Mycaptain - Bangalore-Based EdTech Startup Empowering Young Minds

Mycaptain - Bangalore-Based EdTech Startup Empowering Young Minds
my captain company profile | My Captain Bangalore Edtech Startup

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 Mycaptain.

As a teenager, discovering and following your passion is difficult in India as neither the education system offers ample time, relevant knowledge, and the right motivation nor the society supports it. We are judged based on our ability to memorize content and attend classes. This is one of the core problems in EdTech that Zeeshan and the team are trying to solve through Mycaptain. Climber Knowledge and Careers Pvt Ltd is the Parent Company of Mycaptain. Climber company completed 9 successful years of operations in online learning and mentoring in India.

Mycaptain is an online mentoring platform where, young achievers from across the globe, mentor school and college students in their fields of interest and passions. Read this article to know more about Mycaptain company, products, founders, growth, wiki, challenges, achievements, and future plans.

Mycaptain - Company Highlights

Startup Name Mycaptain
Headquarter Bengaluru, India
Sector Edtech
Founders Mohammed Zeeshan, Sameer Ramesh, Ruhan Naqash, Fatema Hussein
Founded 2013
Number of Employees 906
Number of Active Users 30000 (Monthly access)
Parent Organization Climber Knowledge and Careers pvt ltd
Website mycaptain.in

Mycaptain - About and How it Works
Mycaptain - Founders and Team
Mycaptain - Startup Story
Mycaptain - Products and Courses
Mycaptain - Name, Tagline, and Logo
Mycaptain - Startup Launch
Mycaptain - User Acquisition and Growth
Mycaptain - Business Model and Revenue Model
Mycaptain - Market Size
Mycaptain - Funding
Mycaptain - Challenges Faced
Mycaptain - Advisors and Mentors
Mycaptain - Recognition and Achievements
Mycaptain - Future Plans

Learn online with Mycaptain

Mycaptain - About and How it Works

Mycaptain is an online platform where you can learn what you love, live, and online with young Professionals. The Mycaptain team believes that students need to be able to make informed career choices and they envision enabling a societal mindset shift when it comes to different offbeat and traditional careers in the country, and eventually the World.

The Core belief of the team behind running Mycaptain is that everyone deserves to explore the magic of all the professional fields and potential careers out there.

Mentors conduct one-month-long online, live workshops for students to help them learn the basics and get an idea about career opportunities in their interest field.

The regular online sessions are one-to-many, but separate one-to-one sessions can be scheduled in case of extra queries. Any such extra session is free, and students can discuss their questions even after the program is over.

Mycaptain - Founders and Team

Mohammed Zeeshan (CEO and Co-Founder), Sameer Ramesh (CPO and Co-Founder), Ruhan Naqash (CMO and Co-founder), and Fatema Hussein co-founded Mycaptain in 2013.

Each of the founders earns a monthly salary of INR 200000.

MyCaptain Founders
MyCaptain Founders - Ruhan Naqash (left), Sameer Ramesh (centre), Mohammed Zeeshan (right)

Zeeshan was Sameer's school friend back from Nagpur and had shared a common interest in sports, music, and the desire to impact people around them. Zeeshan met Ruhan while in College (SRM University), while one was pursuing mechanical engineering and the other Electronics and communication. Sameer was pursuing B.E in Industrial Engineering & Diploma in Experiential Education. The trio eventually decided to come together and build Mycaptain.

Mycaptain Team
Mycaptain Team

The current company size is 170 people, and the average age of all the team members is 23. The founders are the oldest (26, 25, 25). The company's culture is that of ambition, perseverance, and celebrating achievements.

They also believe in being the most caring when it comes to their customers (mentees). The startup hires young people because they believe that the problems of the young generation can only be solved by young people. More recently, to further scale, they have been recruiting more experienced people who have the vigor for education and want to make a change.

Mycaptain - Startup Story

The idea of Mycaptain was born out of a hostel room discussion. Zeeshan (CEO and Co-Founder) wanted to become an Astronomer, Sameer (Co-Founder) wanted to become a Tech blogger and Ruhan (Co-Founder) wanted to become a Writer. But when they approached their parents for the same, they were met with criticism, cynicism and eventually all the three ended up studying Engineering, a subject they were never passionate about.

While in college they met amazing potential filmmakers, designers, developers, photographers, models, and whatnot, but unfortunately they all were studying subjects they had no interest in. This led the founders to believe that the problem of making uninformed career choices or not being able to follow their passions was a problem that their entire generation faced.

They launched Mycaptain in 2015, after trying out a lot of models and learning modules. They even validated their ideas by conducting offline boot camps and workshops and slowly moved them online. This is how Mycaptain began, where students could learn whatever they loved, Live and Online with young professionals.

The initial people that they talked to about their company were their target audience i.e. college students, and their parents. And everyone they talked to, said the same thing: “I wish I had something like this right now/when I was in college”.


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Mycaptain - Products and Courses

Mycaptain Course Enrollment
Mycaptain Course Enrollment

Mycaptain is an Online app (and web app), where they conduct 4-week learning journeys for students in fields right from stand-up comedy to Machine learning. The 4-week learning journeys consist of International level and relatable content (both video and text), amazing projects, and exciting Live Video Classes with Young professionals and Achievers from these fields.

Each program is designed in a way that by the end of the program the student has something tangible - Like the students from the Mycaptain novel-writing program have the first chapter of their novel ready and edited by the end of the program. The students from the MyCaptain web development program have their first website ready and so on.

The company offers skill-based courses, advanced courses to get a job and a lot of content on your interest. An Overview of Mycaptain Courses is as follows:

Business Visual Arts Creatives & Literature Technology
Entrepreneurship & Advanced Photography Psychology AI
Marketing and Advertising Graphic Design Journalism & Media Studies C Programming
Digital Marketing Short Film Making Spoken Word Poetry Andorid App Development
Stock Market and Finance UI & UX Design Content Writing & Blogging CPP Programming
Business Communication Fashion Design Novel & Creative Writing Python & Java Programming
Business Analytics Illustrations & Doodling Music Production Full Stack Development
Event Management Social Media Content Creation Data Analytics with Python
Search Engine Optimization Humor & Standup Comedy Writing

The problem that this solves is it gives the students a kickstart into their field of passion by not only helping them build something tangible in the field but also connecting them with the right mentors to get guided and get a real-life experience of the field as well.

Initially, they launched a magazine called Inking Pages back in 2013 - 2014, which was written by college students pursuing various degrees in different colleges and was meant for school students to make a more informed career choice. But they had failed to realize that online content consumption was way higher than print. But to be able to conduct online programs, the team needed experience in creating great learning experiences. So they started with offline boot camps and eventually moved to online programs.

In August 2020, Mycaptain announced the ‘Freemium’ version of its mobile application and website. This will allow its users to take Free Live Sessions, micro-courses and demo classes covering 40+ Potential careers and subjects, such as Photography, App Development, Music Production to name a few.

With 100,000+ paid users in 2020, Mycaptain wanted to go an extra mile by providing a platform to each and every individual who wishes to explore their passion, which will help them evolve in their career as well as personal lives. In this endeavour, the company decided to launch an unpaid version of its Live Online Courses for the first time ever.

They have 150,000 paid learners as of January 2022.


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Mycaptain Logo
Mycaptain Logo

On a train journey for a B Plan competition back in 2014, when the founders were still in college, they decided to watch this movie called “Dead Poets’ Society”. The movie in their head changed the role of a teacher and how it should evolve with time and also featured the famous poem “O Captain My Captain” by Walt Whitman. This was a turning point for them as they understood how Education and learning were not just about textbooks, videos, or lectures and had a deeper reliance on human relationships, and mentoring as well!

The tagline for Mycaptain is “Learn what you love”. It clearly talks about their culture and vision as an organisation.

"We want to facilitate your learning and professional development in the field that you truly love! The logo has a hand in it, which is a symbol of being offbeat, and breaking the norms for us. We are perceived by our stakeholders, and mentees as a revolution.", said Ruhan Naqash, co-founder of Mycaptain.

Mycaptain - Startup Launch

MyCaptain Bangalore Office
Mycaptain Bangalore Office

In February 2015, just a month after the founders formally launched Mycaptain, there was a Fest at SRM University (Zeeshan and Ruhan’s College). The team put up a stall there, with only 4 programs under their belt at that time - Entrepreneurship, creative writing, Ethical Hacking, and Astronomy. They saw a whopping 192 people pay upfront for these programs on the very first day of the Fest. This led to them having a strong belief that this product was something people wanted and it solved a real solution.

They started mentoring by delivering live online sessions on the free version of WizIQ (an E-learning delivery platform) and used WhatsApp groups to communicate and interact with the mentees. They used to share videos and other such learning materials via google drive.

Mycaptain has evolved over two years, and now they use their platform with a lot more added features and customization that suits the needs of mentees for the live sessions.


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Mycaptain - User Acquisition and Growth

Mycaptain Customer Acquisition
Mycaptain Customer Acquisition

Mycaptain has a very strong presence in colleges and runs arguably India’s largest Campus Ambassador Program with more than 600-800 active campus ambassadors every month. Their marketing campaigns inside colleges, where their tone has been brash (for example “has your professor ever built an app? Our mentors have! Learn App development with us”) have gone viral within campuses.

This has led to conversion rates of 20-25% on the potential leads that they generate from these campuses. The startup has scaled to more than paid mentees so far through their Campus Ambassador Model, and a strong online advertising strategy.

Mycaptain runs operations all across India and has its headquarters in Bangalore. Their revenue in the financial year 2021 was south of 1 Million dollars and has had a paid user base of 80,000+ which is equivalent to highly funded companies like Unacademy and Vedantu from the Education sector. All of this is completely bootstrapped without raising a single penny. Their NPS is above 50+ which is one of the highest for Education products all across the World.

Recently, Mycaptain also raised funding of $3 million in order to further scale course offerings, acquire more users, increase revenue, and grow the team.

Mycaptain - Business Model and Revenue Model

Mycaptain Revenue 2021
Mycaptain Revenue

Mycaptain has been generating revenue and is profitable right from the first day. Students pay 1,000 rupees for a month-long workshop. Mentors get a part of this amount, and the company get the rest.

The rest of the compensation for mentors happens by helping them get mentors for their research or work. They are also given LORs, and the startup even helps them get funds for their research or startup.

An example of one such event is the 'Indian Youth Conclave' which consists of sessions that help students in gaining useful insights into their field of interest. The event spans over a couple of days and covers topics from various domains.

Mycaptain Course Revenue
Mycaptain Course Revenue

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Mycaptain - Market Size

The company is in the Education Industry. The Market size is almost 38 million people (10 million students from 8th to 12th standard, 12 million students enrol in undergraduate courses every year, and 18 million graduates).

The Total Market Size is $1.6 billion currently. According to the report by KPMG on Online Education in India, the market is said to be growing by 44% year on year.

Mycaptain - Funding

Mycaptain raised a funding of $3 million in series A round in January 2022. The funding round was led by Ankur Capital, Inflection Point Ventures, Firstport Ventures, IIM Calcutta Angels Network, and Singapore Angel Investors.

Date Stage Amount Investors
January 2022 Series A $3 Million Ankur Capital, Inflection Point Ventures, Firstport Ventures, IIM Calcutta Angels Network, and Singapore Angel Investors

Mycaptain - Challenges Faced

One major challenge was faced when the founders went bankrupt and were in heavy debt before starting Mycaptain as their magazine didn’t take off.

At the end of 2014, they had subscribers for their magazine but did not have the resources to cater to them. They were liable to print 12 more issues of the magazine, but the founders didn’t have the funds to do so and were in debt of around 2.5L.

The idea of Mycaptain was born during this phase. The revenue from the first few months of starting the company helped them clear the debt.

Another challenge Mycaptain faced in the very initial days (5 years ago) was acquiring mentors when their credibility was low. This was overcome at the time, after the IIM Bangalore incubation, that the founders got right after college. They also used a strong network effect of vetting and referral from their then mentor pool. Right now MyCaptain has a pool of 250+ mentors.

Mycaptain - Advisors and Mentors

The company's chief advisor has been Mr. Naga Raja Prakasham who is an investor and also a startup mentor at IIM Bangalore. His advice has been very precious for them.

Mycaptain - Recognition and Achievements

  • Mycaptain was incubated at NSRCEL, IIM Bangalore in 2016.
  • SDSN awarded Mycaptain as of one of the top 50 youth-led solutions in the world working towards Quality education and Decent economic growth and work.

Mycaptain - Future Plans

They want to expand their offerings to 50+ programs, expand into professional levels for each program and also get into vernacular languages so that they democratize the notion of being able to make an informed career decision for the entirety of India.

In the coming years, Mycaptain is looking to acquire 300,000+ more paid customers, begin international expansion and have more than 3000+ Top Educators onboard. Additionally, the company is aiming to host 2000+ Free Live classes and workshops for students to get a taste of each field and learn from the best minds in India.

FAQs

What is Mycaptain?

Mycaptain is an online mentoring platform based in Bangalore where young achievers across the globe can mentor school and college students in their fields of interest and passions.

Who is Mycaptain Founder?

Mohammed Zeeshan , Sameer Ramesh, Ruhan Naqash, and Fatema Hussein are the co-founders of Mycaptain.

When was Mycaptain founded?

Mycaptain was founded in 2013.

What are Mycaptain Courses?

Mycaptain offers various Courses in several fields:

  • Business (Entrepreneurship, SEO, Business Analytics etc.)
  • Visual Arts (Photography, Short film making, Fashion design etc.)
  • Creatives (Creative/Novel/Humour/Content Writing, Journalism etc.)
  • Technology (Web Programming, Full Stack Development, Java/C/Python etc.)

Has Mycaptain raised funding?

Mycaptain was bootstrapped until January 2022. Bangalore-based Edtech startup raised funding of $3 million in January 2022.

Who are the competitors of Mycaptain?

Some top competitors of Mycaptain are:

  • Coursera
  • upGrad
  • Udemy
  • Udacity
  • Edureka
  • Simplilearn
  • Imarticus Learning

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