Studium BI Products

Industry

Ed-tech

Timeline

Jan 2025 - May 2025

Organization

Studium Tech

My Role

Business Intelligence & Strategy

Team

1 External advisor, 2 interns, CEO

Type

Live project

Description

Studium is a B2B SaaS platform for University Accreditations. Along with the core Accreditation product, it provides a set of supporting modules. These modules help in added value & complement & help the core modules do their job smoothly. We built a new module providing analytics from crucial data for the institutes, like Research, NIRF & Alumni data; which was later spun-off into separate products. This project involved Business Intelligence as well as Business Strategy, as it would help make Studium's conversion rate far better than it was. I lead this project & worked directly with the CEO on it.

The start: capturing more value

In the education industry, there's a lot of data that is publicly available but just sits there without anybody using it to their advantage. This doesn't really appear as a problem, but when you compile it, process it & position it as a decision-making & research tool its value starts to be evident.

This project started when I was tinkering with one such publicly available source- NIRF Accreditation Reports. These were public reports of the top ranking institutes in the last year's NIRF. Every report contained a ton of data-points & when combined, patterns would start to appear. I thought why not compile all available data & create a product for comparative analysis, which other institutes could use to know where they stand.

How the module came to be

I had no idea about BI or data analytics, but the CEO saw potential in this. So we built a pipeline from start to end-

Compiled all the discipline-wise reports from the past years (Management, Research, etc.)

Extracted all relevant data out of the reports using python bots (needed some help from the developers here ;)

Took 50 odd raw datapoints, processed the data & output a comparative analysis of any institute across 20+ different metrics.

We worked with an advisor to figure out the front-end of this module, in a BI tool called Google Data Studio.

Thus, we had the first working prototype of the module ready.

If your institute had gone through the NIRF cycle, all you had to do was input the data from your report & you could compare yourself with the top 100 institutes in the country. It was an interesting new value proposition for institute owners.

Similar to NIRF reports, research & alumni data also represented untapped opportunity. After NIRF, we focused on these two areas to design similar modules for research & alumni data.

ORCiD & Google Scholar profiles of institute faculty had a ton of research data available, which together showed the larger picture on how the institute as a whole is doing on the research front.

Some metrics we got were:

  • No. of publications & types

  • h-index & i-index

  • Citations per faculty, publication & year

  • Top journals published

Linkedin also had rich data of how alumni were doing, years after graduating. When compiled, this data gave institutes a retrospective validation of their efforts for students- right from curriculum to placements.

Some metrics we got were:

  • Current demographics

  • Industry-wise spread

  • Seniority

  • Major employers

Solving the business problem

As we were validating these new modules with pilots with out existing clients, we were working on officially launching them as offerings. The initial thought was including them as peripherals bundled with the core product, as was the norm with other peripheral modules. But that's when it hit us. Studium had a problem we could solve using this:

So we came up with a new GTM strategy:

Spin-off these BI modules all as separate products.

The core product costed ₹X,XX,XXX but these smaller products would only cost ₹XX,XXX, proportional to the value they provided.

Relatively low ticket product like that could be signed-off on by the principal alone. This meant fewer approvals to complete the sale.

Which in-turn meant a shorter sales cycle.

Once they'd already been in the ecosystem for some time & had a good experience, it would be much easier to pitch the core product, as the precedent was already there.

This way Studium would increase its conversion rate fast.

Our existing clients showed a lot of interest in these new products, validating the value they provided to the top management. So we went forward with the new GTM, eventually developing the products in code & moving away from Data studio.

Impact that we had…

Top management now had a better picture of their institute's health on various crucial fronts like research & student progression.

Comparing with other institutes, they could set a benchmark that was right for them.

Institutes could now try out working with us before spending huge amounts of money.

The business gained a new sales channel & a GTM strategy.