Onto a New Journey

of rethinking & redefining education…

4 min readJan 14, 2022

Almost a year ago we started Upskill India with an aim of enabling better learning experiences for the self-taught learners on internet. A platform to help you learn skills in a Easy, Fun and Community driven way.

We started building this product in Feb’21 and after working 10+ months on this we’ve decided to pause the development of this product due to some reasons:

1. Unable To Reach Our Product Market Fit (PMF) Metrics.

We have had a decent traction since we launched July’21, with over 5000 users, with a consistent DAU of ~12–15%. In Nov’21 we also crossed 100K learning mins on the app and build a community of 10k learners.
We also launched another (side) product — Twittr Gems which was #1 Product on Product Hunt and over the time have acquired over 3k unique users.
From user acquisition to retention we did a lot of experiments with our product but were unable to find that “MAGIC” moment for our users while using our product.
Also another aspect we failed upon was unable to measure & quantify learning of anyone learning on our app in the right way.

2. Scalability Issues on Product and Business End.

Our Product was a curation first product and our goal was to enable a better learning environment and way to consume this (curated)content. This brought a lot of technical challenges from point of designing the product, automating & maintaining content to scaling it future.
Another part of it this was monetising our product was difficult with curation first content and we had multiple ways to do this in future but as we continued building we realised that it might not just work out in longer run in terms of monetisation.

Over the course of building Upskill India we made our share of mistakes but below are the 3 classic ones we made.

1. Build a Product For Everyone

We made the classic mistake of — building for everyone and ended up building for no one.

Yes we knew who our TA was but it was too broad and somewhere down the line positioning & building the product which such a broad audience we lost the plot.

2. Spend More Time Building Rather Than Experimenting.

As an early stage startup we were quite a small team and we ended up making mistake of focusing & building more features & new ideas instead of experimenting at minimum viable level to test those ideas and move a needle towards our PMF metrics.

This resulted into building a product that was miles wide and inches deep.

3. Spend More Time Building Product But Not Distribution

Another classic mistake of — If you build it, they will come.

Acquiring our first ~1000 users wasn’t really a problem with us but scaling from there became a challege. We tried a multiple channels, strategies and even drops to acquire users but nothing ended up building a solid traction channel for us in these 10 months.

We learned & realised this later the hard way that most startups fail not because they can’t built product but because they can’t get traction (or enough customers).

In the process of building this product, making all these mistakes & talking to many of our users, we realised another bigger & better problem to solve for 👇

Where Are We Today?

At Upskill India our one of the main focus was helping students learn skills which are often not taught & ignored in schools & colleges, skills which are often considered “Out of Syllabus” but are most important part in real world aka — Soft Skills.

Introducing — Career Leap

At Career Leap our aim is to help students & professionals learn these essential life skills often not taught & ignored by schools & colleges and help them take a leap in their career & life.

At Career Leap we are designing a compelling experiences so that students / professionals can learn, apply and excel these life-skills in a collaborative way.

We’re quite excited of what we’re building at Career Leap and what the future holds.

Currently we’re in waitlist & you can join it here — https://careerleap.io