Launching Gain and Shine at College (2023)Archived
We gave the APSCHE pitch again, this time to our own college. A hall full of second and final years, and an idea about who should be allowed to teach.
This is the one I have wanted to write for a long time.
After the APSCHE final round the college treated us differently. Reaching that stage brought them some recognition, and the same management that had no particular interest in us before was now willing to listen.
So we asked to present Gain and Shine to the college itself.
The room
Second years and final years, gathered into one hall.
Same deck we had taken to Vijayawada, delivered on home ground. Pavan took the high end of it this time and covered most of the explanation.
What we were actually annoyed about
We hated the course teaching culture.Not any particular company. The shape of the thing. Someone records a course once, sells it forever, and the person on the other end never talks to anyone who does the work for a living.
Gain and Shine came out of that irritation rather than out of a market opportunity. We did not plan for traction. We wanted to build something and see whether people would come.
The idea
Two tracks, running together.
Our own courses. Pavan started recording them. We made the material ourselves and put it out, and people could take it here or take it anywhere else they wanted. Nothing locked.
Everything already free. There is an enormous amount of good material out there that nobody points you at. Gain and Shine collected it and put the links up as resources, so you did not have to work out where to start alone.
Then, across both, real developers brought in to teach whatever topic people were on. Someone from Google, from Microsoft, from wherever that thing is actually done. Not slotted into a curriculum, dropped in where the learning was happening.
We were learning at the same time as everyone else, and that was the point rather than something to hide.
The reasoning was simple arithmetic.
There are millions of developers. In the Telugu states alone there are lakhs of them, working across every kind of company.
If even a small number of those people are willing to teach for an hour, or for twelve days, that is not a hard ask. It is not a full-time commitment and it is not a charity case. Most people will do an hour for students if somebody organises it properly.
The argument at APSCHE
This is where it did not fit.
The panel wanted a company. They wanted to know how it becomes a business, what gets sold, where the revenue is. That is a reasonable question at an innovation award, and it was not the question we had gone there to answer.
I did not come to sell courses. The thing we were building was mentorship while you learn, on top of resources that are already free. Take money out of it and it still works. Put money into it and it becomes the exact thing we started out annoyed about.
That was the disagreement, and we did not win it.
Founders
What came of it
Good recognition from the room. People stayed after, asked questions, wanted to know when it was starting.
We had real connections lined up with people who could have taught, and the plan was further along than a college pitch usually is.
After that we kept working on it, slower, building toward the same thing. Gain and Shine still exists.
What I take from that day is not the launch. It is that a room full of students recognised the problem instantly, because they were living inside it, and nobody had ever asked them about it before.