In conversation with Rishabh Singh, the Co-Founder of Widhya.
As aspiring professionals, we are all caught in the paradoxical loop. We need the experience to get a job and a job to get experience. The only way to get experience as a fresher is through internships and even they are so hard to get for a lot of us. As people who have faced this problem themselves, Rishabh and Rahul set out to solve this problem through their startup, Widhya.
Tell us about your Startup Inception Story & Founding Members?
My college room-mate Rahul and I started Widhya when we were students. Both of us when applying to internships realized that many students were not getting any internships because they belonged to a different background, lacked skills or had low GPA. We then found the need for students to undertake industrial training of choice, irrespective of the area of the background or specialization and internships are the only way to do that. On the other hand, recruiters find it tough to hire the right talent because of the many applications they receive. I realized this after talking to my supervisors during my internships in 3 different countries. We intend to break this pattern and help companies make smarter and faster recruitments. And this is why we started Widhya, to solve problems faced by both students and recruiters. Our “Learning by Doing” approach on the lines of the Progressive Learning Theory which has time and again proved to be the most effective way of learning for students and our performance evaluation criteria defined by unique KPIs, which recommends top candidates to companies helps us to stay become on of the best and most efficient e-learning and hiring platforms in India.
How do you wish to make an impact on society?
The graduate unemployment rate is at an all-time high. Students lack real-time industrial exposure which is where we step in. We take projects from various companies and convert them into “gamified” experiences called Missions available for students to solve on our platform. Each of these Missions is split into subdivisions called “Micro-tasks” to facilitate progressive learning, making all tasks beginner-friendly to solve. We aim to make one million students “Industry Ready” in the next couple of years through our learning by doing approach.
How did you face the challenges accompanied by the success and failure in your life?
Every challenge we faced in the past turned out to be a learning outcome for us. From bootstrapping the company without any investment to becoming profitable and having users from 10+ countries, we faced multiple challenges at each and every step. Tackling problems with someone you share good chemistry with gives you a better edge towards solving problems more efficiently. We continue to face upcoming challenges by seeing them as new learning opportunities!
What is your vision for the future?
Our vision is to make every student in the nation, industry-ready by equipping them with relevant skills through learning by doing in a gamified manner.
Impacts of the Pandemic and the steps that you have taken to overcome the crisis?
The pandemic actually helped us as this was when both of us(founders) decided to postpone our plans for our higher education and focus rigorously on developing the product. It also gave us a little boost to launch in the market because the whole world was going online.
What do you think about the Startup culture in Hyderabad and how can it be enhanced?
Hyderabad’s startup ecosystem is extremely diverse and most of the founders are just a click away to seek mentorship or collaboration which makes the culture very healthy. These days, more and more student entrepreneurs are coming up with new and innovative ideas. It would be great to have a functional incubator at the college level to fast-track the growth of student led startups. Right now, Widhya is being facilitated by India’s largest incubator T-hub, having such an entity in the city helps keep raising the bar of innovation and competition.
Message for budding entrepreneurs?
Execution is the only way to find out if a plan is good or bad. Never shy away from trying out new things.
Widhya is trying to solve a double-edged problem. They are trying to solve the problem for students who want to gain some hands-on experience to get the right job as well as the companies who want to hire the right candidates having real-time industry exposure by gamifying the whole experience with real projects from various companies aggregated on one single platform.
