Pady Srinivasan Co-Founder Clay6 along with Balaji Thirumalai. Prior to Clay6, Pady was the CEO of Geazy technologies, which developed software solutions for digital marketing for used car dealerships in the US. Pady has 20 years of work experience in the software industry working in Fidelity, Adobe and various startups. He has a Masters in Computer Science from Boston university and an Integrated Masters in Mathematics from IIT Kanpur. Clay6.com is a Free resource for students to get better at their exams through practice. Currently, Clay6 offers unlimited practice tests for CBSE, JEE and AIPMT.
Pady recollects the days when he began selling with his MVP of a few lessons and tests. Pady began targeting individual schools and tutorials. He began focusing on the top schools in Chennai and also on MBA tutorials all over South India to begin with. He realized that he had to convince multiple people (5 to 6 of them including the principal, correspondent, students, teachers, parent teacher associations) in the schools . Many a times, even the parents felt that the students were overloaded with studies and hence cannot take up one more course and they also thought that they were paying money to the school and hence they were not convinced about the need to pay extra money and the entire initiative was derailed in-spite of him convincing multiple stakeholders within the schools.
Pady felt that doing a pilot was one good way to demonstrate the value of the course to the entire eco-system. He realized that the teachers anyway teach everything and gives homework to the students and they perceive that this is extra work which has delayed the purchase in the earlier situations. He began the discussions with the teachers and started understanding the problems they faced in their day to day work and then began positioning the tool according to that problem. For eg, if the teacher were to say that teaching is not a problem but time to cover the syllabus is a problem or availability of supplementary materials is the problem, he began demonstrating how his tool solved that pain point and convinced them. He also began demonstrating the biggest advantage the tool gave to the teacher is that the tool gives analytics on which chapters the students are weak in and that helped the teachers to spend more time on those concepts to the students and made them skilful. Then he went and did a pilot in the school, the pilot took about 3 to 6 months and when the school had to take the decision at the end of the pilot, he was surprised by the feedback . Even though the students/principals liked the system and its effectiveness, the students felt that they had to take this as an additional exam/effort and he had to convince the students, teachers and in some cases, the parent teacher association that this can be interwoven as a part of their curriculum by replacing their exams frequently and still get more benefits out of the similarity in depth of the questions and the analytics that would come out of the tool which made their lives easier.
Pady then used the combination of how this tool can be made as a part of the school teaching methodology in addition to the benefits of reduction in the cost, reduction in the time to teach, increase in confidence in students, increase in skill sets of students etc was able to convince the schools to buy. Once he got his first set of schools, the other schools have begun exploring Clay6.
Pady’s advice to the early stage founders – “Fitting in your solution as part of the customers day is extremely important and customers will buy once they are convinced in this aspect They will delay the purchase or will not buy if they feel that your solution is an add on or a burden”
Today Clay6 has about 4000 registered users on both mobile as well as web and also has marquee schools in the client list for engineering, medical, 12th standard supplementary courses.
