Livelihood education app ffreedom, a unit of Indianmoney.com, plans to target the Bangladesh market by launching courses in Bengali soon. The app, which provides courses in six languages — English, Hindi, Telugu, Malayalam, Tamil and Kannada, will introduce courses in Bengali as part of its plans to cover the entire country.
“We are adding Bengali to the languages in which we offer 800 livelihood courses. We want to venture into the Bangladesh market. We plan to start operations there. In order to enter that market, we are launching Bengali course,” said CS Sudheer, Founder and CEO, ffreedom.
Launching courses in Bengali will help the app cover West Bengal. But more importantly, it will help in getting subscribers from the entire population of Bangladesh, he said.
Helping raise income
Sudheer said it was a challenge to create 800 courses in a new language. “We avoid dubbing as much as possible. We look for a mentor in the language in which we launch a course and then create the content. Our team goes to the place and works there after reaching an agreement,” he said.
ffreedom offers these livelihood courses in agriculture, small business and personal finance. These courses are up to six hours but each course has other higher levels too. “Our livelihood education app is to help people increase their income. We have 15 crore farmers in the country and another 20 crore homemakers besides 6.3 crore small businessmen,” he said.
All the courses are taught by “super successful” people. For example, the course on sheep and goat farming is taught by someone who earns ₹3 crore annually. Similarly, honeybee farming is taught by a person who earns ₹4 crore.
“We have 18 courses in honeybee farming and 25 in sheep and goat farming. Our courses are taught by 1,200 super successful farmers and small business owners,” Sudheer said, adding that these courses are skill-driven that help a person in acquiring skills.
Lack of capability growth
The skills can be replicated among 2-3 million to carry out sheep and goat farming and a similar number in honeybee farming. “School and college students miss a lot of things in life. Through these courses, we help them find a livelihood. The aspiration curve of every individual is increasing but the capability curve does not grow. That way, we help individuals to grow rather than resorting to any shortcut that could threaten others,” Sudheer said.
The app offers courses that can help a person start a vocation without any investment. “You can start honeybee farming with zero investment. The government itself gives five bee boxes at no cost. Sheep and goat farming is one that does not need much investment. You can even do farming without any land — mushroom cultivation,” the ffreedom CEO said.
The whole idea of the firm is that people can decide on improving their livelihood and there are ways. The Bengaluru-based firm is witnessing a 10-15 per cent growth every month even as it adds 50 courses every month.
Subscription-based app
The app does not sell the courses since at least 70 per cent of those buying a course with a popular firm do not go through it. “We, instead, sell subscriptions for the app that helps the subscriber to learn whatever course he/she wants. The subscription can be taken on a quarterly or annual basis,” he said.
Subscribers on average complete two-and-a-half courses in three months and by that time another 150 courses would have been added. The app, which was launched in March 2020, has 80 lakh subscribers and ffreedom’s objective is to increase it to 100 lakh over the next 24 months, Sudheer said.
Indianmoney.com was launched to help provide financial education to people after Sudheer witnessed how insurance was sold misleading people. “Then in 2019, we wanted to build a large company that would help us over come the saturation in our business,” he said.
By the then, the company’s was earning ₹5 crore a month. “But we wanted to move from a call centre driver firm to an app-driven but our board was not ready. Therefore, I convinced the members to allow to launch a pilot project on holding a workship on ‘Four things we do with money’,” he said.
Even before the first workshop could be help, the second one got fully booked. So, Sudheer held 28 workshops between November 2019 and March 2020. Each workshop had 300 participants, each paying ₹3,000. It was during the workshops where he met 7,000 of the attendees personally, the ffreedom CEO undertook that “people did not how to make enough money”.
This convinced the Indianmoney.com group to launch the livelihood education app and it helps the firm earn ₹7 crore as monthly revenue. The firm has so far raised ₹58 crore in equity as capital over the last to years. “We now plan to raise ₹300 crore but we are delaying it since we are a profitable firm,” he said.