Q.What made you initiate something like this?

- In our previous startup, we were consulting for large educational brands that were coming from France to India like Lisaa school of design, Vatel from Bordeaux,  and Raffles from the Middle east. So we have worked with large education brands at the ground level where some of the highest paying students take these courses. We clearly saw that in the future the technology will be able to level the playing field.  And the best way to get across the issue of finding great internationally acclaimed faculty from any part of the world and to be able to give the best knowledge from any part of the world will be through technology. 

Knorish is essentially our effort to build that entire ecosystem. To enable people who are experts. For example, a student from a remote part of the country can now learn how to create world-class designs from a fashion design expert in France. And all that student would need is a mobile phone and internet connection. At the same time, that expert would not need anything else except Knorish. And that is a big issue to solve because to be able to do this, one would need about 16 different technologies to be able to build what you can build with Knorish, right from building your website, payment gateway, students management system, chatbots, online course building systems, and there are an endless list of technologies one would need. Add to that the constant support required from an entire team of developers, software coders, and testers that would be required. So we have taken all of that away and now so now experts can continue to do what they do best which is share their knowledge and expertise while we empower them with the entire tech stack that is available with Knorish. That too at unbelievably low costs. 

Q. What are your plans for the following year?

- The pandemic has opened up challenges that did not exist earlier and as such new opportunities have been created as a result. And so our goal has changed a little bit. We were planning to empower individual tutors, trainers, coaches, small coaching centers, etc. for the foreseeable future. But the need in the market is clear that there is no good solution for smaller institutions and even primary institutions to be able to get their courses online and to take daily classes. All the tools that are out there to take parts of this, i.e. the popular video conferencing solutions offer are not the right tools for solving this problem because they are instantaneous collaboration tools. You come into a virtual environment, once the conversation is done, then you go away. For an educational environment, you need much more, you need scheduling, attendance, management of teams, allocation of content - recorded or pre-recorded, or live. Synchronous or asynchronous both kinds of teaching should be enabled there. The way we have built the platform, we didn't intend it to be used by schools. But when some of the schools started using the platform and the way they have been using it, and by the way, there are a few thousands of students that are using it now for daily classes. They figured that it is the environment that makes students feel they are in a Netflix or prime video kind of a tool and not just doing their own classes. So we have made it super easy for a school to build that kind of an environment. Which these new generation users are accustomed to. This is why we will focus on building key features such as live streaming technology for teachers to be able to take classes, making other tools available for creators, publishers, and schools to be able to offer content for their students. We will also make tons of content, training, courses, live interviews with people who have been able to do this successfully. People and institutions who are able to hack the curve and garner success quickly.

Q. What are your business expansion plans?

- We are seeing a lot of global traction as well. And as such, there is no reason why Knorish shouldn't be made available in other parts of the world especially southeast Asia, Africa, the middle east, and some parts of Europe. Going forward this year, we will also focus on these parts of the world. 

- Tem: Our tech team will keep expanding because we have audacious goals because we have the most audacious goals to make it the most elaborate and extensive platform. We want to make Knorish the operating system so that any teacher, instructor, trainer, coach, university, the school that this should be a solution that they can use with ease and create their online presence in under a day. So we will focus a lot on tech and at the same time build a robust customer support ecosystem complete with the latest tech as well as individuals.

Q. How is your online business operational in this pandemic?

-We have seen unprecedented growth coming from just about 500 creators in March to more than 5500 by June end. This has been fuelled by the need for all the trainers and training businesses to go online as their businesses and income sources in the offline world have been forced to shut down. Hence, it is a position of responsibility and honor to be able to help them continue with their teaching and training endeavors with our platform. So we have had more workload and our ability to perform and handle things at a scale that we have never been able to perform in our careers before. So we have been pushed to rethink every aspect of the business from how to optimize operations, customer onboarding, manager work from home environment better. And yet be empathetic towards the needs of the customer without keeping profits as the sole goal of the business. 

Q. How does Knorish help people turn their hobbies into their profession?

- One of the big roadblocks to anyone turning their hobby into a profession or passion is how will they survive on their hobby more. So what we enable is we bridge that gap. We enable them to go online and find that hobby that they love to teach people about and quickly monetize it. I think we are one of the very few tools where you could see the monetization coming within the first month. If you really put your head around how it's done right, you could start your online academy that teaches your hobby and have that become your main source of income from the very first month. We have already seen so many cases on our platform where this stands true and creators have actually started focussing on their online part of the business more than their offline businesses, some are even doing it now full time. And this is as varied as someone teaching cooking, guitar, leadership, Yoga, design, public speaking, photography to even technology courses. 

Q. What kind of target group do you have?

- Anyone who wishes to share what they know, teach others their hobbies, experiences, skills, be it, children or adults, across the ages is what Knorish is for. We have already seen people as young as 10 years old create their own online academy on knorish where they are teaching others and helping others learn. And of course over the past few months, as the platform has grown, we have seen a wide range of creators from all walks of life launch academies that are across the spectrum. The technology is built as such that literally anyone can quickly build and launch their own academy that sells courses and content.