Great Companies: How did you get your idea or concept for the business?
Mayank Pareek: So Scholify is actually a result of my personal experience. I was pursuing my PGDM from an expensive college in India and by the end of the 1st year of the program, I along with around half of the batch was asked to clear our due fees, ahead of our global immersion program in Nanyang, Singapore. Despite being a scholarship winner myself, I was unable to arrange funds in the stipulated time. Following a few discussions cum arguments with management, I and 2 other batchmates had to unfortunately, drop out, and this somewhere led to the inception of Scholify. I was lucky to get a PPO from the organization I was interning at, and it was while working there, I thought there had to be a solution to stop this increasing drop-out rate. A few nights of extensive researches, discussions with professors and mentors, in 2018, I, with a couple of friends, conceptualised Scholify.
Great Companies: What are the various Services provided by Scholify
Mayank Pareek: Scholify operates in both B2B and B2C sectors. For students, it is the simplest scholarship discovery platform that seamlessly connects students with ideal scholarships they are already eligible for, in just 1 click. On the other hand, we have a SaaS offering that helps corporates as their CSR implementation partner. While our B2C offering is pretty straight forward, the B2B proposition is unique and is a one-stop solution for socially aware organizations, doing impact investing. We enable them to create campaigns that are impactful, sustainable, measurable and generated value whilst cutting down CSR implementation costs significantly. There is an array of data-backed solutions in our B2B offering.
Great Companies: What makes Scholify different from hundreds of other Edutech firms?
Mayank Pareek:
This is one of my favourite questions. So besides being THE SIMPLEST scholarship discovery platform, our goal is to make education affordable, accessible and debt-free for all.
At Scholify, we are not trying to teach the students by any means or promising them better grades, cluelessly. Our goal is to help them reach their career goals by assisting them with the financial help, that does not build a debt-mountain on their heads by the time they graduate. We are working hard to help them become successful-able and find answers to the WHYs and the HOWs, over the WHATs. Unlike a few websites out there that aggregates and lists random scholarships, internships and what not with irritating ads, Scholify is a completely ad-free platform, with all exclusive Indian scholarships and no other nonsense. We cut down a lot of steps from the usual application process with our 1 click application process, and make applying, a fun, easy and super quick exercise.
Great Companies: What are the struggles and challenges you face?
Mayank Pareek: Haha, we've hustled through a lot of them and thrived so far. Initially to build a product that is first of its kind, Building the right team, financial issues like any other startup, we too have gone through them all. The biggest challenge we faced as first time entrepreneurs was finding the best solution for the chicken or the egg situation. When we approached the students, they were like what do we do when you don't have any scholarship right now, and the corporates would tell us, what do we do with you, when you don't even have a significant number of students.
Integral team members, ones we were heavily dependent upon for the technical part of the work, left us for reasons of their own. Finally around February last year, at a Hackathon in DAII-CT, Gandhinagar, where I was invited as a judge and a speaker, we got 3 fabulous young guys who joined us as interns, and now have become the core of the company. They are the backbone and the super heros of Scholify and it'll be unfair not to mention their names, Souma Kanti Ghosh, Ujjwal Tiwari, and Shubham Rai. Another pillar for the company has been Manoj Kumar, who has been with me from day 1 and he's the man who does the magic with his stupendulous design work. Besides all the hardships, I am not at all hesitant to say that we are a small but a super strong team of 5, and I couldn't be more proud of this team to have come this far.
Great Companies: How do you plan to grow in the future? What does 5 years down the line look like for Scholify?
Mayank Pareek: We plan to continue serving India and Indian students for the next few years to make the world's biggest student scholar's community by helping many more students win scholarships and complete their studies, debt-free. This can be expedited rapidly by working with organizations with prescribed CSR budgets who want to invest towards promoting education. Education is the best tool to deal with most of the problems we are facing today in the country.
We are planning a series of new things to be added to Scholify's offerings and will keep rolling them out in phases. We have plans of taking Scholify global and extend our offerings to students around the world. The vision is to make Scholify a synonym to the term, Scholarship!
Great Companies: If you had one piece of advice to someone just starting out, what would it be?
Mayank Pareek: It has to be our tagline, #KeepMovingForward, no matter who says what. If you are confident and have the right intent, sooner or later things will fall in place. Even in the worst, you'll end up growing as an individual, with experience and learning beyond usual. Also, as a personal suggestion, never, I repeat, NEVER take a plunge into entrepreneurship thinking it's cool and fancy. It's a journey of hardships, sacrifices, sleepless nights that is sure to give you the experience of a lifetime along with a lot of grey hair.
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