How Did Vaibhav Sisinty Scale GrowthSchool to $1M ARR Without a Website?

Welcome to the 5th edition of GrowthDeck! If you enjoy reading deep dives like this, please share it with your friends or colleagues who would appreciate it. Now, let's dive in!

There's no denying that the education system today is broken, with plenty of gaps that need addressing. Only a handful of students today have the opportunity to attend top-tier colleges and gain access to high-quality resources, knowledge, and networks. Meanwhile, others, despite their intelligence and willingness to learn, struggle to achieve success. There's a huge lack of access to resources.

Vaibhav Sisinty, the founder of Growthschool, identified this issue and solved it in an outstanding way. The way he built Growthschool is truly remarkable. During his journey, he used some mind-blowing strategies that can be of immense value to any founder building a startup.

Growthschool today stands as one of the largest e-learning platforms in India, boasting an impressive user base of over 300,000. In less than two years, Vaibhav Sisinty, the founder of Growthschool, has propelled the platform to remarkable heights. This article dives into how Vaibhav, with his exceptional growth mindset, cleverly built Growthschool, becoming a trailblazer in the ed-tech industry.

Trust me, the strategies employed by Growthschool on their journey have been outstanding. We'll unravel the story behind Vaibhav's success, showcasing the brilliance of his growth hacking techniques.

What is GrowthSchool?

Growthschool in one line is the place to learn from top experts in the field. They collaborate with the top 1% of instructors to provide high-impact cohort-based courses on personal and professional development for learners worldwide. Growthschool aims to create a platform for community-led live learning. Their programmes are designed to teach job-relevant skills in a short amount of time. I have personally taken Vaibhav’s LinkedIn Masterclass and it was filled with tons of values.

Vaibhav Sisinty’s Journey

The journeys of solo founders often begin long before their companies are launched, and this observation holds true for Vaibhav. It dates way back to 2011, so let’s first deep dive into Vaibhav’s backstory to see what lessons did he learn from it which helped him build growthschool.

Vaibhav says that he was never regarded as a standout student in school. It was in the tenth grade that a pivotal moment occurred when he failed in seven subjects during his pre-board exams. Fearing that his poor performance would tarnish the school's reputation, he was denied the opportunity to sit for the board exams. (In India, board exams are the exams taken by the government for all the students of the province)

Overwhelmed by the situation, his father offered him an alternative: drop out of school and build an internet café (In India, during that time, due to the lack of broad internet availability, there used to be cafes where you could use pay and go internet). Despite the odds, Vaibhav persisted, surpassed expectations, and eventually received a respectable 77%. These early trials and triumphs created the groundwork for his entrepreneurial journey. Here is a tweet from him demonstrating that he is not an academic.

From a young age, he had a natural desire to become a cricketer and had a passion for dancing. His father, however, denied him these opportunities. Vaibhav, undeterred, pursued other interests such as robotics during his elementary school years. He wanted to buy a computer when he was in 8th grade, but his father gave him a budget of just 15000 Rs which was not enough to buy a computer.

But, at core, he is a problem solver. To get the computer for around 15000, he decided on building it himself and began visiting an internet cafe, where he paid 15 rupees per hour to learn how to build computers from the ground up. He scraped together the necessary parts and assembled the computer himself, meticulously keeping track of the costs involved.

There are several such stories of Vaibhav, if you are interested here is a link to that podcast.

But Vaibhav's real entrepreneurial spirit began to emerge at the age of 19 when he embarked on his first startup adventure, exploring the world of Android development and website building. Within three months, his website DiscoveringAndroid garnered an impressive 100,000 monthly visits and generated a profit of 25,000 rupees. However, their success was short-lived as Google banned them. This setback taught Vaibhav the importance of website development and marketing, skills he would later leverage in his entrepreneurial endeavors. Here is a quick look into his journey!

Post this Vaibhav and along with friends started Crazyheads Solutions which started as a training company and evolved to a website and marketing agency. This was his very successful venture which helped him pay off his educational debts before he graduated college. Have a look at this newspaper excerpt about him.

But Vaibhav being an avid learner got bored of CrazyHeads, they were earning a lot but according to Vaibhav his learning had peaked. So just when CrazyHeads did their best month in revenues, Vaibhav decided to quit it and joined Uber(which he jokingly applied for, he wasn’t very serious when he applied for it).

His journey at Uber was nothing sort of remarkable he went from being a manager to leading the team at Uber in Growth Strategy-Latin America. Recognizing the value of continuous learning, Vaibhav even volunteered to take on tasks that his colleagues disliked or were reluctant to tackle. This thirst for knowledge led him to become proficient in data-driven marketing and the art of closing deals, skills that he would later leverage in his current venture, growthschool.

After Uber he was presented with a job opportunity at a Foot tech company in Singapore, Vaibhav made a conscious decision to turn it down in favor of joining a startup called Klook. His choice was driven by a desire for personal growth and a passion for learning. For Vaibhav, the long-term gain and the opportunity to acquire new skills were more important than immediate financial rewards. He has been laid off twice due to uncontrollable situations and due to no fault of his own, here is tweet about that by him

During covid, when Klook shut down, he wanted to do something of his own, so he started LinkedIn Masterclass because he already had enough followers on LinkedIn; this was very successful for him, so he finally thought that this could be converted into a startup idea. Because it had already been validated for him, he thought that conducting such Cohort Based Community Led Courses could benefit a wide range of other people and areas.

Let us now delve into the 2 strategies that have led to Growth School's success.

1. “Better done than Perfect“ approach

2. “Bucket Strategy” In Fund Raising

By the way, he mentioned in one of the podcasts that He doesn’t like reading books since he cant engage for a long time, also he also doesn’t read blogs much. I hope reads ours somehow 🙃 

Growthschool’s Growth Drivers

"Better done than Perfect“ approach

Vaibhav has always growth hacked his way to success. He believes in “Better done than Perfect“.

From the initial days onwards, Vaibhav always emphasized quick shipment, experimenting with things, and taking risks. While he could have raised money in the initial days, he decided to put his life savings into it and follow the lean and shrewd approach. Here is a picture of Growthschool’s initial days where they only had a team of 6 people out of which 3 of them were interns. They did not even have a product or tech team because they couldn’t afford it:

They never spent too much time on anything unnecessary. Even for Idea validation, Vaibhav was already running LinkedIn courses so he knew that it would work. Vaibhav realized that different people have varied reasons for purchasing products, he emphasized the importance of identifying and catering to those specific needs.

When it comes to learning, he believes that:

The interesting thing is they did not even have a proper website or a logo until they reached $1M in revenue. He just partnered with multiple people from different industry who can start similar cohort-based courses like his own LinkedIn Masterclass and made a landing page for them. Here is a post by Saptarshi Prakash who was a early partner with them while they were in stealth:

Later because he already owned Growthschool domain, they decided to go with it. Even their website was built with simple no-code tools like WordPress, Webflow, Zapier, etc. They always focused more and more on providing value rather than spending time on NOT so important things. Here is a picture of an earlier version of their website. At that time, they just had 4 courses.

Each and every decision that they made at Growthschool were always performance focused. Vaibhav learned from his time at Uber that everything should be data-driven and not intuition driven.

At Growthschool they try to recover every customer acquisition cost (CAC) from the customer's first purchase itself, They’ve implemented various strategies such as crash courses, on-demand videos, and access to busy mentors to attract and retain customers. Not only did they prioritize a well-structured curriculum and strong networks, but they also employed growth hacking techniques to secure funding (more on this later).

Vaibhav strongly believed that true product-market fit is when, if tomorrow, you close your company and 10 people knock on your door to start it back again. Growthschool, today is a very good example of PMF. They have aced on utilizing the power of engineered organic growth to establish themselves. They employed various strategies to foster the growth of their product, such as leveraging the growth of others, utilizing existing networks, and forming brand partnerships.

To ensure sustained growth, Vaibhav placed a strong emphasis on building a personal brand and investing in SEO right from the beginning. Additionally, they ran concise and targeted advertisements. They excelled in the field of ads to such an extent that they even developed small micro products within the company specifically designed for efficient advertising of their products. Here is a funny example from Vaibhav’s website about targeted ads.

Growthschool has achieved great success as a result of their growth hacking approach, lean and strategic mindset, and focus on what truly matters.

Bucket Strategy In Fund Raising

Growthschool was already profitable and there was no immediate need to raise the money. However, Vaibhav believes that “The real beauty of building anything is impacting at scale“. Hence he decided to raise funds for Growthschool. While they wanted to raise the funds but Vaibhav had no prior experience in raising funds and they did not want to spend too much time looking for VCs. They just made a simple notion document and decided to give 1 month to raise funds.

Vaibhav’s only motive for raising funding was to gain access to the knowledge of the investors that he could utilize in scaling his business. He didn't just want to receive money from any VC; he desired to attract quality investors. However, he lacked the fundraising skills required to efficiently attract those investors, so he implemented the bucket strategy to categorize them.

He categorized the investors into 3 buckets.

1. “No-Go“ - From whom he would never raise money.

2. “Potential“ - From whom he’d be ok to get money.

3. “Dream” - From whom he’d love to get money.

So he started pitching his idea to the "No-Go" bucket first. He received feedback, improved his pitch, and once all the investors in that bucket were exhausted, he would move on to the "Potential" bucket. By following this process, he developed a playbook for raising funds and gained a solid understanding of the funding process. Finally, he approached the investors he highly valued and decided to raise funding from them. In this way, he strategically hacked the funding process.

He always prioritized the quality of investors and chose to work exclusively with those who could provide significant value to him. As of today, Growthschool has successfully raised approximately $5 million from renowned investors such as Sequoia Capital, Owl Ventures, and around 81 Angel investors. These Angel investors are highly regarded in their respective fields and have immensely contributed to the growth and success of Growthschool. Here is the full list of All the investors in growthschool (Link).

Growthschool under the leadership of Vaibhav Sisinty has truly impacted thousands of students. Growthschool is a clear example of how strategic decision-making, quick adaption, lean, and growth-hacking approach can lead to a revolutionary product like Growthschool. We will now wrap up this issue by adding some invaluable key learnings and tips from Vaibhav that would help founders in their journey

Key Learnings

• Working at an early-stage startup is an MBA that pays you for learning

• Execution is the most underrated superpower

• Stop trying to tick boxes, you can’t be good at everything, do things you love.

• The best kind of marketing doesn't feel like marketing.

• Better Done than Perfect

That’s all for today. This edition took us about 20 hours of effort, If you think your friends or colleagues would like this, please share this link. Thanks for reading and don’t be shy to leave your comment if you have any. Also, please consider following us on Twitter (Keval Jagani, Meet Shukla) and sharing this newsletter.