sales person running! I was an average student through out my life but have done alright for myself, I have many friends who were below par on studies until high school or even until the 12th but have done very well in their graduation and their respective jobs/businesses thereafter, all parents should realize this, one shouldnt be after the rat race and get fleeced by these sharks! In my opinion, Byjus deserves to be shutdown for their toxic business model alone, not even trying to bring up their dubious accounting practices!

If I ever start a business, I will start small and try to grow at a steady pace, I simply dont get this strategy of getting millions/billions of dollars from VCs and drawing up huge valuations when one is a loss making entity, the con of recovering from an IPO and dumping the losses on retail investors is such a horrible practice, authorities should not let this happen and all IPOs need to be carefully vetted, can understand a business may make a loss for a year or two, but if one is posting negative numbers for years together it is never going to work, making a loss in the name of acquiring market share is a toxic business practice and should be avoided, so many of the startups belong to this category!

[Samurai]

Right now, we are all able to freely bash Byju, for all the right reasons too. But give a thought to people who tried the same 4-6 years ago. Specifically two names, Pradeep Poonia and Dr.Aniruddha Malpani. Byju's used their enormous funds to bury them under social media ostracization and law suits. Byju was able to get the Linkedin accounts cancelled.

Full story was on Ken in 2020: https://the-ken.com/story/byjus-sile...nline-dissent/

Originally Posted by abaliga

If I ever start a business, I will start small and try to grow at a steady pace

This is what I do, but this is considered outdated thinking or small-mindedness in the modern era. In fact, I have read some VC claiming it is not entrepreneurship at all. Running profitable startup is so 20th century. True entrepreneurship these days is getting an investor to finance an operation that is continuously hyping and working towards increasing the valuation, while paying lip service towards building services/products and profitability.

Originally Posted by abaliga

I simply dont get this strategy of getting millions/billions of dollars from VCs and drawing up huge valuations when one is a loss making entity, the con of recovering from an IPO and dumping the losses on retail investors is such a horrible practice

It is the fastest way of making money without really having to creating anything useful. Byju was probably creating something useful a decade ago, before they had any investors. Once they got investors, they started chasing valuation and stopped creating value. In fact, in case of Byju's they started creating negative value to the society by scamming unsuspecting parents, suppressing any negative news or opinion about them.

There is nothing wrong in getting equity capital to establish a company in the initial years. However, the investors have identified a get-rich-quick scheme in this model, and have abused it to the hilt. I don't know what the antidote is.

This has created a whole generation of investors and founders, who have no idea how to run a profitable business. It has become a lost art. When the input cost is higher than the revenue, the only thing they think about is raising more funds. Most have no clue on how to reduce the input cost.

Government intervention is not recommended, because government knows even less than VCs about how to run a business.

[TallBoy]

I would like to highlight two aspects we tend to lose sight of in such discussions on startup shenanigans:
1. The number of genuinely built businesses that suffer because of the senseless pricing of products & services by these funded startups. They just crowd out traditionally funded companies which follow a cost+ pricing model. By the time the startup is done with its stupidity, the traditional businesses too would have suffered, sometimes to the point of no-return

2. The funding that these startups attract is not 'some stupid fund' but coming from people like us. It could be some Canadian teachers' fund etc in the past, but increasingly these are funds raised from Indian investors too. And the mindless burns would ultimately hurt some passive small investor somewhere while lining up the pockets of a celebrity footballer, a movie actor, a media baron, a fund manager and a promoter. Some of these fund managers seem to be good at blindly shooting darts, hoping they get some right and make their bonuses

[The Rationalist]

I do agree that there are two sides to the coin, parents are also responsible for these kind of firms cropping up. The mindset that only those who have success in education will succeed is the real issue. From the experience I see, education is needed, but it doesn't guarantee you success in life. I would count upon street smartness more important quality than having a coveted degree to succeed in life. I have seen many less educated persons who are far smarter and successful than 'so called educated' persons like me. Our system of education doesn't prepare us to face practical life. Our education system makes one scared about failing in life to be honest. So most of us never do anything extraordinary out of the fear of failing. No one ever told me when I was young that it was ok to fail, instead I was told you will end up as one who will be carrying bricks for a living. Not that manual labour is a despicable thing, but that instills a fear in most kids to play it safe and somehow 'win' the parameters that parents and teachers set for themselves. I hope at least some of us tell our kids that it's ok if you fail in exams. In current era, I can assure you that they will never go hungry if they are willing to do any work.

[bhphog]

Disclaimer:
1. I have never worked with Byju's, the information below is based on my experience working with one of such ed-techs way back and from information shared by people still in that industry.
2. My opinion is not targeted towards a specific person/persons.

The ed-techs in India are divided into three segments:
1. K-12 - Kindergarten to 12th standard.
2. Test Prep - Preparation for all competitive exams, JEE to UPSC.
3. Upskilling - Distance Education such as MBA.

Byjus started with a noble concept.
It started with the K-12 segment and then the Test Prep segment but never into the Upskilling segment.

Kids these days are exposed to multimedia content, eg. cartoons, and games at an early age and are attracted to such content.
Byjus did not do anything revolutionary, it only brought a product that would use multimedia content to teach kids in a way that would be attractive to them.
Byjus partnered with Disney to develop cutting-edge content and teaching, albeit only for the top 1% of the population.
It saw a progressive rise before COVID.

Once COVID struck, parents wanted their children not to waste their time and wanted to involve them in other activities.
This was the period when Byjus was at its peak and investors, and VCs were thrilled with the quick rise and projected numbers and shoved money in Byjus and other edtechs.
However, as COVID faded, parents and kids realized that there was no replacement for traditional chalk and board education.
In short, the value addition in the education of a kid that Byjus advertised was insignificant and the ROI was pathetic.

However, investors had invested heavily and like the VC game that we all know of, pressurized Byjus to sustain the same level of business as it was during the COVID era.
Thus, the strategy of Byjus changed from 'pull' sales to 'push' sales, meaning rather than fulfilling the need by the product, the need was created and then fulfilled.

Now the important questions:
1. Where did the money go that the investors had put in?
- It should have gone to develop the product, innovate, and pivot the company to a sustainable direction.
However, the money went into marketing both offline and online as the organic need for the product was stagnant but the pressure from the investors required them to enroll more students.
Till the point when schools and parents didn't realize the insignificance of improvement in education, offline marketing would provide Byjus with high-quality leads and good conversions and be on the trajectory towards profitability.
But once schools and parents did know about this, the entire funds went into digital marketing campaigns via ads to generate leads, and that is where the entire story started to 'push' sell the product.

The Cost per lead rose way about 400-1000 bucks a lead and the conversion, believe me, <1%.
In easy words, Byju's would invest 1L to generate 100 leads out of which 1 would enroll with an average ticket size of say, 40k. (not even considering the operational costs)
The CAC - Customer Acquisition Cost was extremely high.
But for an investor to make money from Byjus required them to increase their enrolment count, i.e. sales, and thus came the pathetic sales techniques.

Byju's salespeople were trained with tactics, armed with tricky questions to ask the kids and ways to play on the sentiments of parents by scaring them.
Byjus had a 2-month training program, mind you.

2. Were Byju's employees and salespeople evil?
- NO.
- While today most of us are fortunate enough to have necessities fulfilled, many don't.
- Do you think it was fancy college graduates working in Byjus? No. They were people from the economically weaker section of society and for them to earn 30-40k/month was far more than a dream that they ever saw.
- You may ask why these employees didn't choose a different job. Well, not everyone is fortunate like us to know English, use a PC, or even have formal education till 12th standard. For many, 'speaking' is what feeds the mouth in their family. And thus, sales and customer support, BPOs.

- Reference - We cut the calls of a credit card agent within the first second of them introducing themselves, do you know they make 500+ calls a day, listen to rejection the whole day, being abused only to make 9-10k a month?
- Sitting in our comfortable homes, I truly think making statements like 'he deserved the salary cut' is uncalled for. Be empathetic, it costs nothing.

Ultimately, why did Byjus fail?
- Investors and the startup game altogether where the investor can only make profits by raising another round, and that round can only be raised when the company increases its customer count/end users.
The growth in customer count/end users didn't happen organically for Byjus and the rest is history.

The acquisitions of companies like WhiteHat Jr. were to increase the customer base.
The acquisitions of companies like Akash were a confirmation that Byjus and the top brass knew that a company cannot just run on digital marketing, they had to have physical or blended learning to provide value addition to its learners.

Are all Ed-techs bad?
- NO.
- Because of a few Ed-Techs, affordable easily accessible quality education is available and especially with the upskilling segment, the value addition in the professional growth is on point.

To the people in favor of the 'helpless' parents who were 'duped' of the money, I am emphatic however, I firmly believe they are equally at fault as well. Two reasons:
1. Do these people have such a weak personality that can be overcome by someone who has interacted with them for an hour or so? It was a conscious decision that they made like everything else in life after having understood everything from the sales rep.
2. Did they ensure the kids make 100% use of the product? In most cases I know, it was bought and provided to the kid without ensuring the kid derives productivity from it.

[Samurai]

Originally Posted by bhphog

However, as COVID faded, parents and kids realized that there was no replacement for traditional chalk and board education.
In short, the value addition in the education of a kid that Byjus advertised was insignificant and the ROI was pathetic.

However, investors had invested heavily and like the VC game that we all know of, pressurized Byjus to sustain the same level of business as it was during the COVID era.
Thus, the strategy of Byjus changed from 'pull' sales to 'push' sales, meaning rather than fulfilling the need by the product, the need was created and then fulfilled.

Are you trying to tell us that Byju's was more or less following ethical marketing methods until Covid started fading? Sorry, then you got the timeline wrong and hence their motivation.

The Ken article I shared was from 2020, when Byju's was aggressively killing all negative news, and shutting off social media channels of critics. COVID started in March 2020 in India. And Dr.Malapani posted the toxic audio clip in May 2020, action against him took place by July.

Originally Posted by bhphog

To the people in favor of the 'helpless' parents who were 'duped' of the money, I am emphatic however, I firmly believe they are equally at fault as well. Two reasons:
1. Do these people have such a weak personality that can be overcome by someone who has interacted with them for an hour or so? It was a conscious decision that they made like everything else in life after having understood everything from the sales rep.

This is victim blaming. Byju's mostly targeted uninformed lower middle class parents who are very anxious about their kid's future. VN gave an example of how his cook almost fell for it. They would even warn the parents that anyone advising them against Byju's program doesn't want their kids to succeed.

[bhphog]

Originally Posted by Samurai

Are you trying to tell us that Byju's was more or less following ethical marketing methods until Covid started fading? Sorry, then you got the timeline wrong and hence their motivation.

Comparatively, Yes.
Yes, there were instances of mis selling and unethical practices but not company wide.
And these were instances at an individual sales representative levels due to high commissions.

Byjus has always had a strong legal setup like most companies and while this has come in the light and may seem bad but this is a standard market practice.

Originally Posted by Samurai

This is victim blaming. Byju's mostly targeted uninformed lower middle class parents who are very anxious about their kid's future. VN gave an example of how his cook almost fell for it. They would even warn the parents that anyone advising them against Byju's program doesn't want their kids to succeed.

I am not saying this is the entire fault of the victims or the sales rep but it is a mixture of both, the naivety of the parents + the cunningness of the sale rep.
Somebody comes to my house and tells me my kid is stupid will not go back without a black eye.
I have full empathy with the victims.