Pariksha App : The Beginning
Better late than never. It has taken us a year to realize that we should start documenting the happenings.
Pariksha, a brand that started a few years back, was into the Placement preparation scene for engineering colleges. Boasting an association with more than 270 colleges in India that included all of the IITs, NITs and any other brand that you can think of, it was a successful platform. But there was a need to go deeper.
MADHYA PRADESH : This was the time when Utkarsh had started exploring the Government jobs market. Being an Indori, it just took a couple of days and talking to a few people in Indore that made him realize the vastness of the market. To give you a little idea : In 2018, there were a little over 20 Lakh applicants for IIT JEE and we have a host of apps & websites to help these applicants. In MP alone, there were 37 lakh applications for the year 2017. And not one single app that focussed on all the state level Government exams. There were seasonal apps that people put up without a motive of scaling it up to multiple exams, multiple states or the biggest picture — multiple languages.
Upcoming Challenges Identified : The Placement Preparation portal was easier to market for two specific reasons :
A) Identify the Placement Coordinators from various colleges and talk to them to onboard their students
B) Students preparing for their Placement Season all have laptops and we never needed the necessity to launch a mobile app
If we decided to go at the Government Jobs market, we would need an app. Acquiring users? We did not have a clue. Coaching centers in Indore were a good place to start. A few visits to the coaching centers with a basic proposal yielded decent results. But how do we scale this? Or should we dive into the market and a solution would just pop up? We did the latter.
We already had the test service ready since that is what we did for the past few years. We needed an Application. We needed content. But what content should we make? Oh did I mention that the State Level Government exams have no fixed schedule? And in the upcoming months, that would prove to be one of the biggest issues that we had not accounted for.
The app for MP was ready
A team in Indore to manage the content was ready
Content : Free Practice Questions, Test Series (MP Police & Jail Prahari)
March 25, 2018 : MP Pariksha was on the Play Store
Next Up : A Journey from Offline Transactions to Online Transactions, the first few months from a Growth and Product perspective
Want to check out the app? https://pariksha.page.link/parikshablog
