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# System prepended metadata

title: YC Winter 2021 application review

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# YC Winter 2021 application review
 
#### Company name:
Untropy

#### Company url, if any:
https://www.untropy.app

#### If you have a demo, what's the url? Demo can be anything that shows us how the product works. Usually that's a video or screen recording. (Please don't password protect it; just use an obscure url.)

#### Describe what your company does in 50 characters or less.
Gamified learning using very short videos

#### What is your company going to make? Please describe your product and what it does or will do.
We're building an app where educators from across the nation or outside can post short video bites of concepts that students can watch and learn. Both teaching and learning are gamified where educators gain points for likes & views on their videos and learners gain points for watching videos. We have a leaderboard where the top educators and students are displayed.

Borrowing an idea from Amazon’s Kindle Unlimited, for educators, we have a program where every month a fund is allocated and the total points gained by all educators are used to calculate the rate per point. Then each educator is paid for the points that they have gained. They have an option to take a payout or carry over to next month.

We also have pop quizzes for students that gain them bonus points for a reward at the end of the month.

#### Where do you live now, and where would the company be based after YC? (List as City A, Country A / City B, Country B.)
Bangalore, India/Bangalore, India

#### Personal email address of the founder who is filling out this application: Please enter an email address that you check often and that you will have access to for a long time.


#### Phone number(s):


#### Please enter the url of a 1 minute unlisted (not private) YouTube or Youku video introducing the founder(s). This video is an important part of the application. (Follow the Video Guidelines.)
#### 
#### Please tell us about an interesting project, preferably outside of class or work, that two or more of you created together. Include urls if possible.

#### How long have the founders known one another and how did you meet? Have any of the founders not met in person?
#### 
#### How many founders are on the team? (Fill out this number of founder profiles)
1

#### Which category best applies to your company?
K-12


#### How far along are you?
Have a product live in the Play Store and App Store with 1000+ users.

#### How long have each of you been working on this? How much of that has been full-time? Please explain.
I have been working on this since May full-time. Until April was working on a travel social app and before that a travel itinerary optimization engine. Pivoted due to COVID's effect on the Travel Industry.

#### Are people using your product?
Yes



#### How many active users or customers do you have? If you have some particularly valuable customers, who are they? If you're building hardware, how many units have you shipped?
The platform has over 1000 users with an average DAU over time of 100. I have 5 educators who are actively generating the content, inviting students to the platform, giving feedback, and treating the platform as their means of teaching.

#### Do you have revenue?
No


#### Anything else you would like us to know regarding your revenue or growth rate?
Our previous three weeks have seen rapid growth since we piloted with the monthly payout for educators. We saw an organic word of mouth invites by educators who brought their existing students onto the platform. It's clear that teachers are looking for an alternative earnings platform for online teaching. And we have 10 million professional teachers just in India and 250 million school-going children.

#### If you are applying with the same idea, did anything change? If you applied with a different idea, why did you pivot and what did you learn from the last idea?
I pivoted just after the previous Summer 2020 YC application. I was working on a travel social and it quickly became a reality by end of March that Travel is not a viable space at least this year and hence I pivoted to my secondary idea. I was able to build the product better, go-to-market faster, and talk to users about an idea with an immediate impact.

#### If you have already participated or committed to participate in an incubator, "accelerator" or "pre-accelerator" program, please tell us about it.

#### Why did you pick this idea to work on? Do you have domain expertise in this area? How do you know people need what you're making?
This idea came to me when I observed the disparate educational impact of elearning taking place in India even before COVID made elearning a necessity. I had talked about this with friends and family but didn't pursue it because I was already a little ahead in the travel social idea.

COVID made me not just drop my travel idea but embrace something closer to the heart which is fixing the educational paywall that has been erected by current high-growth EdTech companies.

When I started pitching this idea, people listened with a bit more interest than my travel idea, and educators who struggle to make their content available on YouTube immediately gravitated towards this. The chance of not having to compete with YouTube entertainers and able to reach students directly resonated with them. Vernacular content makers are encouraged and students are happier learning in the language of their choice.

Students find this platform a way to get lessons from their known teachers and appreciate the zero paywall scheme.

#### What's new about what you're making? What substitutes do people resort to because it doesn't exist yet (or they don't know about it)?
No Paywall between teachers and students.

EdTech social is a new category that has been limited so far to YouTube in India. Students search for topics on YouTube and learn but the algorithm doesn't allow new creators to be discovered. Our platform allows new content creators to immediately be discovered because we use a TikTok\Instagram like interface.

Our gamification forces teachers to post quality content, bring students to the platform, and have discipline because it could potentially be a platform for earning. Students take it seriously because their teachers conduct quizzes using the content and also there's a reward at the end of the month.

EdTech model has always been a few-to-many in terms of teachers and students and it's paywalled. New educators who aren't hired by the big EdTech companies, at this point can only use YouTube to post their videos and self promote their content on Facebook. Students who can't afford paid learning platforms come and search for topics on YouTube. They may or may not find the right video to learn.

#### Who are your competitors, and who might become competitors? Who do you fear most?
EdTech social and Untropy is supplementary to the existing channel of learning. So our main competitor is YouTube which so far has allowed anyone to upload a video but hasn't given education a separate platform. If tomorrow they decide then that could be a competition. We fear that Google or Facebook could potentially do that.

#### What do you understand about your business that other companies in it just don't get?
Live Classes are exhausting and the content made by teachers isn't making them money when they sleep. Also, students tend to find a teacher comfortable to learn from but they want choices of teachers, language, and style. Gamification in learning has been focused on early learners and has left out high school students. Short video bites tend to perform better than hour-long lectures on YouTube.

#### How do or will you make money? How much could you make? (We realize you can't know precisely, but give your best estimate.)
We are an Ad based revenue model. We would be able to start monetization when we hit 10,000 with a DAU of 1,000. When that happens then we would be displaying Ads that target students and teachers. We should be able to start with 5-10 businesses charging them a minimum Rs 10,000 to Rs 50,000 per month and that is Rs. 50,000 to Rs. 250,000 revenue or in dollars it's approx $850 to $4,250 per month or $51,000 annual.

If we extrapolate this then when we hit 1 Million users(100x from 10,000 so 100x everything) we should be making $5,100,000 in revenue.

How will you get users? If your idea is the type that faces a chicken-and-egg problem in the sense that it won't be attractive to users till it has a lot of users (e.g. a marketplace, a dating site, an ad network), how will you overcome that?
We have observed that the best way to attract users is to attract teachers with existing students. These teachers are best reached through Facebook. Another way to create virality is to gamify the student learning so that they invite their friends to gain points. We're still experimenting with both strategies.

#### Have you incorporated, or formed any legal entity (like an LLC) yet?
Yes

#### What kind of entity and in what state or country was the entity formed? (e.g. Delaware C Corp)
Delaware C Corp

#### Please describe the breakdown of the equity ownership in percentages among the founders, employees and any other stockholders. If there are multiple founders, be sure to give the equity ownership of each founder.
100% owned by the solo founder

#### Have you taken any investment yet?
No

#### Are any of the founders covered by noncompetes or intellectual property agreements that overlap with your project? If so, please explain.
None

#### Who writes code, or does other technical work on your product? Was any of it done by a non-founder? Please explain.
Founder

#### Is there anything else we should know about your company? (Pending lawsuits, cofounders who have left, etc.)
none

#### If you had any other ideas you considered applying with, please list them. One may be something we've been waiting for. Often when we fund people it's to do something they list here and not in the main application.

#### Please tell us something surprising or amusing that one of you has discovered. (The answer need not be related to your project.)

#### What convinced you to apply to Y Combinator? Did someone encourage you to apply?

#### How did you hear about Y Combinator?
Social media

