Challenge – To come up with a workable business model for an education institute which

would  teach students to crack competitive exams for Governmental jobs.

Selection – After inital research and brain storming about students who are looking for

coaching and teaching to crack competitive exams to grab governmental jobs, I did discover that  1. Students would be more comfortable attending classes online from the comfort of their homes 2. If they are at home they can save a lot of money on transportation and living costs. 3. Cheaper internet tariffs can make education affordable.

Therefore, using these info, one of the Ideas I came up with was to ‘conduct online classes’ instead  of classroom course. This led me to adopt Learning Launch tool. This tool was explained by Dr. Ed  Hess during week 4.

Application – To test my idea, before I could increase it to a large scale, I wanted to test it

small. I made an announcement in the social media about the first “Online batch” directed to the  students who are preparing for the competitive exams. I did not spend much on it, the only expense  was on  Facebook and Youtube Ads. I used free subscription of online video streaming platform like Zoom. The other creative works like posters and videos were created by me with the help of free  tools available online.

I announced that the first week of the class will be ‘free of cost’ and if they like the sessions then  they can enrol for the rest for a fee. As I am a teacher as well, I decided to take the first week’s  classes so that I do not have to pay someone else for that. My goal was to keep expenses as low as  possible.

To my surprise. I found 150 registrations for the course and out of that only 15 attended the first  week. After the first week of the course, I did call those 15 to check if they want to continue and  found none interested to continue. Zero admissions! However, I did collect feedback from them  about the class and I found these below common comments. 1. Teaching and delivery quality is good over online 2. You are a good teacher, however you have not cracked the particular competitive exam, It would  be better if we had someone who have been there and done that. 3. Looking for an institute with a track record of students who have cracked, yours is new so we are  not sure. 4. Fee is pretty high.

Though the tool was useful in helping me conduct the experiment at a very low cost but the “profit” was not achieved. However, a lots of learning happened.

Insights – With the above feedback from the students who did attend the first week classes.

I found things which I would want to keep and few which I want to change. Now the first point,  which is about my teaching abilities, I would want to keep but the other three points really helped  me understand that there are few changes which are to be done. Another key point I learnt was that  not all registrations will end up getting converted into attendance. In my case it was just 10%. But  its OK to begin with.

Therefore this approach of Design Thinking through the tool ‘Launching Learn’ really helped me  learn a lot  of things about my business model at a very minimal cost whatsoever. Now imagine if I  had straight away put my idea into a large scale deployment then I would have really met into a  huge financial loss.

Approach – Now as the next step, I would work on feedback and conduct another “Free First  week” by repeating all what I did previously (putting ads in social media, creating posters and  creatives by myself etc) however with the changes which are given below.

1. I will remain as a teacher, however I would not conduct all the classes. I will bring in a reputed  teacher atleast for 2 days in the first week. This will convince students that the experienced and  reputed teachers are part of my faculty. 2. I will announce a discount in fee for the ‘intial’ set of students. Now this will solve points 3 and  4, given above. Usually the established institutes charge high fee, now as my institute is new I will  charge them low fees through discount. Therefore, the chances are, students who can’t afford  rexpensive institutes, might get interested to join my institute.

So this is my journey so far with “Design Thinking” to start and run an education institute which  will help students crack competitive exams for governmental jobs.

