Josh Talks, an upskilling platform plans to launch job-oriented skill-based courses in regional languages in addition to entering the test-preparatory category, as it looks to widen its scope of offerings. The new products will be launched under Josh Skills – which is an English learning mobile application. The company claims that the mobile app has more than 45 courses on spoken English and personality development. “We have divided spoken English courses into 650 rules and 3,000 words to simplify the learning process and plan to introduce games within the application, in an effort to encourage the audience to converse in English while playing. This month, we started new courses in spoken English in six regional languages such as Punjabi, English, Marathi, English followed by Telugu, Malayalam, Gujarati and Tamil,” Shobhit Banga, co-founder and CPO, Josh Skills, told FinancialExpress online. Josh Skills is targeted at youth between 14 to 30 years old in tier 2 and 3 cities.
The company claims that the course subscription fee is its main source of revenue. “An user gets a free trial at first. Post this after a day, she can choose to buy a yearly subscription of a course for Rs 500 or get yearly access to all the courses for Rs 1,000. We don’t spend anything on advertising and marketing and also have zero customer acquisition cost. Primarily Josh Talks does the marketing for Josh skills. After every video, we inform viewers about Josh Skills. So, we get users partly from there and partly through word of mouth from our existing subscribers,” he added.
Regulatory filings accessed by business intelligence platform, Tofler show that Josh Talk’s revenue from operations shrank 6.1% to Rs 8.8 crore in FY21 from Rs 9.3 crore, during the same period in the previous fiscal. While it reported a net loss of Rs 1.4 crore in FY 21 when compared to a net loss of Rs 83 lakh in FY20. The company claims to spend most of its revenue on product development and workforce, which is about 90% and the remaining goes to operations and infrastructure.
According to Banga, Josh Skills monthly revenue ranges between Rs 30 to 40 lakh every month – this is about 50% of the revenue. However, the company plans to change the model soon. “Our primary focus is to make a technology-driven product to make the English learning experience seamless for the audience in tier 2 and 3 cities,” he added. The company further claims to have clocked over 2.5 million downloads and close to two lakh users in the past two years. It further claims to have registered a 15%-30% growth in the subscriber base monthly while the average time spent on the mobile application per day is 30 minutes and course completion rate for spoken English course is 32% as of Q3, FY21-22.
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