ToppersNotes[How this startup is helping students in competitive exams in 2023]

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dayakarmaisa
D2C, Digital services, edtech, EduTech, indian startups, Internet, Startups, startups in india Mar 30, 2023 1 Comment

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What is ToppersNotes?

Founded by Ayush Agrawal in 2015, ToppersNotes is an educational startup in the competitive test preparation space, ToppersNotes build materials for the mass market, especially Tier 3 and below cities. The 8 to 10 crores students living in these cities appear for various competitive exams and are provided with affordable study notes in an organized manner.

The edtech startup provide study material for many national-level exams like UPSC, SSC, Banking, IIT, Judicial, Defence forces, etc, and also state-specific exams which are often covered in the vernacular languages of the respective states.

The vision is “to provide guidance to the people who cannot otherwise afford it for competitive exams”

The mission is “to make sure that no individual fall short of becoming something in life due to economic reasons”

Startup ToppersNotes
Website Toppersnotes.co
Founded 2015
Headquarters Jaipur, India
Products Study Notes, Video Lectures
Revenue Model D2C, Subscriptions

One Time Payment 

How did Toppersnotes start?

The founder’s parents are both teachers and run a Hindi medium school and his sister was the first one in the family to become a doctor. This was a huge driving force for the founder to do something related to the field of education.

Here is a quick overview of Toppersnotes

toppersnotes

Growth of Toppersnotes

FY2017, which was Toppersnotes’ first major transactional year, witnessed a turnover of 10 lakhs. The next year, Toppers Notes jumped to 50 lakhs or 5x growth. And the next year from that, 1.5 crores were made or 3x growth. This was also the first time when Toppers Notes made profits that were reinvested.

After that, it was 4.3 crores. This was the time when Toppers notes needed funding, so fundraisers were also started. In FY2021, 7.4 crores and in FY2022, 10 crores were made. Currently, the projection is for making a turnover of 30 crores by the end of the year.

This Jaipur-based startup has been catering to over 16+ states of the Nation with 1.2 lac+ students trusting the toppersnotes, covering over 4+ Languages for competitive exams with 5236+ Selections since its inception.

Market Penetration

Before the onset of Reliance Jio, the market penetration was slightly tough for the D2C startup as they were operating in a D2C space but people were not online. But post-Jio and post-pandemic, many people are now online and hence the awareness for Toppersnotes increased.

Core Offerings

The  3 major core offerings are

  1. The notes of toppers
  2. Phygital section: Physical + Digital duo where a student gets a QR code linked with ToppersNotes’ app that contains notes, videos, etc on a subscription basis.
  3. Freemium section: There is a current affairs app with 4-5 lakhs downloads on the play store and apple store. It contains current affairs that are free and paid.

Team

Roughly the team is of 150 members based in Jaipur.

Targeted Market

Although D2C-focused startup covers a large variety of exams, they see an untapped market in the regional sectors exams like those for nursing, hawaldar, etc in Tier 3 and below cities.

Sales Turnover

In the first month of Toppersnotes, the turnover was INR 1 lakh and in the last month, it was INR 1.8 crores.

toppersnotes_ss

Competition

In the notes providing space, all the competitors are from the unorganized sector, and none are from the organized sector.

From a price point of view, there are a lot of companies that provide video courses at a similar  price. There are many publications too that are lower priced than Toppersnotes but all the competitors are indirect as Toppers Notes is trying to operate in a synergetic space with all.

Toppernotes Funding

The founder personally invested around 5-10 lakhs in the startup via bootstrapping. Toppersnotes also took debt. 2019 onwards, Toppersnotes is operating from cashflows from profits.

In Late 2021, Toppersnotes raised US$ 1M in its seed round from the likes of  VC Networks of Inflection Point ventures, PlanB Capital, Lets Ventures, Ashish Sharma of Innoven Capital, and Pulkit Agrawal of Trell.

Expansion Plans

Over time, This Jaipur-based startup realized that apart from notes, students also need video lectures, test series, and strengths and weaknesses analysis, something they started venturing into in 2023.All of these in provided at an affordable price of less than INR 6000.

SWOT Analysis

The strength of Toppersnotes lies in its quality of content and affordability.

The weakness is this ed-tech startup is it lacks in a distributor network.

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The opportunity is huge in the physical and digital space on which this solo-founded startup is capitalizing upon.

The threat is the competition, especially from a price point of view.

Toppersnotes Founders/Co-founders

Ayush Agrawal, founder, and CEO, has done his Bachelor’s in Technology under Electrical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay.

Devendra Dhaka,  Co-founder has done a Master’s in Technology from the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay.

Arpit Bansal, Co-founder, and COO have done bachelors from the Indian Institute of Technology, Patna.

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Who is the founder of ToppersNotes?

Ayush Agrawal

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