The situation
FIITJEE built its name in physical classrooms; myPAT was its bet on digital. The audience was unforgiving: students, parents, and educators in a market where every rupee of education spend is scrutinized, competition for attention is brutal, and the buying decision involves three different people with three different anxieties.
The constraint
Edtech in that era loved vanity growth: app installs, free signups, engagement charts. The business needed paying subscribers. The gap between "student signed up for a free test" and "parent paid for a plan" was where most edtech marketing quietly died, and closing it required treating the funnel as one system rather than a set of campaign silos.
What I built
- Hyper-personalized acquisition strategies segmented by student intent: exam, class year, and preparation stage, not demographics.
- Performance marketing and content working one funnel: content earned the trust, performance converted it.
- Lifecycle automation that moved free test-takers toward paid plans with behavior-triggered communication, built around the actual study calendar (exam cycles, result days, admission windows).
- Analytics connecting awareness spend to paid conversion, so budget decisions came from cost-per-paying-student, not cost-per-install.
What it taught me
Edtech was my first full-funnel ownership seat, and it hard-wired two habits: segment by intent rather than identity, and instrument the whole funnel before scaling any part of it. Those habits later scaled a Bitcoin marketplace and built an agency; they were learned convincing Indian parents that an online test series was worth paying for, which remains one of the harder sells I've ever worked.
The one idea worth stealing
When the buyer and the user are different people (parent and student, CFO and end user, board and team), the funnel is really two funnels braided together. Marketing that speaks to only one of them measures well and converts poorly.