IIM Kashipur student’s start-up is helping school children understand their growth

NEW DELHI: After seeing his undergraduate classmates confused about their futures in 2019, Arpit Vijay decided to help. His classmates were unable to decide whether to start working or study further after graduating from their engineering programme at Amity University, Noida. Vijay came up with the idea of using data from students’ academic and co-curricular journeys to help them make informed decisions about their future.

“Although I had a lot of opportunities during my school days, the right kind of career mentorship and guidance could have helped me to plan my career a little differently. We are providing the right kind of mentorship through our platform,” Vijay, now a second-year MBA student at Indian Institute of Management (IIM) Kashipur, told Careers360.

That platform is “YOUU”. Conceived of in 2019, it was launched in 2020 and is dedicated to helping students from Classes 6 to 12 navigate their career paths.

From idea to reality

As a BTech student, Vijay was a core ograniser of the Indian Red Cross Society’s youth festival and also a member of the international youth-run non-profit, AIESEC. As its member, he went for a global volunteer programme to Turkey.

“I had diverse exposure to what students are doing across the globe. I became aware of the trends about different fields of studies,” he said. During the “chaotic time” of placements after engineering, he saw that students were confused about taking up jobs or going for higher education.

“I asked myself why we have not been able to help students understand their growth using data to highlight their journey and development as students. I explained the idea of having a platform to resolve this problem to a friend and we started working on it. We planned our business model, platform name and other things,” he said.

Upon graduating in 2019, Vijay shifted back to Jaipur and partnered with a few schools there to pilot test his idea. When that was successful, he launched the platform in March 2020.

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Funding and functioning

Vijay and his team members organised career-related workshops for school students in Jaipur, charged nominal amounts to bootstrap their venture. The start-up faced several challenges due to the Covid-19 pandemic.

“We started YOUU in 2020 during the peak of Covid-19 pandemic. At that time, schools were not willing to collaborate with the company to try something new. Pandemic disrupted our plans of holding offline meetings with students and schools but we adapted and held meetings online,” he said.

The main aim of YOUU is to help students understand their growth and consider the opportunities based on that. YOUU collaborates with schools to provide students with detailed reports on their career and educational growth.

“Ed-Tech companies are mainly fulfilling a student's academic needs and career counsellors are advising on career options based on their strengths and weaknesses. We really need to empower the students to make better decisions based on their growth data as,” he said.

At IIM Kashipur

After running his venture for two years, Vijay joined IIM Kashipur in 2023 to learn how to run the business effectively.

“I was a science student and in B-school, I learned how businesses actually work. The diversity of students helps me understand different perspectives. It has made me understand my company better and develop a model which will be more holistic,” Vijay said. “I had never studied finance, marketing or business models before enrolling in an MBA.Our professors also help as mentors to solve our problems related to start-up.”

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Vijay is now trying to revamp the entire model of YOUU to meet the needs of students.

“We are still in the learning phase. The growth has been slow as I am currently focusing on my MBA,” he said. “We are currently connected with five private schools in Jaipur and we have not expanded anywhere else because of our current capabilities. Around 1,000 students of Classes 6 to 12 are benefitting from our platform. But, we have several new plans for future growth.”