StudyIQ: Smart courses for smart preparation

Founded in 2014, StudyIQ is a fastgrowing test preparation platform for government employment examinations. Interestingly, the founders— Gaurav Garg and Abhishek Jain— met during their stints at New Delhi-based coaching institute, TIME. As educators and aspiring entrepreneurs, they sensed the massive opportunity in the education space in India. While Jain’s prowess at quantitative mathematics had fuelled his path to being a math educator, Garg was a dental surgeon turned mass communications professional. They began their journey offline, with a physical coaching centre in Delhi with just two teachers and a handful of students. Quickly realising that offline teaching was plagued with inefficiencies and scalability constraints, it didn’t take too long for them to conclude that the real opportunity was online. There has been no looking back for these two first-generation entrepreneurs since then.

Both Garg and Jain realised that live sessions are neither effective nor efficient. Opting for recorded lesson videos, StudyIQ now boasts 25,000 videos across 100 subjects. It offers 120-plus courses for government exams ranging from UPSC, legal exams such as CLAT/AILET, Railways, SSC, IBPS PO &
Clerk, insurance to defence exams such as NDA/AFCAT/CDS besides the state PCS and clerk exams among others. The content in these courses is primarily bilingual (English and Hindi). Currently, It has 15 full-time teachers who create video content.

With 8.46 million cumulative subscribers, StudyIQ’s YouTube channel garners 100 million monthly organic views which makes it one of India’s most watched YouTube channels across genre.

The average watch time per video on YouTube is around five and a half minutes — also one of the highest across genres. Given that the average length of a course video is 10 minutes, students are consuming more than 50% of the video.

“Execution has been the key mantra for StudyIQ. We have managed to build a well-oiled machine over time that works with consistent efficiency to bring out the best results,” says Garg. The startup launched its app in April 2020 to maximise its reach and accelerate growth. The app has paid and free lessons, with bilingual content. There are EMI options for the more expensive courses.

“StudyIQ has been profitable from its first year, all the while remaining bootstrapped,” says Garg. “We have grown from strength to strength over the years, relying on our high engagement level to drive completely organic user acquisition. StudyIQ’s revenue has grown nearly 10x in the past three fiscals, with over a 30% profit margin.”

StudyIQ now plans to add new exam categories such as judiciary exams to its list of prep courses. It is also looking at streamable courses on its website. “We plan to expand our offerings to areas such as K12, JEE, judiciary, NEET exams in the near future and also invest heavily in technology to ensure a seamless experience for the learners. The future looks promising as we expect to close FY2021 with a revenue of Rs 35-40 crore.”