Exclusive Interview with Manish Chawla, CTO of Classplus

Manish Chawla from Classplus explains how the SaaS platform contributes to the EdTech

SaaS or Software-as-a-Service is flourishing in the global tech market owing to its power provided to users to connect to as well as leverage cloud-based apps for the digital world. It is helping multiple industries to adopt digital transformation, especially the EdTech sector. The rise of SaaS EdTech companies has started revolutionizing education in the last few years.

Analytics Insight has engaged in an exclusive interview with Manish Chawla, CTO of Classplus, where he elaborates smart offerings through its unique platform to transform the education sector while integrating SaaS.

1. Kindly brief us about the company, its specialization, and the services that your company offers.

Classplus is India's first mobile SaaS platform for educators to digitize their offline tuition classes and bring their coaching business online via their own white-labeled mobile app. While other EdTech giants are using technology to replace them, the company enables them through technology by allowing them to adopt a digital teaching model and create a new future for themselves. Classplus allows educators to run all their coaching, communication, assessments, payments, and student engagement activities through a full-stack mobile solution with their own brand. Besides taking them online, Classplus also enables them to sell their courses online and grow their business and communities beyond their immediate neighborhoods.

2. With what mission and objectives, the company was set up? In short, tell us about your journey since the inception of the company?

In 2018, all EdTech startups in India were developing solutions for students. The team went the other way and launched India's first mobile SaaS platform for teachers to digitize their offline tuition classes and bring them online. In the Internet age, educators found themselves devoid of any technology to provide their students a digital learning experience and were not able to compete with the big online players of the internet age. It has built and delivered the product to customers with the objective of not only running their business efficiently but also enabling them to grow their business beyond the traditional brick-and-mortar setups. Classplus is obsessed with customers and that has been the mantra for success so far.

3. Please brief us about the products/services/solutions you provide to your customers and how they get value out of it.

At Classplus, it is of the utmost importance for the team to deliver immense value to customers. The products are built around four major metrics— engagement, acquisition, transaction, and retention. It also provides educators a content distribution channel allowing them to monetize their digital content. They are saved from the trouble of using multiple platforms for different needs and spending time on learning technology so that they can focus on teaching their students in an easy manner. Right from growing their student community to increasing their earnings to improving margins by saving costs, Classplus can deliver all these values using one single product.

4. What does your technology and business roadmap look like for the rest of the year?

Though the team always works towards the long-term vision of going global and being a household name when it comes to building and launching a self-owned learning app, it only freezes what the company wants to do in the next three months keeping the north star in mind and take baby steps towards that. For that very reason, I can only provide the visibility of this quarter. Being a young startup, Classplus is super agile and often course-correct if the team realizes what is not making sense and bring value to customers. Very soon, it is going to launch a product that will enable educators and content creators to launch a vernacular version of their apps, allow learners to stream content at a much lower bandwidth requirement (streaming 0.5Bn minutes of multimedia content a month), and overall, much better community engagement tools.

4. What is your Leadership Mantra?

I have always been a big fan of Dada (Sourav Ganguly) and his leadership style. He came and changed the complete outlook of Indian Cricket. The Team India, today, talks volumes about the legend of Dada. It is a real honor and a matter of great pride for me that I got a chance to work with Classplus while Dada is the brand ambassador as well as an investor.

Leadership to me is about the trust one generates amongst people. To be a good leader, one needs to identify the right talent and then nurture them and set them up for success. As a strong leader, one should have the courage to be disliked. There will be times when one has to make certain decisions that may not go down well with team members, and one should be ready for it. One has got to be backing folks and taking the fear of failure out of them. Insecurity is the root of all evil and so, eradicate that completely from the team. For any leader to be successful, communication plays a vital role. Sending the right message at the right time is really important.  And lastly, no one in the system is indispensable— one day one needs to give away control and hence keep investing in people and plan for succession way ahead of time.

5. Do you also feel that the right kind of talent is a challenge in the industry?

I have heard a lot of people saying, finding the right talent is a challenge. Somehow I believe, it's not about the shortage of the right talent, it has more to do with own expectations from the talent the company seeks to hire. A couple of decades back, when I started my career, the definition of a talented software engineer was someone who is logical, has a steep learning curve, and has the courage to ask questions. Now the definition has changed and everyone wants a 10X developer.

The mindset of hiring has changed from nurturing people to leveraging talent and the reason for this mindset shift, in my opinion, is the dopamine to get with instant gratification. No one wants to invest long-term in people. But my philosophy is a little different. I believe that the leverage one could create by nurturing individuals would supersede any short-term gains that one would otherwise get by hiring super-duper talented people after spending a lot of precious time, energy, and resources.

6. What are the skill sets that you specifically look for while hiring them at an initial stage?

While hiring people, I have my list of negotiables and non-negotiables. Talent and skill for me are negotiable as beyond a certain level, they don't help much. Some of the non-negotiables for me are commitment, sense of ownership, integrity, curiosity to learn new things, and gratitude. Beyond these non-negotiables, everything else that the team works with these days is acquired skills. If someone is logical, has a steep learning curve, and has the courage to ask questions, they should make the cut.