Two Startups, 3pundits and Teacherji Merge to Form ThinkVidya, An Education and Learning space Venture

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We earlier profiled 3Pundits (3Pundits Helps Your Child Find The Nearest School [Education]) and TeacherJi (Looking to Learning Something New? Hop On To Teacherji) and the two startups have now merged to launch ThinkVidya, an offering in in Education and Learning space.

ThinkVidya combines the two different offerings and now offers school search plus exhaustive listing of coaching classes and training institutions (i.e. learnings outside the school).

Quick stats (of the combined entity, as shared by the team)

1. We have over 10,000 schools, and over 6,000 Individual trainers and tutors in over 600+ different categories who are registered with us.

3. We provide information about schools, preschools, summer programs, colleges, tuitions, trainings, coaching for 16 major Indian cities including Bangalore.

4. The combined entity has over 100,000 users who visit us every month with over 12,000 subscribed user base.

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I asked Santosh regarding the move (after all, both of these ideas had good opportunity at hand) and here is what they have to say regarding the merger

- Team – We both (Rakesh and I) understood the importance of having a great team to build great service/product. We found each other just the kind of partner one would want to have in the team. We were open and had lot of similarities when it came to running ethical user focused businesses.

Also, that both of us offered complimentary skill sets. While Rakesh is from pure Technology domain and has rich vast experience in heading technology for large startups in the US, I am an MBA and have extensive experience in Online businesses in different capacities (from marketing to analytics to advertising to operations and editorial). It just made sense for us to come together, not to mention the other efficiencies we would bring together, just as resources and networking.

- While the ideas were quite different, there was still a large overlap in the audience segmentation. Both had large audience between 25-40. These are people who are recently employed or recent parents. This segment looks for school admissions for their children but also has time/money/energy left to learn something for themselves like weekend courses. So, it appealed to us to join hands and come up with larger offerings.

- Both of us had some great ideas, experience from some really good experiments that we had done on our products that we could leverage for larger offering.
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Great move, I must say. This is the kind of collaboration that’s needed in startup space in India [Read: Collaborative Selling – Mantra for Sustaining Your Startup], especially when your offerings are complimentary and can combine to make a bigger pie.

Recommended Read: What Indian Startup Ecosystem Needs to Learn from Bihari/Oriya Cooks

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