The problem
Edureka served working professionals — but ~1.5 million fresh engineering graduates come out of Indian colleges every year without industry-ready skills. A full-stack web development program for them was a big opportunity in uncharted territory: a segment with low ability to pay, high tech-savviness, and no history with us. The mandate: validate it fast, spend almost nothing.
What I did
Built the MVP from no-code parts — in 3 days. With no engineers and one support person, I assembled the entire acquisition product myself: an Unbounce landing page (heavy on FAQs so we didn’t drown our lone support rep), GoToWebinar demos, Zapier automations wiring registrations, attendance, and demo poll responses into Google Sheets, and a standalone Razorpay payment page. A three-step funnel — register, attend a demo, pay — filtered genuine candidates from browsers.
Let the first month teach us. ~47 enrollments at ₹10,000 each (~₹4.8L), at a CPL of ₹40 and CAC around ₹6,000. Enough signal to invest in iteration.
Optimised every stage of the funnel. I broke it into registered → attended → interested → enrolled and interviewed ~50 students across stages. Traffic-to-registration went 8% → 13% (mobile-first, asset-light page, first-fold CTAs, “job-ready” copy, participation certificates, multiple demo slots). Attendance went 30% → 42% (reminder emails and SMS at T-1 day and T-30 minutes). Payment conversion went 2% → 3.1% (automated lead scoring on background and demo engagement, drip campaigns, a ₹1,000 advance-payment page, EMI and buy-now-pay-later options).
Productionised only after the formula worked. Dedicated landing page, Zoho CRM journeys, marketing campaigns, per-user payment links — built with engineering once the hacky version had proven every assumption.
The impact
Leads grew from 6,000 to 18,000 a month; traffic-to-enrollment conversion went 0.05% → 0.17%; monthly revenue grew roughly 10× to ~₹50L by month six.
What this says about how I work
Validation doesn’t need a roadmap slot. The fastest way to answer “will this work?” is to duct-tape a real funnel together, put real money through it, and let each month’s data pick the next iteration.