Started as a pilot programme in August 2022, the edtech major has now hosted around 650 demo classes, and has about 100 teachers under this service, people aware of the matter told ET.
The new offering, Byju’s Home Tuitions, is currently available across all pin codes in the city, a customer service representative of the firm told ET on enquiry.
A Byju’s spokesperson declined to comment, saying it’s too early of a pilot to be sharing details about.
Currently, Byju’s is taking registrations for home tuitions only for science and maths. It has been running advertisements on social media for at least a week. ET has seen these advertisements.
The hourly demo class is priced at Rs 500, which gets adjusted with the monthly fee of about Rs 6,000, without discount, for five days-a-week hourly class.
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This was a price point for a fifth standard student studying under the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) board.Internally, Byju’s is undergoing a revamp functionally following a tumultuous 2022, with a delay in reporting financials, unpaid loans, governance and layoffs of about 10,000 staffers. Earlier this month, the edtech unicorn implemented a four-tier internal sales process, replacing its existing direct sales programme, after it came under scrutiny for allegedly mis-selling its products to consumers.
The home tutoring space is extremely fragmented in India.
While it is still in pilot stages, experts said a challenge for Byju’s in this space is disintermediation, wherein tutors undercut the company’s pricing by teaching the existing students directly and going independent.
An investor from an early-stage fund – that has evaluated edtech firms – said unit economics in home tuitions would be hard for Byju’s to pull off.
“It does not look like Byju’s has thought this out too deeply,” the person told ET. “Byju’s is probably exploring adjacencies with its existing offline centre network to maximise revenues. The other way to make this work would be to hire extremely low-end salaried teachers.”
Business models in the larger tutoring space otherwise have struggled to scale rapidly over the years, the investor added.
Byju’s advertisements online to attract potential tutors call for candidates among homemakers, school teachers, freshers, working professionals, and students pursuing relevant undergraduate or postgraduate studies. It also mandates ownership of a two-wheeler or four-wheeler with a valid driving licence.
“Making money from home tuition is hard,” said Rakesh Kalra, founder of UrbanPro, an aggregator of tutors. “Generally, an experienced tutor does not want to do home tuitions. Their first preference would be online, even before the pandemic. The second preference would be that students go to them and they teach in a group. Typically, those tutors starting out in their career go home to teach,” he told ET.
Vidhu Goyal, founder of Wonk, said the pricing of Rs 6,000 per month is largely in line with industry standards. The 2016-founded Wonk helps its users with tutor discovery and booking across 50,000 pin codes in about 50 cities.
Narayanan Ramaswamy, national leader of education and skill development practice at KPMG India, told ET, “What Byju’s is doing is a logistics play. ‘I have a steady supply of teachers and I have a big market where tuition is needed,’ and they are trying to address this via at-home teaching solutions.”