Startup Interview with Raj Kothari, Co-Founder of MyClassCampus

The education industry is encouraging and attracting more and more entrepreneurs to come up with ancillary services to take the Indian education industry to the next level. Intending to equip institutes with an all-in-one school ERP, Raj Kothari, Rachit Dave, and Rutvij Vora came up with MyClassCampus.

MyClassCampus, an online cloud-based school management system, empowers educational institutes to manage their business operations effectively and in an affordable way. This system is built to be accessed 24×7 from anywhere and any device.

In Conversation with Raj Kothari, Co-Founder of MyClassCampus

Tell us about the inception story of MyClassCampus. What was the basic motive behind the establishment of the MyClassCampus?

In 2015, the founding team of MyClassCampus was approaching and meeting 100s of schools and educational organizations for career guidance seminars. While visiting schools and colleges, we found that almost every student in college was with a smartphone, and a big mass of parents of school-going kids had smartphones with an internet connection. However, still, they need to remain dependent on notice board/classroom instructions or parents meeting to receive important information. Many schools were using SMS service to inform parents, but it was limited to important notices. All the users were already using WhatsApp, Facebook, etc. to socialize and improve communication efficiency in their personal life. Also, a big mass was using mobile Apps for ticket booking, shopping, entertainment, etc., so we felt that there is a huge need to have an All-in-One Smart ERP with Mobile App. That’s when we decided to build MyClassCampus – an All-in-One ERP with Mobile App for educational organizations. 

Can you tell us about the challenges that your firm faced through the course of its inception, and how did you overcome those challenges to become a key player amongst the school management solution providers?

As we didn’t have any external funding, we had to build the product with whatever limited resources we had. It was quite difficult to build a team of developers and expert technocrats to work on our development plans for building a world-class product. Also, it was quite difficult to convince principals, directors, and owners of schools to invest in the platform as Jio wasn’t in the market at that time, and interest data was relatively expensive. We recruited a few expert freelance developers to meet our development requirement and design a mobile app version, which could work in offline-online mode to convince customers to start using it. We focused more on those customers who understand the importance of such platforms and benefits of the same and started building a customer base. 

What are the challenges your clients usually come up to you with? How do you mitigate their pain points? 

A lot of customers were already using one or the other kind of software or offline tools to maintain student records, manage fees, etc. However, most of the time, they were facing issues on new feature development and customer support through existing solution providers. We used to get a lot of new advance development requirements from potential clients, and if we agree to do that, then they were ready to switch to our system. From the beginning, we wanted to build an all-in-one solution that could meet all kinds of software requirements of an institute, so we started taking such development challenges and kept building wonderful features, satisfy our customers and acquire a new pool of tech-savvy customers. 

Please elaborate on the major features of your ERP solutions and also help us understand the unique benefits that the company assures to its clients through these solutions?

MyClassCampus covers all the aspects starting from the online admission process to inquiry management to the exit procedure of a student. So ideally, it covers the entire life cycle of student management. We have features divided into three parts- communication management, academics management, and operations management. Some very unique things we provide are multi-branch management with a single account, multi-parents access for a child, advance finance management with multiple trusts or institute accounts management, tally integration, and dynamic result card generator that can support almost all education boards’ formats available in India. Our mobile app is uniquely crafted, which helps us stay ahead of all other platforms available in the market at very reasonable rates. Beyond software features and solutions, our most unique system of assisting customers in getting the best of the system by facilitating staff is what makes us win the market and get references from our existing customers. 

What makes your company different from its competitors in the market? Where does the core competency of MyClassCampus lie? 

We are a team of 50 young professionals working full-time dedicated to the product. We build a lot of new, advanced features and improve our existing features based on customer feedback and experience. Every month we come up with new updates that make the life of our users easy. Our domain knowledge of educational ERP and our vision to make educational institutes 100% paperless is what gives us strength while meeting our customers and assuring them the best experience they could ever get in this segment. 

What are the new frameworks and techniques that MyClassCampus follows to provide high-quality services, and what are the new arenas in technology that your company wishes to focus on?

We follow a simple principle – treat your customers like your family members and support them on time for their needs to give the best experience. Every happy customer will bring many more new customers. We assign a dedicated Key Account Manager and Customer Relationship Manager to our clients for their better experience throughout the journey of using MyClassCampus. 

Can you list some of the leading names that you have served over the years?

We have many reputed brands across India using our system. Few of them are SGVP International School – Ahmedabad, Divyapath Campus – Ahmedabad, Bharad schools – Rajkot, MDKG College – Assam, Indira Gandhi Institute of Medical sciences – Kerala, and 100s of other reputed institutes. 

Please tell us about MyClassCampus’s work culture and employee program. How do you update your employees with the latest skills?

We trust our team and give them complete freedom to do their work in their own way to bring the best in terms of results. We try to understand their core competencies and accordingly assign roles for their personal satisfaction and help them build experience in the domain. We do programs and invite domain experts to interact with our team and share their knowledge/experience, which could help them grow more. Overall it’s a balanced environment where our team enjoys the work with all the colleagues whom they find more friends than colleagues. 

How has the company’s growth been since its inception? Mention a few milestones achieved by MyClassCampus.

We are growing 3X year over year in terms of the number of customers and revenue. This year, we have set big goals to grow even faster and achieve the extraordinary milestone of serving 1000s of educational organizations through our platform – MyClassCampus. 

In your opinion, what are the major factors that have contributed to MyClassCampus’s successful journey in this industry? 

Basically, our clear focus on solving the core problems of this domain through smart and easy-to-use solutions is what helps us grow. We focus more on our customer problems than our own ideas and workout on bringing the best innovative solution which could save time and give the best results in terms of reports, data, and efficiency. 

How has the company charted out its map for the future, and what developments can we expect in MyClassCampus in the years to come? What other solutions are you planning to come up with? 

We are planning to innovate more on the communication part and bring advanced chatbots for a lot of daily activities. Also, we are innovating more on collaborative activities and data analysis parts, which will result in the next level of decision-making power to management for their institutes and parents for their kids. Trust us; we will make your journey of getting digital more exciting and meaningful in time to come. 

Finally, what do you want to highlight in the story? Do you have anything further to add?

It’s just the beginning; we dream a time when no school would need to remain dependent on offline methods of communication and operations management, which would save 100s of hours of teachers and admin staff, which could be used for teaching and other important work. We dream of a time when parents will feel more connected with their school and know more about all the good things school, and their kids are doing, which will result in better parent-kid relations and overall development of the kid.