How I Turned My College Club Into A Skill-Tech Startup.
By: Pranay Wankhede
Tags: Entrepreneurship, Startup, Side Hustle, Skills, Product

Around 15 million youths enter the job market every year out of which 65–75% are not ready for jobs. The main reason for this is that the students are not skilled and don’t even have basic communication skills and people skills. While on the other side 83% of hiring managers says that soft skills are essential and very important while hiring employees.

Now, colleges do contribute to teaching you the technical aspect of a job, but what about the other skills? These are the ones that most colleges don’t share with their students. Even the conventional training programs out there are costly and very time consuming.

So, through this interview, I will try to share my journey of “How I built a skill-tech startup to solve the problem of skills and unemployment in India.” — The Stage.

Who are you?

Hey there! I am Pranay, the founder of The Stage. I am from Nagpur and I got my bachelors in Mechanical Engineering from SB Jain Nagpur. I have an expertise in building digital products and I am also a writer.

I also wrote a book “What Can I Learn?” which will help you learn most from your daily life activities.

You can get more information about me and all my work here: Hello, I’m Pranay

What’s the deal with The Stage?

The Stage is an Skill-tech Start-up incubated at NASSCOM 10000 Startups. We help individuals from all walks of life in their personal and professional growth. We are working to solve the problem of unemployment in our country by helping students to develop skills through our online platform.

We create industry-relevant courses — designed by industry experts and taught by expert mentors, delivered to you through an online learning platform called — HIRO.

HIRO is a certified one-on-one mentoring program that is strategically designed to help students gain an understanding of personal and professional growth so that they can create a better future for themselves.

What motivated you to start The Stage?

In the second year of my college (2016), I was supposed to present a PPT in front of my class and I as so nervous that I was unable to speak a lot and I found out that I have the fear of public speaking. But, that day I also found that not only me but out of 60 students in my class 50–52 students had the same problem. They all had the fear of public speaking.

In the same semester me and my friend attended the TEDx conference in Nagpur and the next day when we were sitting in class, me and my friend were discussing that we will start a club called The Stage where we will help students develop their public speaking skills. Suddenly, our teacher saw us speaking and threw us out of class. But we were so dedicated to solve this problem that we took a copy with us an formulated a plan while sitting outside the classroom and started a club called The Stage next week.

But soon the club collapsed because we were running it for free and students were not valuing it. So I started working on other projects and I always wanted to start a business.

In 2017, I was working with an organization and that’s where I saw a bunch of young college students started a startup and scaling it. This is where I found my passion for entrepreneurship.

During my work with this organization, I saw that students are not only struggling with public speaking but they are also struggling with leadership, problem solving, and basic communication skills. I found this problem in every other student of my class. I always wanted to help them and that’s why I started The Stage, a skill-tech startup working on helping students in their personal and professional growth.

Coming from a non-technical background, how did you build your MVP?

For the first we were doing offline workshops and events in our college and in city and after my graduation I started working on building our product HIRO.

So I build the whole learning program with the help of some industry experts I was connected with and hosted it on the free version of Teachable. Launched a google site with free domain and used bit.ly to shorten the link.

I use to take registrations on the google form and then use to add students on the workshop.

I didn’t spent a single penny in building the MVP of anything from my pocket. It was completely bootstrapped and profitable from day one.

Today we have a website hosted on a domain with multiple workshops communities running.

How did you get initial users and how did it grow?

Fortunately, I have very good friends and they help me a lot. I used a very small circle of mine and my friends and shared some posters about the online program on social media. I also asked my teachers to share these posters with the students and they happily shared.

This is how I got 20 registrations for my first batch of workshop.

After that, I recruited interns, ran ads on social media, did campus ambassador programs and scaled it to impact 3000+ students.

Campus ambassador program was very effective and we got really good result from it.

Celebration for our first 100 customers.

The Biggest challenges you have faced till now and how did you cope with them?

In India the biggest challenge is that colleges and students only focus on hard skills and neglect soft-skills. But 83% employers say that they look for soft skills in an employee.

So, getting people signup for the courses which are related to soft skills was the biggest challenge. And even a bigger challenge when its an online course. On the other hand most of the students don’t even know that this problem exist, that they cannot communicate effectively. They are just okay with it.

These are the things that I did to solve this problem:

I recruited campus ambassadors from different colleges who were aware of the problem and understood its importance. I asked them to get the sign-ups for the course because a student trusts a fellow student or a friend more than a new company. I launched awareness programs in different colleges and collected leads, called them and converted them. I launched a community called Ideas community where we use to do free sessions in different colleges and cities with some prominent speakers to get attention from students.

What is your advice to folks starting out?

I would simple say that ideas don’t come fully formed you have to work at it and you will see that it evolves.

“So just be romantically involved with the problem and be flexible with the solution. Solution might change but problem will remain the same.”

And I would also like to tell them that don’t become a scalar quantity like speed with just magnitude, become a vector like velocity and have magnitude and direction.

The magnitude here is the perseverance and the direction is vision. Always know which direction you are moving and never give up.

Check out my podcast, where I shared my journey.

You can also listen to this on my podcast “The Pranay Wankhede Show”

Audio version: Anchor — The Pranay Wankhede Show

Video version: YouTube — Pranay Wankhede