‘’Today, most of the teachers in India consider assessments as success matric rather than diagnostic matrix. And when it comes to daily practice and weekly assessments then only less than 1% tutors are doing it and even those 1% do not have track record of student’s data. Hence, the whole decision-making process is quite traditional and not based on data.’’ Krishnakant Patidar, founder and CEO of Factr who was born and grew-up in a small town near Bhopal.
Krishnakant Patidar had always had a knack with numbers and sharp analytical thinking which helped him get selected in Jawahar Navodaya Vidyalaya entrance exam. At JNV, he got a new family away from home and inculcated his selfless nature by living in a disciplined environment with friends and having higher responsibilities.
Krishnakant graduated from IIM Indore in 2016 in finance and strategy area. He gained 3-year experience while working in boutique management consulting firms and had the fortune to work with 500 clients in Industrial products, Automobile, F&B, and hospitality, etc.
Startup Journey
The journey of the innovation of Factr started when Krishnakant was in college and used to teach school students during his summer breaks. That made him realized the technical gap in our school system and the way our teachers teach in classrooms. Even after spending enormous amounts of time on assessing the students, teachers still don’t know much about student’s true learning gaps, skills and conceptual weaknesses. Krishnakant has been tracking the education sector since his college days and has been continuously working to bring some change since then.
Amrit, co-founder of Factr has more than 5 years of experience in software development. He graduated from IIT KGP in B.tech & M.tech computer science.
While discussing about the current problems of educational sector, Krishnakant and Amrit came up with an idea and immediately boarded to actualize that and left their corporate jobs to commence Factr.
Factr – a personalized assessment and education intelligence platform for educators and learners
Factr is a brand of Techademics Analytics Pvt. Ltd. founded in 2019 by young entrepreneurs and alumnus of IIM & IIT. Factr is a B2B product technology company in the education sector. It is India’s first fully integrated analytics & algorithm based tech platform for institutes.
Factr is a data-focused company and believes that data have most of the answers. Factr followed this to get to know about customers’ likeliness for the product, user journey, conversion point, leakage point, A/B testing, need vs value matrix, NPS etc. These matrices helped to make better decisions along with being data-focused and good with numbers.
Factr is trying to solve this mass problem through faster assessment tools, adaptive assessments, analytics and artificial intelligence.
Earlier they started Mentee (an exam preparation app for JEE) but being in a very competitive content space wasn’t their speciality. Factr is not an education content company but specializes in technology & data. (Most of the education content companies are led by the founder who themselves were huge content creators like Khan Academy, Byju’s, Vedantu etc.). So Krishnakant and Amrit stopped Mentee and cleverly pivoted for Factr.
Funding
They haven’t raised the funds yet and want to build a product-market fit to see the response of their idea. Firstly, they decided to have a few organic sales to see if customers needed the products or not and if they do then what the customers thought about when they purchased the products.
Krishnakant believed that the initial challenge to any business is to identify the right product-customer chemistry. Once you can identify it then it becomes easier to sell. After that, it remains just the funding and growth game.
Market and the future
They are still in the early stages of start-up innovation, assessment and education intelligent space. They try to be the most intelligent, faster and simple platform for tutors and students to improve their performance through assignments, AI, insights and suggestions.
Building new & innovative features and getting positive feedback from the users proves to be the major reason to work even harder and smarter.
Currently, their target audiences are individual tutors and small coaching classes. There is no scarcity of tutors in India who spend most of their time just assessing student’s learning via creating question paper and conducting assessments. They collected the data of around 200 tutors and the results were shocking; assessment activities take huge proportion of teacher’s time and still the quality of assessments is quite poor.
“If you are persistent in building startup that fits the customer need and market. Then you can build a successful story and, yes at certain point funds matter a lot for the growth of the company.”
Startup Advice
Krishnakant Patidar recommends to entrepreneurs to first take care of themselves and their health. Start-ups journey is a lonely journey so one should be prepared for it. They should try to focus on solving the genuine problems for customers and build products regarding it. He advises to spend initial months to build product-market fit because without product just marketing and advertising will not catch the eyes of investors. Use data to identify the PMF because many times customers don’t tell what’s right and what’s wrong.
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