In the world of the Internet, where platforms chase your attention and time, the London-headquartered micro-learning startup Uptime offers 5 minutes learning hacks by choosing the best resources from books, documentaries and courses. The company describes it as its unique proposition in the edtech industry.
Uptime has a presence across 170 countries, officially. It was launched in India on Friday at a time when edtech is booming like no other sector, having received over $2 billion in funding this year so far.
“We aren’t here to compete with Byju’s,” Patrick Walker, Co-founder, Uptime and Former Director of Media Partnerships, Facebook, told BusinessToday.In.
Walker said having worked in companies like Facebook, YouTube, he has had “decent exposure” to a market like India, with millions of users.
“It is the possibility of the scale of expansion in India for which the global companies enter this market. We have seen tech giants doing the same. And for us, India is a huge opportunity,” the techie said. He said although he is up against many several home-grown edtech unicorns like Byju’s, Unacademy, UpGrad, he is confident his product and business model will be a fresh change in a super-charged and information overflowing ecosystem.
“At Uptime, we are clear about our messaging. We don’t want the users to spend days/hours on the platform. Our visually storified formats are short, engaging, informative and fun. The engagement with the users focuses on how they feel rather than how much time they spend on the app,” Walker says.
According to him, it offers the best of both worlds -- meaning, if the users are short on time and value productivity, they could simply read the hacks sourced from the best possible literature outside fiction, documentaries, science, academics, etc. If they want to dive deep into each one of these resources, there are links provided on the app that directs them to the original source.
Now, for a market like India, where subscription-based online learning is still at a nascent stage, Uptime believes its pricing model is slightly cheaper compared to other countries. “We offer subscription rates in the range of Rs 299 per month and Rs 1,299 per year. This comes on top of the first 3-day free trial access to the app, where the user can have access to 5,000 hacks,” the Uptime Co-founder said.
The app claims to have 10,000 users from India, who have registered on the platform. “The kind of traction we saw among the existent users in terms of the daily active user base and engagement, has prompted us to officially launch in the country,” Walker said. The app claims to have 300,000 installs since launch in January and has already raised over $19 million, with investors including Huda Kattan, the beauty mogul, Chad Hurley, the founder of YouTube, and Sir Terry Leahy, the former CEO of Tesco, as investors.
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