Developing India’s study material sharing platform – NotesHub.co.in

Its been more than 3 years now since we started building a study material sharing platform – NotesHub. We (my team and me) started developing this platform for our class in 2016 and since then we have managed to scale it to a million page views per month from more than 10,000 students across 12 colleges in Delhi.

The Idea

The idea behind it is simple – Help each other, no matter how big or how small the help is. I realized early in college that college is one CONFUSING place to be. Everybody wants to study but everyone is confused about what to study and where to study it from. The probability of you landing good notes/study material is directly proportional to how strong your network is.

At the same time, I realized that in college the majority of students are really helpful and they don’t mind taking out 5 min to share the study material they have over WhatsApp or Google Drive. But then again, this makes the whole process of sharing material very unstructured. So, I, along with my team realized that all students need a simple platform where they can upload study material they have today so that:

1. Other students can access them and study from them
2. Juniors (the next batch) will have all the material already complied for them in one place
3. It will become a point of reference for the student uploading material – he/she can access the same material from anywhere later onwards.t

Therefore, we built the platform and now the NotesHub community has understood that:

No one has ever become poor by giving.

– Anny Frank

The Learnings

I won’t be able to pen down all the learnings this simple product has taught me. 2019 is almost over I am still intrigued by the potential of this product.

One thing that has constantly been troubling in developing this product is the excuses and procrastination on my end. Due to this, there have been some incumbents in the market now which is catering to the same niche. I personally know that this is a big fuck up on my end but yes I am determined to rectify it in the coming days and weeks.

We have been working on scaling the product for quite some time and I am focusing on launching the product before 2020. There will be some sleepless nights ahead but I am confident that we’ll pull this off.

Modules under development

Today, while working on the uploading and favorites module, I realized how awesome this is going to be for the students in the coming year and if the students start contributing to the platform, this will be one of the biggest ed-tech platforms out there.

The volume of traffic that we have been experiencing is constant from the last 1 year. The fact that it is in 1 city – 1 university – 1 course and still have been generating such traffic is pretty rad.

Even though the tech will be ready, it has to generate money and for that, we need a recurring and sound business model. We have thought of a few things but let’s see if we can execute them.

Sacrifice and Time management

In the coming few weeks, we have to launch the product, all we need to do is work every day. There is no other option if we need to get the product out. There will be sacrifices and I would have to adhere to a strict schedule by then.