From academia to Silicon Valley, Duleep Deosthale has co-founded an innovative recruitment service using mobile technology. He explains how Admission Table has reached three million students in its first year and shares his thoughts about life on the business side of international education.
The PIE: You were an academic for 20 years but now you have a Silicon Valley tech startup focusing on international recruitment. How does that feel?
DD: It’s been a lot of learning and it’s changing how I think about the academic side compared to the business side. In the academic environment there is a lot of consensus, a lot of time taken. Here it’s snap decisions. If something isn’t working you switch gears. I’ve also learned not to be risk averse. You have to be able to take chances.
It’s exciting to be able to provide educational opportunities to a larger number of students than what I could from my academic role. Now I can assist all universities, not just the one for which I was working.
“Now I can assist all universities, not just the one for which I was working”
The PIE: What’s the idea behind Admission Table?
DD: Generation C– for connected– do not have access or have limited access to desktops or laptops for whatever reason- financially, literal access– so they depend on mobile phones to connect with the world.
Then there are universities trying to get students and not knowing how to penetrate the market. You have 500 universities, let’s say in the case of India, who are all going to the same five cities to recruit. For the students in these five cities it’s fantastic, they have 500 options, but for universities if you’re not number one, two or three, forget it! You’re not getting the best students.
So the challenge was: how do you reach out to this segment? And the answer was obvious: mobile. In India alone there are over 900 million mobile phone users. And smart phones account for about 13% of that. That is 13% of 900 million which is nearly a third of the US population. Suddenly those numbers mean something huge.
The PIE: Tell me about the interface.
DD: We wanted to make something simple keeping in mind their attention span and bandwidth. If someone is sitting at a bus stop, and has two minutes before the bus arrives- how much information do you want him or her to get to convince him or her to go to your university? So it has to be short, sweet and simple because basically they’re looking for who are you, your location, your ranking, the academic programs, the cost, and can I get a scholarship? If you answer these six questions, then it’s smooth sailing for phase 1!
If you start showing them pictures and everything else that exists on this planet, you’ve lost them. They want information, on their terms, not yours!
“If you start showing them pictures and everything else that exists on this planet, you’ve lost them”
The PIE: So it’s an app?
DD: It’s a mobile web app – we used HTML5 and browser to maximize our reach to students using all kinds of mobile phones. We are going to release an android app in the next couple of months which will help us engage better with the students.
We also have a web app for universities to manage their recruitment funnel.
The PIE: How do you communicate with students?
DD: We connect using the dominant social media networks in a country. For example we’ve created communities like “Study.at.US” “Study.at.Australia” and “Study.at.Europe”etc on Facebook. Students usually find out about us through somebody they know because somebody they know is liking, commenting or sharing about our post. But it is all very targeted based on connection, interest and demographics. We are not interested in everyone on Facebook. These communities lead them to our platform where they can find out more about universities, admissions and connect with their choices.
The PIE: And who controls the content?
DD: Universities! Always! They fill out a setup document to allow us to create their microsite that can be changed/updated within minutes over the course of the year.
On Admission Table itself, the institutions set the parameters which they consider will be according to them a qualified lead. For example some of them might want us to market all of their programmes while others just one within engineering. One school wants us to recruit just for robotics for example, while others may indicate from a certain part of the country.
The PIE: How do you get students with such specific profiles to even visit the platform?
“We are going to have a reach of nearly eight million students by the end of 2015”
DD: Let’s take electrical engineering. When we do the marketing campaigns on our community pages we only talk about that university and the electrical engineering programme. Only students interested in this programme are going to pursue that. The numbers may be small but they are students who are interested in this specific programme making them far more attractive than any average information seeker.
The PIE: How many students can you reach?
DD: We’ve been pretty successful. Today we have a reach of nearly three million students. We also have 44 universities from the US, Europe, Australia and the Emirates who have subscribed. We are going to have a reach of nearly eight million students by the end of 2015 so we need more universities where we can channel this volume of students.
The PIE: You launched about a year ago with seed funding from 500 Startups. What’s happened since?
DD: Apart from 500 Startups from Silicon Valley (500.co), a well-known VC from the education space and a couple of entrepreneurs from the mobile space also joined our seed round. With the seed money we made our product better. We added features like Peer Recommendation for universities and analytics tools to get a better sense of student’s online behavior. We have also been able to increase our university clients from six to 44 with a six fold jump in revenue in the last one year and a five fold jump in average revenue per university.
The PIE: So you’ve grown quite a bit in a just a year.
DD: Yes we have. I think much of it has to do with unmet demand. People say they’re going to do their own recruitment which is fine but we can help them spend their dollars more effectively. We don’t say cut your travel budget, or anything like that. Instead we tell you where there is interest for what you’re offering. The idea is to enhance existing recruitment efforts, not substitute.
The PIE: Are you only present in India?
DD: No, not at all. We help universities who recruit from India and South Asia, Vietnam, Africa and parts of the Middle East. We will be expanding to the rest of South East Asia as well as parts of East Asia soon.
The PIE: Can you use your model to recruit for non-university educators?
“In China there are six incomes for one Chinese student, while in India it is one income for six children”
DD: Not all students are designed for a university education. A lot depends on the kind of school that is trying to recruit and the kind of degrees they’re offering. It all boils down to what kind of careers are there. So even if it is a one or two year diploma and there are students who want to go there then yes we have space to cater to that.
The PIE: Numbers from China are set to decline. How do you see recruitment evolving?
DD: Those I believe are the projections. However, the same is not true with a lot of other developing country markets like India or the rest of south Asia, South East Asia, the Middle East, Africa and Latin America.
In India, this is also a generation whose parents have access to resources both in terms of loans, as well as, disposable income. But the difference between China and India is six for one and one for six. By this I mean, in the case of urban China there are six incomes for one Chinese student, while in India it is one income for six children.
They’re very conscious that for their children to succeed they must get a good education so you’re going to see parents being bullish and picky and savvy. Their focus is on ‘after the degree what?’ Parents and students are going to ask universities to predict the future and tell them what their degree will do for them. You had better have a solid answer, not just “it will open many doors and opportunities.” This generation is not buying that anymore.
