Doubts Doctrine: Users Flock but Questions Linger Over Doubtnut

Doubts Doctrine: Users flock but questions linger over Doubtnut, Brainly Unlike full-stack edtech players like Byju’s, platforms like Doubtnut and Brainly are hoping to turn doubt solving into a standalone business. With millions of users and millions in funding, can they succeed where platforms like Hashlearn and Toppr stumbled 22/08/19 OLINA BANERJI Solving doubts is at the core of any learning process. Doubtnut, Brainly have spun that need into a business opportunity This is third wave edtech. Concepts come later. Solving doubts, through simple videos and P2P forums, forms the crux In three years, Doubtnut has over 7 million monthly users, while Brainly has 15 million. Both have attracted large VCs But the doubts business is disloyal. Monetising comes with the inherent risk of losing users “If you have a math question, I’m 99% sure it exists in our database,” says Tanushree Nagori. We’re inside a giant boardroom, with off-white walls and rows of tables, which double up as writing surfaces. Nagori draws on the table between us, explaining where her fledgling online venture—Doubtnut—lies within India’s edtech landscape, which is projected to be worth $1.96 billion by 2021. “I guess you’d put us in this quadrant,” she says, pointing to a white space between “local language” and “concepts + doubts”. Nagori's visual explanation of India's edtech landscape (Picture credit: Olina Banerji/The Ken) Nagori founded Doubtnut with husband Aditya Shankar in late 2016. Offered as an app, a website and even a WhatsApp helpline as of 2019, Doubtnut is an online platform which primarily offers students 24×7 help with math doubts. It caters to students all the way from class 6 to aspiring engineers sitting for public exams, allowing them to upload pictures of questions from books and receive a video solution within minutes. Like a Google for math queries. “No one was paying attention to the urgency of doubts. We wanted to resolve doubts in a way that would break the Byju’s price point,” says Nagori. Byju’s—which offers online videos and course material on tablets—charges upto Rs 2.5 lakh ($3500) a year, which makes it financially unviable for a large section of the Indian population. Doubtnut, while yet to arrive at an exact price point, is experimenting with granular pricing for modular products. Say, Rs 399 ($5.6)to unlock a month’s worth of doubt-solving videos. Of all the use cases to build edtech products, doubts are perhaps the stickiest and most compelling. If not tackled on the spot, they fester into what Nagori labels ‘learning gaps’. While Byju’s prides itself on creating a multi-step, learning journey, Doubtnut’s approach is to provide the necessary pit-stops. But has spinning an engagement model of just solving doubts really taken off? Like a rocketship, Nagori claims. Doubtnut says it receives 200,000 mathematics doubts every day. It has 7 million monthly active users, with over a quarter of these using the platform daily. Till date, Doubtnut has raised around $3.3 million from marquee investors such as WaterBridge, Sequoia and Omidyar Network. But Doubtnut isn’t alone. Its main competitor in India—Brainly—fields questions from over 15 million users every month. Unlike Doubtnut, which is programmed to send pre- recorded explainer videos to students, Brainly is an international peer-to-peer question-answer platform, a la Quora. “We realised that students turn to their community of friends, parents and teachers if they’re stuck on a question,” says Michal Borkowski, Brainly’s Poland-born co-founder. This is the experience, he adds, that Brainly’s trying to replicate online. Market Potential One in every four Indian students are enrolled in private, after-school tuitions. That’s 26% of the total student population, or 71 million students. Of these, 89% use tuitions to augment their basic education The surge of students towards doubt solving platforms is indicative of what the next wave of learners—millions of whom are from tier-2 and -3 cities, many just discovering online learning—needs. The immediate gratification of solutions. According to a 2016 report by the Indira Gandhi Institute of Development Research, Indian households spend up to 18% of their income on higher education—one of the highest in the world. B ut as the demographics change—from users who can spend Rs 15,000-30,000 ($210- 420) a month on supplementary education, to those unable to spend more than Rs 200- 300 ($2.8-4.2)—product parameters must evolve. Be mobile-friendly, more focused on regional languages and state education board content. They must also be priced significantly lower. Both Brainly and Doubtnut have understood this. “Doubts is a smart entry point. These apps are targeting the segment that primarily interacts online through Tiktok, Whatsapp and Youtube,” says Akshay Saxena, co-founder of Avanti, a chain of affordable coaching centres. Consequently, the two are winning over the elusive tier-2 and -3 audience that everyone—from e-commerce platforms to payment apps—is trying to monetise. Neither company is worried about monetising for the moment. That can wait till they grab more market share from the established players. But is doubt solving a sustainable business? “Can you really build a Rs 1,000 crore ($140 million) company on the back of doubts?” asks a senior edtech investor. He wished not to be named because his firm chose not to invest in Doubtnut. More importantly, if and when these companies do monetise, there’s no telling whether students will stay the course or abandon ship. Gurugram to Gaya Doubtnut’s office in Gurugram could easily pass for a call centre. Flanked on both sides by open cubicles, Nagori leads us to a backroom that houses a floating team of 20-30 young engineering graduates who build Doubtnut’s content. The cubicles are partitioned and quiet because these “tutors” need to record audio explanations for the solutions they’re writing. “It’s just like if a teacher was solving the question in person,” explains Nagori, in a hushed voice. Since its launch in 2016, Doubtnut has hired interns every summer to belt out a huge number of the most common math solutions. They currently have 400,000 solutions in the database. And that’s just math. The team is also building content for both physics and chemistry, which recently launched on the platform. At last count, they were adding 4,000 solutions everyday. “We expect the number of incoming queries to double,” adds Nagori. The USP of how these questions are solved—in a mix of Hindi and English, step-by- step—and how long they are—usually 4-5 minutes—resonates with a market untapped by full-stack edtechs such as Byju’s, Toppr or Unacademy. Doubtnut’s videos target users looking for solutions on YouTube or Google, who have little access to quality tutoring near their homes. Rakhi Kumari, an IIT aspirant from Gaya, Bihar, is a case in point. “Doubtnut gives me the solution on the spot. 80% of the time, I’m able to source the exact question I’ve been stuck on,” says Kumari. The eleven other students from 9 cities The Ken interviewed told a similar story. 80%, they agreed. When they can’t find something, they submit their doubts and wait for a response. New-age apps like Doubtnut represent the third wave in the edtech product line. They eschew the sophistication and design frameworks of their full-stack predecessors. Instead, Doubtnut’s interface is a mishmash of video tutorials, pop-up quizzes and test paper solutions. There’s even a poorly integrated chat function to boot, crammed with ‘good morning’ messages. There’s little typing involved, since questions can be sent via uploaded pictures—a boon for the test prep population and those not fluent in English. “You can break down the concept all you want. But it’s application in a test setting that really counts,” ADITYA SHANKAR, CO-FOUNDER, DOUBTNUT On Brainly, on the other hand, users submit questions across a variety of subjects, with the community answering them. The top answers—the ones with the most upvotes— genuinely do a decent job of answering doubts, even if there is also a glut of non- serious answers. Compared to a Byju’s, Doubtnut is thin on conceptual videos with fancy three- dimensional graphics and drawn-out explanations. Brainly, currently doesn’t have any videos, though it does allow students to upload pictures of their doubts. Both models are a definite structural departure from the more premium products in edtech. The reason, says Shankar, is that Doubtnut doesn’t bother itself with conceptual clarity if a learner can’t really apply it in a test situation. Their videos are no-nonsense: a phantom hand solving a sum on a smartboard, while explaining the steps. “You can break down the concept all you want. But it’s application in a test setting that really counts,” he adds. Despite their lean, sparse and patchy look, or rather because of it, the platforms have rapidly gained traction. Doubtnut has gone from 1,000 monthly active users in 2016 to over 7 million within three years. Brainly too, says Borkowski, has been getting traction from learners across India. It even allows for questions in vernacular languages such as Marathi, Telugu, Bengali and Tamil. Different strokes The numbers alone can hollow any arguments against their efficacy. Local tuition teachers who use Doubtnut, however, are less enthusiastic about its pedagogy. “It’s a great resource for us.

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