Prepare for Government and Competitive Exams With Ixambee

Company Profile is an initiative by StartupTalky to publish verified information on different startups and organizations. The content in this post has been approved by ixamBee.

A Government job is the first preference of many-educated young adults in India. Every year millions of graduate and undergraduate students appear for competitive exams to secure jobs in the public sector. As shown by surveys conducted by the Lokniti research program at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS) in 2016, 65% of the Indian youth preferred a Government job. Again, a huge chunk of these Government job aspirants belong to the rural areas and a lot comes from financially weaker sections.

However, this section residing in backward areas and having a low income does not get adequate opportunities to prepare for competitive exams, owing to lack of infrastructure or money. Considering this scenario, ixamBee, a New Delhi based startup is offering free mock tests on its online platform so that all the govt job aspirants can prepare well for their dream job, irrespective of economic status, and from anywhere.
StartupTalky interviewed ixamBee CEO Chandraprakash Joshi to understand the startup better.

About ixamBee and How It Works
Online Education and Ed-Tech in India
Founders of ixamBee and Team
How Was ixamBee Started?
ixamBee - Name and Logo
ixamBee - Revenue Model
ixamBee - User Acquisition
ixamBee - Startup Challenges
ixamBee - Advisors and Mentors
ixamBee - Growth
ixamBee - Future Plans

About ixamBee and How It Works

ixamBee is a platform that lets Government job aspirants prepare for various competitive exams online. ixamBee is the only website where all the mock tests are available for free to the users to practice and prepare for various competitive exams and that is their USP.
ixamBee makes a large number of questions at a very low cost. These questions are made in-house, after thorough research and analysis of past trends, matching the difficulty level of the exam and following the same exam patterns as the real exams. The platform offers mock tests for more than 50 exams in Banking, Insurance Teaching, Railways, SSC and other categories.

ixamBee also provides comprehensive online learning courses for exam preparation. These learning modules are a package of short video lessons, study notes, practice questions and live sessions with the expert faculty.  Besides online practice tests and speed tests offered in the platform helps the users be better prepared to face the exam. Here, you can find over 500 video lessons to learn from and over 10000 practice questions. With paid subscriptions to these online courses, students can learn from anywhere and anytime convenient to them.

Some highlights of ixamBee courses are-

• Users get exam preparation tips from exam toppers and subject experts.
• Offers career guidance by successful professionals.
• Exam focused on comprehensive and concise study materials.
• Content is available in vernacular languages too.
• Extensive question banks that help students prepare better.
• Video lessons for difficult topics.
• 'Adaptive Practice' tests, where difficulty level of questions are adjusted as per performance.
• ixamBee also offers topic wise and section wise performance accelerating analytics.

Online Education and Ed-Tech in India

There are 300 million students in India and a large majority of them live in villages and small towns where quality learning material is not easily accessible. Online learning provides an equal opportunity for anyone to learn from anywhere. As per reports, the size of the Online Education market is expected to reach $325.48 billion by 2026.

EdTech market is very competitive, probably due to the low entry barriers. However, considering the large market, we have always been confident to make our own space. Today ixamBee is growing fast because of its focus on the quality of content that helps students in clearing the exam. In the time of information overload, our crisp and to the point content which is created by Subject Matter Experts is helping students get success.

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Founders of ixamBee and Team

ixamBee was founded by the trio, Arunima Sinha, Sandeep Singh and Chandraprakash Joshi in 2016.

Chandraprakash Joshi is the CEO of ixamBee. He received his formal education in the field of agriculture and finance. He held reputed positions in RBI as Manager (Hyderabad) and Assistant General Manager(Lucknow). He also held various positions in esteemed organizations like Oriental Bank of Commerce, Regional Rural Bank and Yes Bank before starting ixamBee.

Arunima Sinha, a born teacher, quit her government job (as Manager–SIDBI) and started Stratagem – a coaching institute for the preparation of competitive exams. She being an educator was very keen to work on a project for the betterment of society, combining the benefit of her teaching with tech skills, which made her join the founding team of ixamBee.

Sandeep Singh has extensive technical experience as he used to manage various technical departments in brands like Make My Trip, Carnation Auto India Pvt. Ltd and Sirez Ltd. Sandeep also co-founded an E-commerce site ‘Babyhugs.com’ which dealt in baby care products.

ixamBee has a team of qualified and dedicated professionals having diverse skillsets which have helped it get established as a known name amongst students.

How Was ixamBee Started?

Chandraprakash Joshi did his schooling from a village and had no proper awareness and guidance to choose the right career. While travelling to different parts of the country during his field visits for YES Bank, he interacted with a large number of people living in small towns. The observation made him realize, that the people were willing to invest in education, however, there were hardly any options that made quality education accessible. Increased access to internet services in rural areas has created an opportunity for online education so Chandraprakash grabbed the opportunity with both hands. He always wanted to do something beneficial for the youth of the country, and his experiences during personal and work-life turned into a passion to teach, that finally led to the conviction of starting up ixamBee.

ixamBee - Name and Logo

“We wanted a name that is related to education and exam preparation and also wanted to include an element of nature in it,”  said Chandraprakash explaining the idea behind the name ‘ixamBee’.

Bees are the most social, systematic and intelligent insects having a crucial place in the cycle of life by helping plants grow, breed and produce food.  Therefore, the word ‘exam’ is clubbed with ‘bee’. The ‘e’ of the exam is replaced with ‘i’ as the company name starting with ‘I’ makes it personalized for every user and every team member of ixamBee.

ixamBee - Revenue Model

ixamBee provides free mock tests for more than 50 exams and it is the only platform where students get mock tests without paying anything for that. ixamBee’s revenue comes from the comprehensive online learning courses that students subscribe to for the preparation of competitive exams such as Bank PO, SSC, RBI, NABARD, SEBI, LIC, and others.

ixamBee - User Acquisition

ixamBee launched the mock tests in April 2017 and reached customers using social media such as Quora, Facebook, and Youtube. Students visit the website to attempt mock tests because of the quality of questions, answer explanations and personalized feedback analytics that helps them in improving their performance. More than 300 million questions have been attempted by 750K plus users on the website.

For a B2C player in the online space, it is tough to reach customers, and one needs to spend much on digital marketing. However, social media did the magic for ixamBee, in getting its first 1000 registrations in the first month itself. Due to good content quality, very quickly the word spread among the online student communities across various social media.

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ixamBee - Startup Challenges

“I always believe, What doesn't kill you, makes you stronger”-Chandrapraksh says.

At ixamBee, there was a big challenge to get qualified and experienced professionals on board when the company has little money to pay them. Again, there was a challenge to make students realize the quality of the content.

To some extent selection of students in the first year of the course launch and appreciation by users about the ixamBee experience has helped us grow at a good pace. We are continuously learning how to manage these challenges in a better way and are also preparing for the bigger challenges we are going to face in the coming years.

ixamBee - Advisors and Mentors

Keyur Joshi, Co-Founder of MakeMyTrip is mentoring ixamBee since the beginning. Sandeep (co-founder and CTO) has earlier worked with Keyur in MakeMyTrip. Keyur’s continuous guidance has been extremely valuable for crafting the differentiation strategy and growth plan for ixamBee.

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ixamBee - Growth

ixamBee is growing very fast and becoming popular among students because of the value they are getting. Today the company has 1 million-plus monthly visits on the website and the number is growing constantly. There are more than 45 million page views on the websites and students have spent a total of 800,000 plus study hours at ixamBee.com. These numbers are growing at the rate of 80-100% month on month.

The average ticket size for each course ranges from INR 3,000 to INR 60,000 per course. The company claims to have about 1,500 paid users.

ixamBee - Future Plans

iexambee plans to keep investing the profits into the business to launch more courses, they have already launched a mobile app and added more languages on the platform.

“We have still not reached even 1% of the student in the market. We have lots to be achieved and we are preparing in the right direction.” Chandraprakash says.

ixamBee’s aims to reach 100 million students by 2025. Recently, in 2021, it has raised $300,000 in seed funding.

FAQs

When was ixamBee was founded?

ixamBee was founded in the year 2016.

Who founded ixamBee?

ixamBee was founded by Chandraprakash Joshi, Arunima Sinha and Sandeep Singh.

What is ixamBee?

ixamBee is an online platform that helps in learning and preparing for competitive exams for like Banking, SSC, Railways and others.