This start-up is making kids in hinterland master English

When Aarti and Ishaan Gupta started their venture Q-in-1 around two years back, they were perhaps not aware that their entrepreneurial journey would help fix a problem that may sound petty or trivial to many but could be a life-changing one for those going through it.

The husband-wife duo founded Q-in-1, an edtech venture, in early 2019 to impart courses in various subjects for kids in the age group of four to fourteen but soon realised that communication skills in English have become the weak link, especially for kids from the hinterlands of the country.

"If people speak to two toppers and one talks in English and the other in Hindi, then they start judging the one who can't speak English. The language (English) has become very important in today's life," says Aarti, one of the co-founders of Q-in-1.

"Till last year, we had classes in around 4-5 subjects. It was working well but we realised English was the subject that was acting as a divide sort of thing. So, early this year we pivoted towards English teaching," she adds.

Currently, the edtech entity has a total of around 6,000 students enrolled in the various modules with the monthly growth pegged at 20 per cent. On a cumulative basis, more than one lakh students have engaged with the start-up ever since it was founded in early 2019.

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More importantly, around 60 per cent of the students are from tier 2/3 towns of the country where access to skills like spoken English or even personality development is quite limited.

"Success in the real world is not just dependent on how academically brilliant you are. It is a mix of many other things. Effective communication and personality skills play a key role. But unfortunately, most students from tier 2/3 cities did not have access to these skills. There are schools but there is not much of personality development," explains Aarti.

Incidentally, the couple named their venture Q-in-1 as they wanted to focus on the development of all Qs or quotients for a kid - emotional, intelligence and personality quotients.

Catering to the masses, the founders also realised that the expectations of a parent from a lower-middle-class family or a smaller town are very different from that of an urban counterpart.

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They are not expecting the kid to prepare for an IIT or an IIM but are happy with a normal job, maybe in a retail store or even becoming a telemarketer, says Aarti. They know that such jobs need good interpersonal skills even as fluency in English is like a prerequisite, she adds.

"There are many options for the privileged class. We wanted to make a good quality product at an attractive price for the middle-class consumer. Information asymmetry should not be someone's password for success or the reason for lagging behind," she says.

Q-in-1 has modules starting from Rs 1,000 per month and the maximum number of students per class is capped at four. Just like most other start-ups, this edtech venture also relies a lot on technology to ascertain the right module and even the right teacher for the kids.

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"We have a curriculum builder, which is a combination of 500 different curriculums. It assesses the kid and suggests the right module. We even use technology to screen our educators and match the right teacher to a certain kind or category of students," says Aarti.

Interestingly, the automated screening process checks on various parameters to assign, for instance, an extrovert teacher to a shy student or vice versa.

While the venture also has modules on coding, English constitutes around 90 per cent of its business currently. It has raised two rounds of funding as well with Venture Catalysts and LetsVenture, among the investors in the start-up.

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