Interviewed by Anisha Saha, MBR Team

MBR: Sohopathi is the first social learning platform in Bangladesh for peer to peer learning. Please tell us how you came up with idea of Sohopathi?

Sohopathi: Our founding team, comprising 4 members, have the collective experience of teaching more than 10,000 students across the country over the last 8 years. We started teaching from the beginning of our university life in different regions of Bangladesh. As a result, we have closely observed that there is a considerable gap between students in urban and rural areas due to the scarcity of qualified teachers. We visited many schools in different districts of the country where specialized teachers of various subjects were not available, but it did not stop the students’ eagerness to learn by any means. We were deeply moved by these situations and wanted to create an impact in all of these auspicious yet underprivileged students’ lives. Thus, we tried to teach many such students personally, but we soon found out that it was not possible to help each and every student with such a small group of educators; rather we needed to build up a huge community to make a longlasting impact.

In this regard, technology is always the best resort to come up with a scalable solution. All of our co-founders were students from the same university with computer science majors, so we were very quick to develop a technological solution through our first version of our website in 2018, which was an open academic problem solving and content sharing platform for students. That is how “Sohopathi” was born. From day one until today, we have been working continuously with the same vision to create a sustainable social community for education.

MBR: One of the core features of Sohopathi is to connect students & educators from all across the country. Please share with us about the services you offer which set you apart from your competitors?

Sohopathi: The current ed-tech platforms in Bangladesh are mainly focused on producing their own content and launching their own courses. As a result, the production cost of the content becomes very high, and so, it becomes relatively difficult to bring in a large pool of content together. More importantly, each student has their own learning style and learning needs. There is no single course or teacher who is best suited for each and every student. This is where “Sohopathi” works like a game-changer. Using our digital social platform, educators from anywhere can share their learning content and grow their own student fanbase. They can also launch paid courses and manage his/her online classes building their own brand and also get access to all the utility tools for online teaching management. Since, we are aggregating the contents from educators all across the country, we are building a pool of diverse educational content unlike any other platform. On top of that, we have a content recommendation engine that suggests the students with the best suitable content and educators, for their learning style. These features make “Sohopathi”- a highly scalable platform, both in terms of content production and targeted personalized learning.

MBR: Sohopathi has come to market just before the pandemic. What are the major challenges that you have faced during this pandemic? Can you share with us how you overcame those challenges to bounce back?

Sohopathi: When the COVID-19 situation started, we already had launched our paid services in the market with a fair amount of dedicated students regularly subscribing to the paid courses. Even though the pandemic situation forced people to shift to the online learning paradigm, a big challenge was to build credibility among the users through online marketing. Most of our superusers came from different suburban areas of Bangladesh and there is indeed a huge market in those areas. However, most people were reluctant to take our services only because we could not reach out to them physically and build brand awareness. So, we took a different strategy. We used our loyal userbase as our main channel of marketing and recruited 1000+ campus ambassadors all across Bangladesh. They helped us to build our brand awareness through referral and affiliate marketing. Interestingly, that also helped us to bring in a lot of good educators in our platform as well. Now, as the pandemic situation has improved, we are looking to build on this strategy and adopt a hybrid model (offline and online) to reach the root levels of Bangladesh.

MBR: The main objective of Sohopathi is to make a better academic environment by connecting teachers, students, and alumni in a single platform. To what extent, do you believe, that this objective has been achieved?

Sohopathi: “Sohopathi” – started with the vision of becoming the most comprehensive learning platform where we can utilize the teaching potential of each and every person to reduce inequality in education. So far, we have already created a very good vibe in the community. We have impacted the lives of over 400,000 learners across Bangladesh. We have connected over 30 districts and onboarded 200+ star educators across the country. We want to improve the lives of all student by providing them the best quality personalized learning. It is a great pleasure for us to find out that, 90% of our students have improved their academic performance by connecting to our educators and taking their paid courses. Our college admission program has been a huge success in 2019 and 2020. 75% of the students who took services from different educators during college admission got admitted to the top-ranked colleges of Bangladesh. Interestingly, a huge portion of these students is from the suburban and rural areas where access to good teachers is not present.

The educators have been the greatest asset in our platform. Using their support, we have built a content pool of over 3,000 videos and completed 45,000 paid learning hours. All these educators are also from diverse backgrounds- ranging from college students up to professional school/college teachers. The huge diversity is the biggest strength of our social platform, and we are looking to capitalize on this diversity to create a holistic online learning ecosystem.

MBR: Please tell us about the milestones that Sohopathi wants to achieve in the future?

Sohopathi: “Sohopathi”- wants to become the epicenter of online learning by supporting anyone across the globe who wants to teach, in one single platform. We dream of a day where all educators and education facilitators will use our platform to build their own brand, publish their content and grow their business. On the student side, we have the dream of connecting the whole world where a student sitting in a remote village in Bangladesh can learn anything, be it physics or music or economics by connecting them with an educator living in USA or Singapore. All in all, our vision is to establish a social community where anyone can learn and teach at the same time. We have already achieved some significant milestones to execute our vision. We are currently a portfolio startup of ICT Ministry of Bangladesh, which is a pivotal milestone to reach our country’s root levels. We are also backed by the investment of “Accelerating Asia”- a renowned Singapore based VC Fund and are also lucky to be supported by angel investors from USA and Bangladesh. We believe in ensuring equitable quality education for everyone.