Dr. Gunjan Garg Pandey, CEO & Co-Founder at ClassesGuru Pte Ltd

Great Companies: How did you get your idea or concept for the business?

Dr. Gunjan Garg Pandey: I started to feel confined to my typical 9 to 5 job. I knew I wasn’t using my full potential and could do a lot more. The idea of working on something that gives me freedom and helps utilise my skills gained from 18+ years of working in the education industry was intriguing. I longed for a business idea that really excited me and it had to be around education. My experience gave me enough knowledge to capitalize on the growing trend and I still learn every day. As a mother of two and an academician, I always saw kids struggling for tuition classes, running from pillar to post, and losing their time and energy. This got me thinking. What can I do to make their life easier?

This inspired me to "provide an online educational platform for children to strengthen themselves academically through the comfort of their home."

Over time, the concept of offering online supplementary support classes emerged, and as the covid era began, it became even more of a blessing for the children who were confined to their homes but could still learn from their own comfortable places. Several months and a lot of hard work later, we have built a very successful start-up that has helped many students achieve remarkable milestones.

Great Companies: What are the various services provided by ClassesGuru Pte Ltd

Dr. Gunjan Garg Pandey: As we all know, the right to education is fundamental in this modern society, everyone has a right to educate themselves and ClassesGuru aims to contribute and do their part by providing a plethora of online enrichment lessons for K 12 students of different backgrounds in the most feasible way.

I am proud to say that even though we are a new start-up, we have managed to understand the working of various curriculums and in just 2 years, we are able to provide world class education for not only Singapore (MoE) and Malaysian curriculums but also other International and well-known boards such as IB, IGCSE, CBSE, ICSE.

For the last 2 years, we have been equipping our students with invaluable knowledge in mainstream subjects such as maths, physics, chemistry, English, economics, and languages etc but now we believe that we are prepared enough to explore new boundaries by providing classes for subjects that cannot be taught by textbooks.

This is just the start of our marvellous journey as we hope to extend our reach and provide training for other international level exams in future.

Great Companies: What makes ClassesGuru Pte Ltd different from hundreds of other similar service providers?

Dr. Gunjan Garg Pandey: I must agree that standing out amongst the thousands of companies has been a daunting task but I believe that the ClassesGuru team has done an incredible job in doing so.

Even though a direct comparison cannot be made as each company is unique in their own ways, I believe that what makes ClassesGuru stand out from the rest is the fact that we take students' learning experience with the utmost priority — and at the same time ensure it is affordable to everyone. You might be surprised to know that our lessons are 50% more economical than our competitors yet the quality of service outshines others.

Moreover, our teachers are highly trained to adapt their teaching style to benefit the students and play by their strengths so they can overcome their weaknesses. We see that all our students as part of our growing family hence we try to take care of each and every one of them by providing the most we can, we don't look for profit as much as we look for customer satisfaction and I believe that this quality of ours is something that not only wins the parents heart and helps us to create a great connection with our parents but also helps students excel in academics.

Great Companies: What were the struggles and challenges you faced and how did you overcome them?

Dr. Gunjan Garg Pandey: You might already know that about 90% of start-ups fail in the first year due to uncountable issues, it is a real struggle to be able to build something from nothing out here and

I have to admit that ClassesGuru wasn't different.

Every business faces several challenges such as building up a brand, developing a customer base, developing the trust of customers, and of course one of the biggest one, financials but in my opinion, there is nothing a little bit of hard work and teamwork couldn't do. ClassesGuru hasn't faced any catastrophic problems which couldn't be solved by our team of experts but I’d be lying if I say that we didn't face any major problems.

One major challenge that has been haunting the company since the start is the acceptance of online education. E-learning has recently grabbed the attention of many and has become a billion-dollar industry yet somehow parents are hesitant and doubt the effectiveness of online tutoring but ClassesGuru's vision to provide the best to their students fuels our team to work day and night, trying to revolutionise this transformation from conventional physical classes to digitalised classes by providing all the support parents and students need but it's still a long way to go.

Great Companies: How do you plan to grow in the future? What does 5 years down the line ClassesGuru Pte Ltd?

Dr. Gunjan Garg Pandey: Personally, I want ClassesGuru to support students all over the world with the goal of fostering student growth by offering the best online learning environment at a reasonable cost. As you might know that at present we are only operating in Singapore and Malaysia but down the line I hope that ClassesGuru could reach millions of students across the globe and become a symbol of quality education. Sadly, this dream of mine is still a long way off, but my team and I are absolutely committed to making this dream a reality.

In order to do this, we intend to learn from our competitors and of course give our 100%. As

mentioned before, the acceptance of online education has been hard for the parents and majority of them prefer face-to-face classes over online tutoring.

We aim to change this by doing better than our competitors and putting everything we have on line just to assure the parents that we indeed are providing an E-learning environment which is just as good as traditional education, if not better.

Great Companies: If you had one piece of advice to someone just starting out, what would it be?

Dr. Gunjan Garg Pandey: Patience and perseverance are the key elements, if you’re just

starting out — keep sailing with a positive attitude and things will fall in place with time!