A small town simpleton with a Masters degree in engineering from IIT Kanpur set out to begin his own startup venture with only one dream, of making learning fun and interesting. He began Mocept against many odds to help and provide students with a learning experience using interactive media content.
Speaking about his business idea, Gomathi Sankar, Founder and CEO, Mocept says, “For a long time, I had an idea to start a business which will make learning fun for students and candidates preparing for competitive exams. The best way to make it interactive is through an audio visual medium and Mocept was born.”
Where It All Began
I noticed that while preparing for engineering entrance exams, many aspirants find cracking the English Language segment quite a challenge. Some also take special coaching to improve their diction, vocabulary and the language on the whole. However, not every aspirant can afford to take expensive coaching for English apart from other subjects.
Thus, I wanted to start a company which would help such students improve their command over English without spending money and yet learn it in the most interactive way.
I had a good career going for me. A comfortable salary was taking care of the EMIs and my family’s needs. But my ambition was to start my own venture. To get a feel of what it takes to get a company off the ground, I quit my well-paying job to work in startups and spent 6 years in such companies. Finally, in 2013, I decided to venture on my own. I was excited to start my own company but was also worried about the future as at the time of starting up, I was the only earning member of the family. But as the team starting to fall in place and our first product hit the app store which was downloaded lakhs of times, I can today say that starting Mocept was one of the best decisions of my life.
Illustrate – Our First Product
The dictionary has been around for more than 100 years now, however, its look and feel hasn’t changed much. It’s the official text book one can use to check meanings of various words. We wanted to deliver the same content in a more interactive manner so that it actually helps learners to retain the vocabulary and even learn to use those words in the right context. The idea was in development for more than three years, during which we also reviewed two major competitors in the US and found that their apps focused on certain things like the words that can be shown but didn’t focus on narration. The team identified this as a gap and filled it with Mocept first product Illustrate- the video dictionary. It currently has 20,000 plus words covered. Illustrate now uses a visual medium to not only explain meanings of English words but also their usage in the right context.
Diversifying Into Quizzing
We felt an interactive quiz is a natural extension and hence also launched Word Quiz, a quiz app for English learning based on the video content we had created for the video dictionary. The user response and engagement was very encouraging. With the success of the previous products we decided to go that extra mile to engage individuals in various subjects through a quiz app and launched Freehit Quiz with Cricket as one of the early topics, this year. The app became an instant hit among the cricket lovers and user engagement levels went up as high as 11 minutes, which is higher than the industry average. This validated our business idea. Recently, we have added movies quiz too in Freehit. It’s movies section has more than 10 topics ranging from Hollywood to Bollywood to regional Indian cinema; the cricket section has 20 topics, popular subjects being — World Cup, ODI, T20, Tests, Legends of Cricket, team names and many more.
The app also constantly shows pop up news and opinions that are related to and cinema. In its new avatar, the game hosts daily tournaments which will now be a part of the app for the movie as well as the cricket section, where players can challenge their friends to test their movie or cricket IQ and stand a chance to win e- gift vouchers worth Rs 500.
Freehit Quiz organises ‘Mega Tournaments’, where winners will have a chance to win exciting prizes worth Rs 10,000. To make Freehit accessible to a larger audience, Mocept has also added multi-lingual capabilities to it. Fans can now choose to play in Hindi. Currently, more than 15% of the total user base accesses Freehit quiz in Hindi. The plan is to add at least 4 more languages for the users. Freehit has been downloaded more than a lakh times and has 5.5 million questions answered in a short span of its launch.
Both Illustrate and Freehit are available on leading platforms like Android and iOS. What a lot of people do not know is that we have the world’s largest Video Dictionary, we have the highest number of cricket questions in the Android Play store and we have the widest variety of vocabulary topics in the word quiz.
Team Mocept
A company is as good as its team. I firmly believe in it and that’s why I feel it is the Mocept team which has enabled our apps become a success among its users. Our team consists of Animation Video Artists, English Language Experts, Mobile Application Developers, Cloud Computing Engineers, and Social Media Marketing Experts. These energetic and driven professionals include a management team of visionaries. We believe, with a dynamic team like this, Mocept is set to transform the e-learning in mobiles and tablets which sets us apart from the rest.
In the first year, a team of 20 highly talented professionals created more than 3,000 minutes of video content. The current team size has the capability to add more than 600 minutes video per month. This video production is scalable with team size growing as per the business requirements.
We are always on a lookout for new talent and we have also begun our internship programs for young minds. For each internal project we select 2 to 3 interns from the IT field. One could always write to us if interested.
Expansion Plans
This app has engaged the smart phone quiz loving users, it has attracted attention from major brands who are looking at Freehit as a medium to reach out to their relevant audience. Recently, we signed up MapmyIndia as our first sponsor for Freehit where they sponsored a weekly mega tournament where the cricket quiz was all about location as MapmyIndia is a market leader in providing location based services. We are in talks with other such brands whose target audience is similar to ours — Smart phone users.
Our vision is to build applications that help improve one’s knowledge through interactive mediums. The Freehit Quiz app with cricket and movie segments that is available on Android went live on iOS platform last week. On a daily basis we add new topics to the movie quiz section. Since the inception of the movie genre the engagement time has gone up by 25% and the number of daily users has gone up by 30% which in comparison to other similar apps is a much higher percentage. We have also focused our time and energy on making the app perform at a greater speed as we believe that delivery of speed for an engaging app such as Freehit is an important asset. While one is completing a challenge the next set of questions is already queued in the interest of saving time. To maximize our reach, Mocept apps will be available in multiple languages.
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Mocept: Visit their website