We all have questions. When it comes to our education, things get worse. With so many options available to students these days, they surely need help. With one of the largest database of universities, colleges and schools in India and abroad, Frosher aims to be the platform for all students searching for courses, degrees and their first job or internship.
Janagaran is the Founder & CTO of Frosher and is responsible for leading the technology team, design the architecture and build new features. Bhavik is the Business Lead for Frosher and is responsible for Frosher’s new look, new brand and new design. He is responsible for conceptualizing new features that can generate traffic and revenue for Frosher, provide business direction, marketing and manage funding requirements. They are currently a team of 5.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=POoWSd6QOp4
The Story behind Frosher
With a passion for technology, Janagaran Varadaraj, already a professional Java programmer set a task for himself to learn php. He started exploring various ideas he could start building to learn php when his nephew came by asking him information on a few Colleges in Tamil Nadu. Despite repeated searches on the web, the result was disappointing. Seeing an opportunity to help thousands like his nephew, Janagaran boarded on a new journey to build a database of all institutes in Tamil Nadu in 2006. While taking on many web development projects for different clients, Janagaran was keen on keeping his education website, then called apsira.com, alive and kept feeding information along with his team of 3 developers. After an introduction to Bhavik, he asked him to on-board Frosher’s journey to provide a new look and business direction. Today, apsira.com has been rebranded and redesigned to frosher.com which has a database of over 50,000 institutions in India and Abroad offering thousands of courses, daily education and admission news, exam preparation material and an upcoming job board to find internships or first jobs. Frosher has over 7500 unique visitors everyday, most of them are students or parents.
The company initially starting off by crawling thousands of institution websites and calling their representatives by phone, information of every university, college, school or course is organized, verified and structured before making it available to the students. Now with rapidly growing web traffic, Frosher has institutions contact them directly to add or update their information.
On Reaching out to Student Community
Besides the usual SEO, Email and Online / Facebook marketing, Frosher aims to work with other websites or products that target the same audience to build brand awareness. [pullquote align=”right”]Their next big feature would be an intuitive job board which will allow students to apply for thousands of jobs or internships using their LinkedIn profile or their Frosher profile.[/pullquote]The team wishes to portray their web image as being young, fresh and vibrant to relate to our target audience of students in helping them along their journey from a school to college to university to their first job. Several Frosher events called “Frosh Week – first week of a new educational year” are in planning, which would depend on the kind of funds they manage to raise.
On Finances and Future Plans
Frosher is completely bootstrapped and supported by friends and family. Revenues earned from Google Ads, CPM Ads by Ad agencies and Lead generation have been just enough to sustain them so far. [pullquote]We are definitely looking to raise our first round to support our growth, expand our reach and develop new features such as a campus job board that will bring in more revenues[/pullquote] The company plans to have 2 major revenue streams – jobs and affiliate marketing revenue. They plan to offer companies an opportunity to list jobs for freshers and feature their listings under “Hot Jobs” for a small fee. Companies will have the ability to list jobs, share it on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and Google through social sharing plugins. Companies can even restrict applications from student who have attended selected universities or colleges or have completed certain courses or certifications. Additional fee can be paid to promote listings.
Revenue earned through Google Ads, affiliate revenue through lead generation for student loans and abroad applications and other direct form of ads such email marketing and banners will form the other source of income.
On Advise to Entrepreneurs
Here is what Bhavik has to say to us –
“If you find something that feels right but doesn’t seem to fit into your master plan, take a chance, and commit to it by working hard. You shouldn’t be afraid to let passion get behind the wheel. You might really love where you end up. – Jerry Wang, Commencement Speech at University of Hawaii”
I truly believe in what Jerry said. I would advise all Entrepreneurs to take chances and don’t be afraid.The fear of failure is nothing compared to the regret you might have a few years down when you will say to yourself “what if I had?”.Don’t let that day come and just follow your passion.
What do we think of Frosher?
Frosher, with its fresh name is definitely the need of the hour. Students need a tool to make well informed decisions and a community that will help them in getting connections across fellow students. A separate professional identity – Frosher identity that will help the recruiters see their entire educational profile at one single glance. Frosher is a complete solution – right from school to first job. With platforms like these, it is extremely critical to get the right amount of information and a lot of it. We would love to see this startup funded, so that the student community would get benefited.
Here’s wishing Team Frosher the very best!
