Expert Interview: Edtech and Education Company Founders

Context for the Expert

Project Disha is designing a hybrid (physical + digital) skill development network for Tier 2/3 India, targeting the 18-24 demographic for employment in IT services, GCCs, manufacturing, healthcare, and logistics. We are in the research phase, trying to learn from people who've actually built and scaled education companies in India — both the successes and the wreckage.

What We're Trying to Learn

The real unit economics of education delivery in non-metro India, what delivery models actually achieve completion and outcomes, where the industry's claims diverge from reality, and what operational lessons would save us from repeating expensive mistakes.

Red Flags to Watch For

  • Founder still in fundraising mode who gives you the investor pitch instead of honest answers
  • "Our placement rate is 95%" without willingness to explain the denominator and measurement window
  • Blaming failure entirely on market conditions or funding winter — no operational self-reflection
  • Cannot give specific numbers on CAC, LTV, completion rates (hasn't measured or doesn't want to share)
  • Dismisses offline/hybrid as "going backward" without acknowledging online completion rate problems

Questions

Customer Acquisition

  1. What's your real CAC in Tier 2/3 cities today — fully loaded including brand spend, sales team, and counselor conversion? How has this changed from 2021 (peak funding) to now? What channel mix works for non-metro?

  2. What conversion funnel numbers do you actually see? Lead to counseling call, counseling to enrollment, enrollment to payment. Where's the biggest drop, and what have you tried to fix it?

  3. Vernacular delivery — have you tried it? What happened to enrollment, completion, and placement when you moved from English to Hindi/regional language? If you haven't tried it — why not?

Delivery Model and Completion

  1. Online vs hybrid vs offline — give me the real completion rates for each model you've tried. Not the "students who completed at least 50% of content" definition. Students who finished the full program and were placement-eligible.

  2. What's the single biggest driver of student dropout in your programs? Not the 5 reasons in your board deck — the #1 reason, and what intervention moved the needle most?

  3. Content production — what does it actually cost to produce one hour of quality instructional content? Break it down: scripting, recording, editing, platform hosting. At what volume does it become economical? How much can you reuse across cohorts?

  4. Live instruction vs recorded content vs project-based — what ratio actually works? Have you measured learning outcomes across these modes, or is it gut feel?

  5. Have you deployed an AI tutor or chatbot for student support? What was the adoption rate? What percentage of student queries did it resolve without human escalation? What did it cost to build and maintain — and did it actually reduce your trainer headcount or just add a layer?

  6. What does it actually cost to produce 1 hour of technically accurate training content in a regional language? Is AI dubbing acceptable to learners, or do they need native-voice instruction to stay engaged? What's the quality-cost trade-off between dubbing, native recording, and bilingual delivery?

Business Model and Economics

  1. ISA (Income Share Agreement) model — does it work at scale? What's the actual collection rate post-placement? What breaks: adverse selection, collection logistics, students ghosting, legal enforceability? If you've abandoned ISA, what replaced it?

  2. What are the real unit economics of your best-performing program? Revenue per student, cost to deliver, cost to place, gross margin. What does it look like at current scale vs. what it looked like at 500 students?

  3. At what student count did your operations break? What was the specific bottleneck — tech infrastructure, trainer recruitment, placement capacity, quality control, or something else? How did you fix it, and how long did the broken period last?

Placement Reality

  1. Placement claims across the industry — how much is real? Give us the honest version. What does "placed" typically mean in industry reporting? What percentage of "placed" students are still in that job at 6 months?

  2. What's the actual cost to place one student? Placement team salaries, employer relationship building, placement drives, ongoing employer management. Does this cost scale linearly or does it get more efficient?

  3. International placement/mobility — is it real revenue or a marketing hook? Have you tried it? What are the actual unit economics of placing someone in the Gulf, Southeast Asia, Germany, etc.?

Hard-Won Lessons

  1. What's the one thing that's harder than outsiders think about running an education company in India? The thing that doesn't show up in market research or business plans.

  2. If you were starting a Tier 2/3 focused skill development company today with Rs 10 Cr, what would your first 18 months look like? What would you build first, what would you skip, and what's the one bet you'd make that others wouldn't?