When working with Facebook in the US, Ankush Singla (27) and Anushray Gupta (26) would come down to India to recruit talent.
They soon realised that most candidates — even those passing out from premier institutes — lacked one key ability: coding.
It was then that the duo decided to come back for good and set up a venture teaching just that. “We found that most students were not equipped with the right skills (in coding),” says Singla, a graduate of IIT-Delhi. He and Gupta, an alumnus of IIIT, Hyderabad, launched Coding Blocks.
The initial funding came from Manmohan Gupta, a serial entrepreneur, and his friends.
“After that Ankush (Singla) and I invested some of our own money,” says Anushray Gupta. The current investment stands at ₹25 lakh. “We teach around five courses and have taught about 300 students from June 2014 till January 2015,” says Singla.
Each course, comprising 23-24 lectures, costs ₹15,000-20,000.
Singla says that most premier colleges do not have the right mentorship for programming.
The start-up has made around ₹60 lakh in revenue from June 2014 to January 2015.
“We are targeting ₹2-crore revenue in 2015-16,” says Anushray Gupta.
The two plan to expand the current Pitampura facility by four classrooms, apart from opening a centre in Gurgaon in May and one in Noida by this year-end.
But how will they find the right teachers? Singla says, “We have hired three students from Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology, Delhi, who will teach at our centres, apart from training two of our former students.”
On competing with giants such as NIIT and Aptech, which have multiple coaching centres across the country, Anushray Gupta says, “We are not competing with them. We don’t promise jobs to any student. We focus on training them well so that they are job ready or can even think of their own start-up.”