Practically Success Story

Practically Success Story The lockdown induced by the Covid-19 pandemic has produced a paradigm shift in learners’ behavior leading to an exponential increase in the demand for EdTech products in India. The global education market is worth $6 Trillion out of which $10 Bn is the size of what the Indian education market will be by 2025. There are 100 Million learners in Practically’s target segment India, which is largely the private school student population.

Practically is an intelligent, interactive and immersive learning app for students of classes 6-12 with a focus on STEM learning. Being the only such product in the world, Practically combines gamification techniques, immersive learning assets, test-prep and AI-assisted study buddy in one compact cross-platform app. 3,30,000+ students have already benefited from the engaging content on Practically platform, which has the largest content library of world-class 3000+ 3D videos, 1000+ AR experiences & simulations, all created in-house.

Practically – Company Highlights

• Startup Name-Practically
• Parent Organization-3rdFlix Visual Effects Pvt Ltd
• Founders-Subbarao Siddabattula (CEO), Ilangovel Thulasimani (CTO), Charu Noheria (COO)
• Founding Year-2018
• Funding-$14 mn
• Headquarters-Hyderabad
• Sector-Edtech
• Website-practically.com

Practically – About

Practically is an intelligent, interactive, and immersive learning app for students of classes 6-12 with a focus on STEM learning. It is the only experiential learning app that brings learning alive through immersive videos, interactive augmented reality and 3D simulations.

3,30,000+ students have already benefited from the engaging content on Practically platform, which has the largest content library of world-class 3000+ 3D videos, 1000+ AR experiences & simulations, all created in-house.

Practically AI Buddy – PROTON

Practically offers a unique solution for schools. The new-age classroom experience for teachers and students, through the Practically School Solution, focuses on futuristic content, gamification, and distraction-free classes. The platform is currently free for all teachers and schools. Practically has come up with a unique tool, which gives teachers the AI-based insights and real-time data analytics of student attentiveness in the virtual classroom, and helps them to come up with alternative teaching solutions such as a pop-quiz or playing a subject related, simulation videos, thereby making learning fun, interactive and distraction-free.

Practically is a young, insurgent brand from a team of energetic people who passionately believe in reshaping the way the world learns. It believes that there is a hidden explorer embedded within us, which is often stifled by the rigid notions of conventional education. Practically aims to nurture that explorer within every learner and unleash their true potential for limitless learning. Practically uses cutting-edge technologies to render experiential learning to the students. Its primary objective is to improve the rate of retention for students to more than 90% by using a new-age learning methodology and experiential content.

Practically – Vision and Objective

Practically’s aim is to be the ‘Most trusted and preferred’ EdTech brand globally. It will be looking at expanding pan India, one more international market followed by other markets with a collective reach of 20M users by 2025.

Although the near-term plan is to expand into other English-speaking countries globally, It is also exploring with partners in countries where there is a need for content in other languages as Practically’s immersive animated video content can be easily localized.

Practically – Indian Edtech Market Details

The global education market is worth $6 Trillion out of which $10 Bn is the size of what the Indian education market will be by 2025 (Source: Inc42). There are 100 Million learners in Practically’s target segment India, which is largely the private school student population.

Growth of Indian Edtech Ecosystem in 5 years

The Indian EdTech ecosystem has raised nearly $2.2 billion in 2020 alone, whereas it attracted only $4 billion over the last five years. Over the last three years, this segment has received total funding of $31 million.

The education sector in India is expected to be a $117 billion market with currently around 360 million learners, out of which around $49 billion is spent on school education. Traditionally, this sector has seen low investor interest however thanks to COVID, several startups have mushroomed and may have been funded as well. This is a watershed moment for EdTech as the next decade is the decade for e-learning companies.

The EdTech sector is witnessing unprecedented growth owing to the increasing adoption of technology during the pandemic. The team at Practically believe that technology adoption in the education sector is yet to see its peak and the growth trajectory is likely to continue beyond the pandemic years. The lockdown induced by the pandemic has brought an ever-increasing demand for EdTech products in India. Consumers are becoming more aware of the offerings and accessibility thus leading to new innovations in learning. With steep competition, players need to modify their offerings to engage consumers constantly.

Practically – Founders and Team

Subbarao Siddabattula (Founder & CEO), Ilangovel Thulasimani (Co-Founder & CTO), and Charu Noheria (Co-founder & COO) started Practically in 2018.

Founders of Practically

Charu Noheria 

Charu Noheria is the Co-Founder and Chief Operating Officer of Practically. In 2018, she co-founded Practically, an experiential learning app for STEM, and has been working to revolutionize the education landscape for the last seven years. Charu has a bachelor’s degree in engineering (Computer Science) from R.V. College of Engineering, Bangalore, and an MBA from the University of Illinois-Urbana Champaign. She has over 12 years of corporate experience in operations, technology, strategy, and managing global teams. Noheria began her career as a software engineer at Samsung where she developed mobile applications. Later, she joined Lumeris Inc. – one of the largest value-based healthcare IT firms in the United States, as a Strategic Leadership Development Associate and quickly moved up the ranks to become Director-Technology Partnerships.

Ilangovel Thulasimani 

Ilango is a hardcore techie and was VP, Enterprise Architecture at Lumeris prior to starting Practically. He loves to roll up his sleeves and get his hands dirty with code. He has worked with some big names in the industry such as eBay, Quikr, etc. Ilango leads product development and technology at Practically.

Currently, 300+ employees are associated with Practically. While its focus so far has been on Andhra Pradesh and Telangana states in India, Practically is working aggressively on expanding pan-India in 2021 and adding over 2000 employees by December 2021.

Practically History – How it Started?

Reminiscing the inspiration to start Practically, Charu Noheria says – “Being part of the competitive rat race for IITs in India back in the day, all I remembered from that experience was stress in learning. I dropped a year, switched five engineering streams, and changed 3 colleges during the 18 months I struggled to get my footing right. Unconsciously this left a lasting mark on me and I was always attracted towards unconventional ways of learning which are away from rote learning. This inspired me to develop a model which will make education easy as well as a fun activity”

Practically’s Journey of Ideation, Designing & Prototyping

Practically is an outcome of deep-rooted insights based on several man-years of study around children’s learning & retention modes leading to the innovative use of new-age tech tools such as AR to provide an immersive learning experience for children.

Charu Noheria (Co-founder & COO, Practically) added – “The three of us- Subba, Ilango and myself were colleagues at Lumeris Inc., in the USA and in the hallways of our workplace is where those very first conversations of Practically began. When my co-founders and I were bouncing off ideas to pursue, it became apparent that we all shared the excitement for tech-based, non-traditional methods of teaching and learning. We all wanted to make some of those very dry subjects more interesting, engaging and fun for learners around the world”

Practically – Product and USP

It also aims to make everything that a learner needs available on a single app helping the parent pay for a single product containing content, simulations/AR, test prep, analytics/feedback, gamification, doubt resolution, live classes, coding, summer programs.

Bringing back joy into learning and using tech to create life-like experiences, Practically uses AI to empower teachers. Practically helps teachers with intelligent insights into their student population, helps them auto-generate question papers, correct answers, giving them 2 hours of operational time back and impacting their experience in teaching overall, making classes engaging and effective.

Practically Platform

Practically is built on Edgar Dale’s ‘Cone of Learning’; we retain 10% of what we read, 50% of what we see and hear, and increasingly more to 90% when we learn by doing. The more dramatic the experience, the more lasting the recall, and most concepts that are dry can be taught with experiential learning.

Practically’s vision is to reshape the way the world learns. It aims to bring modern methods to the everyday teaching process and empower teachers to use the power of visualization and experiential content to transform dry subject areas into jaw-dropping experiences. Its objective is to enable classrooms with a ‘learning by doing’ approach and increase the rate of retention of students to more than 90% for key subjects like math and science and to make learning more fun and engaging.

Practically – Brand Name, Logo and Proposition
Brand Name – Practically

The team wanted to name the product in line with its vision. As the founders believe in a practical approach towards learning, they liked Practically for the name of the product. Simple yet powerful as the need of the hour is to revolutionize education with immersive and experiential content and encourage practical learning.

Brand Logo

The team chose the colors yellow and red as it signifies passion, warmth, and learning all of which are deep-seated in Practically’s DNA. “We are a passionate group of people who are dedicated to the cause of reshaping the way the world learns!” says Charu Noheria.

Brand Proposition

Charu Noheria adds – “Learning Alive was a core message that we had arrived basis a brand workshop which also tied into our core feature of immersive and experiential learning that brings learning to life. We made it purposeful and more action-oriented and arrived at our brand proposition – Bring Learning Alive”

Practically – Business Model and Revenue Model

Practically primarily has two channels for customer acquisition

These free customers, both from B2C and B2B2C, then act as a top of the funnel for downstream monetization efforts through its on-ground and virtual sales agents who directly engage parents and students for paid subscriptions on the app. Practically’s demo to paid conversion rate is more than 30% which is substantially higher than any other product out there. Paid subscriptions can be monthly, annually, or multi-year with an ARPU of > $400.

Practically’s Launch and Initial User Acquisition

Practically launched its beta app in Jan 2020 across two large clients in AP/TS for testing the waters. It received a phenomenal response with over 13k students downloading the app over a 30 day period. This cohort became its first user base and learnings from this pilot were instrumental to get to a commercial launch in April 2020.

Practically’s B2B2C strategy of going through schools by providing them FREE Practically School Solution worked great for the initial mass acquisition of users. It had schools from various nooks and corners of India using the platform and onboarding thousands of students for free onto the product

Practically’s Key Strategies and Marketing Campaign

The product uniqueness is its biggest selling point with users. An experiential product with this quality and grade has never been seen by an Indian consumer. Practically makes sure to be a part of the learning journey of a child and have multiple touchpoints with the student and the parent. It offers doubt resolution services, mentorship programs, and summer workshops which further fuel retention. Practically recently started spending on marketing and growth hacking efforts. It will be more aggressive towards the marketing efforts in 2021.

Practically’s Most Successful Marketing Campaign

Practically’s first-ever brand campaign around the theme – ‘Bring Learning Alive’ in December 2020 helped garner 3x growth and the app has successfully crossed 330,000 downloads to date. The TVCs have garnered over 32 million+ views combined on YouTube and seen above average and consistent view rates, even after two months of launch, indicating relevance and popularity of the campaign amongst the target audience. This has been one of the highest by an EdTech company in India, without celebrity endorsement, so far.

Practically Brand Campaign – ‘Bring Learning Alive’

Capital: Practically required substantial capital upfront to build unique life-like immersive and experiential content. It put in all profits from the existing product sale into this and also went in for its Series-A fundraise which helped the team achieve that. The team faced numerous challenges when it started scaling the business to all parts of the twin states of AP/TS as this needed a larger team and growth capital.  

New/Late entrant: Practically has been widely accepted with 330,000 downloads in a short span of time despite the brand being a relatively new entrant in this category launched in April 2020 amid the lockdown. While competition with deep pockets has been around for a decade, It kickstarted its first-ever brand campaign around the theme – ‘Bring Learning Alive’ which includes TV, Digital, Print, and Social Media Marketing with a regional focus on Andhra Pradesh and Telangana markets in December 2020 and the TVCs received a stupendous response with close to 32 million views combined on YouTube since its launch.

Tools used by Practically to run Company

Just like most technology companies, Practically uses tools to enhance productivity and products that give it operational excellence. It also recently launched its Sales CRM which is a fully customized solution for Practically’s rapidly growing sales team.

Practically – Recognition and Achievements

Practically was recently been awarded the title of ‘Most Innovative Stem Solution’ at World Education Summit – School Education 2021 organized by Elets Digital Learning.

The efforts of the team also received accolades at Startup Awards 2021, where Practically was bestowed with ‘Best EdTech Startup of the Year’ by Franchise India and Entrepreneur India magazine.

Practically – Growth and Future Plans

Currently, Andhra Pradesh and Telangana are Practically’s key markets. It just entered the South and West regions with a small team. It is working on expanding pan-India in 2021 and adding over 2000 employees by December 2021. 2021 will also see Practically entering the K-5 segment while currently, it does grades 6-12.

With the latest round of funding, the team expects to take Practically to the rest of the country by the end of 2021. As mentioned earlier, outside India, the Middle East is its focus market as it received very positive responses to its product. Practically will be partnering with many more schools there in 2021. It is also looking to move to another international market by the end of the year.

Practically – FAQs

Who are the founders of Practically?

Subbarao Siddabattula (CEO), Ilangovel Thulasimani (CTO), and Charu Noheria (COO) are the founders of Practically

How much funding has Practically raised?

Practically has raised total funding of $14 Million to date in Series A and Pre-Series B and Series B rounds.

What is Practically’s marketing campaign?

Practically’s first-ever brand campaign was around the theme – ‘Bring Learning Alive’

How does Practically make money?

Via Paid Subscriptions. Practically’s demo to paid conversion rate is more than 30%. Paid subscriptions can be monthly, annually, or multi-year with ARPU of > $400.

What is the USP of Practically?

Practically is an Immersive & Experiential ONE STOP SOLUTION for students, parents, teachers, and schools. Practically is the only such product in the world that combines gamification techniques, immersive learning assets, test-prep, and AI-assisted study buddy in one compact cross-platform app.