Anyone preparing for entrance exams is familiar with the grind: scouting for coaching classes, hoarding reference material, writing mock tests, attending doubt sessions — the process is as stressful as the exams themselves.
Vishal Meena, an IIT-Roorkee graduate, too realised the problems while looking for a coaching class for his cousin. “The lack of specialised subject teachers, study material in regional languages, mentors, and latest test preparation tools and techniques, are some of the issues I encountered. Moreover, the monopoly of the coaching industry has paralysed students, forcing them to pay a high fee for ordinary content and technology.”
Ideation
Vishal discussed the problem with his friend Alok Katiyar, who was already building apps for various government job exams. After a lot of brainstorming with their friend, Sanjay Jagarwal, the three came up with the idea of Madguy Labs.
Madguy Labs is a platform that combines technology with the real-life classroom experience for enhanced learning. It is incubated by TIDES — IIT Roorkee’s incubation centre — from which they received ₹25 lakh as seed funding for the initial operations.
Through this platform, a student can study from the comfort of their home and find everything at a single place — like updates on current affairs, full-length tests, theory and video lectures, instant doubt-solving and mentorship. This way, students save a lot of money. As of now, Madguy Labs charges each student ₹30 per month for access to all their features.
“We don’t cut the student from the coaching. We actually try to narrow down the gap between teachers and students. Our platform increases the student-teacher interaction via doubt-solving, announcements and message features. Also, it makes teachers fully aware of their students’ performance through our performance analysis feature,” says Vishal.
For those students who are keen on going to a coaching centre for their preparation, the most important problem that Madguy Labs solves is choosing the right coaching centre.
Vishal hails from Kota — India’s coaching hub. So, he is aware of the practice of coaching institutes attracting students with false promises.
“The same thing happens if you are preparing for government job exams. People who are preparing for government jobs come from a background which is not tech-savvy. And coaching institutes for these exams make false claims about the features they offer and their success rates.”
All of this sparked off the idea of including a feature in Madguy Labs where a student can find the best coaching centres based purely on the quality of coaching and teachers. Madguy Labs has a strict procedure to hire mentors. They also analyse the performance of their partner centres by taking feedback from students regarding the content quality and method of teaching. This enables them to give the partner centres a rating. This rating system, Vishal believes, forces the coaching institute to maintain a certain quality.
Currently, Madguy Labs has extended its services to include SSC, bank exams and state-level exams in Karnataka, Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, and Maharashtra.