Unstartup - Book Review

“Excellent case study for new age Internet startups to follow…” - Kunal Shah, Founder, CRED

Is it? Let’s find out! Rather, in Unacademy’s lingo, Let’s Crack It!

Unstartup is a book on Unacademy which represents the various facets of Unacademy’s growth and how it became a $3.44 Billion EdTech startup from being just a YouTube Channel.

To better assess my review, here’s a quick background about me. I have worked for 3 months with Unacademy wherein I worked under Mr. Balaji Ramachandran (Director, Business) and Mr. Kartavya Atri for domains like the Market Research, Design, Operations and Media and YouTube.

Onto the review, Nistha Tripathi has done a commendable job in writing this book which truly represents the essence of Unacademy’s fast paced world along with relevant insights from the top leadership. The book throws some light on the background of the co-founders i.e. Gaurav Munjal, Hemesh Singh and Roman Saini and progresses to show how ones’ passion has brought in a tremendous change in the education sector.

The book started with a foreword from Mr. Deepinder Goyal (Founder and CEO, Zomato) wherein he wrote about chasing impact and opportunity together along with his feelings towards the company and Gaurav. Highlighting the lives of its founders, Unacademy started as a passion project on YouTube wherein Gaurav and Roman posted videos on their forte subjects. Slowly and steadily, Gaurav found himself inclined towards making this project come to life and made a choice to transition from his then obligations. After putting across a founding team of 4 people including him, the company started with creating more content on YouTube and gradually became a platform. Explaining the company culture, brand values and an exceptional mentorship team for the company, the author did justice to the unconventional way this company has become through the word, “Unstartup”. It explains how the company did numerous experiments and how they learnt from instances and course corrected. Getting deeper, she also wrote on how much of an impact has Gaurav brought in with his personal expertise and agility. All in all, the book mentioned the most important things to note and blatantly pointed out the true market conditions and company insights which I personally can validate. Not just that, Unstartup also gives out important messages one needs to know in the journey to excellence, which makes it impact readers minds undoubtedly.

So the question arrives, should you read this book too? The answer is a YES! Anyone who is looking out to venture out or is working on creating a larger impact must read and ponder points on building long term relationships, constantly experimenting, creating a strong team, closing loops, value creation and tonnes of more things.

Kudos to Nistha for penning this beautiful real life story into bite sized chapters.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

My Learning Points:

As Deepinder rightly said, chase impact and opportunity together, it means how companies centred on value creation and excellence bring in a radical change. This comes in lieu with opportunities created and hence, things way ahead of their time fail.
Founders of a company are the tone setters for the organisation, so it is important for them to lead by example. Having said that, the right team that understands their vision for the company would help put things together with the vision communicated properly.
Aligning on core objectives and values is necessary for the bus to head into the right direction. Unless all drivers of the bus named “organisation” follow the same path it would be difficult for them to steer together. With the core team in the company making sure that these drivers are aligned on the path and are proactive yet agile, makes the company valuable.
Organisations must be built to experiment. Experimentation helps one find the right way to go about things. In Unacademy’s case, they had no revenue model in place when it started and with constant experimentation, they found their right fit with a Netflix like Subscription model that worked wonders for them.
Traction is an important element people tend to miss out on. With us living in this “hype” universe, traction remains at the core of how an organisation communicates to its audience and how it makes itself the elephant in the room. Traction channels can be very different for different organisations but it is an element deciding your fate in the noisy world.
Constant upgradations and a quest for perfection is required to make a product thrive. To make it useworthy, alignment of things need to be done and simplicity is required to make it work.
You start small, but with time passing by, you need to scale up with newer changes taking place into the industry and that is where organisations fail. To scale is to become bigger, which essentially means moving forward faster. Rightful metrics to scale are important and hence not being able to adapt to scalable conditions can mean reaching dead ends.
“Be a Sports Team, Not a Family” - Being one of the core values of Unacademy, it depicts how fast paced of an organisation it is. The way they have created a culture that thrives on new challenges and solves for the various problems their users face is commendable.
Unacademy experimented an unconventional organisational structure known as Pods wherein people working on the same project are put together in groups called Pods and are not grouped on basis of their skills or backgrounds. This yields effective results as the team has clarity and efficiency to work on it. Explanation - A team working on making the Live Classes possible is put in a pod unlike all software engineers, all managers put together. This is one of the most unconventional yet impactful thing for organisations to adopt.
Set the right metrics to assess your going and of all the other poles, the North Star metric defines what the company focuses more on. For Unacademy it is “Learner Satisfaction” which is subjective but can work wonders if worked upon rightfully. Similarly, choose the most important North Star metric and hence have 3-4 sub metrics that help you in reaching towards the North Star.
Primary focus of companies to earn higher revenues and profits proves to be disastrous whereas focusing on excellence and value creation for stakeholders proves to be successful.
Building the right and long term relationships on trust, value exchange and walking the road together can help one get cheers. Relationship building is not just confined to organisations but people too. Out of my personal experience, it is necessary to build good relations with everyone and contribute to make it valuable and exciting for everyone involved in it.
Grit, perseverance and the quest to solve problems helps in achieving excellence.

fin