A student in college who came there to study began with a small experiment, born out of a need he saw among students who were struggling with the transition from Class 12 to college. Questions about admissions, courses and what came next were reaching Hemkesh and his friends almost every day.
What began as a Telegram community of a few hundred students grew into something larger. Today, Hemkesh is the founder of Delta Education, a business he built while studying at Scaler School of Technology. He says the company recorded revenue of 10 lakh in the last fiscal year and is now looking to go beyond that figure.
For someone still in college, it is a different measure of what those years can produce.
While students around him discuss placements and jobs, Hemkesh is spending his time expanding a business that began with a group of students asking questions.
Delta Education has not raised outside funding.
Hemkesh said the company is profitable and can manage its own finances. He does not consider external funding necessary for every startup.
The company has, however, begun employing other students. Hemkesh said three to four students from his college have been hired as paid interns for work in growth, problem-setting and teaching.
FROM A STUDENT COMMUNITY TO A BUSINESS
Hemkesh was part of the first batch at Scaler School of Technology. In the early days, students had many questions about the institution, its admission process and the experience of studying there. Messages began arriving on Telegram and WhatsApp.
“We had a Telegram community of initially around 200 to 300 students,” Hemkesh said. Over the course of a year, that community grew to more than 700 students.
The founders then saw an opportunity.
New-age colleges were using admission tests that differed from the examinations students had grown accustomed to. The syllabus might be familiar, but the manner of testing and selection was different, with interviews forming part of the process.
Delta Education began by helping students prepare for those tests and interviews.
The company started around February 2024. At that point, there was no product, only the community. By the following admission cycle, the founders had launched their test series and preparation programme.
In its first year, Hemkesh said, Delta Education had more than 50 paying customers and revenue of more than 2 lakh. Later, the company added recorded lectures to its live classes.
THE STUDENTS WERE ALREADY THERE
Delta Education did not begin by spending heavily to find its audience.
Its first audience was the community Hemkesh had already helped build.
“The members in Telegram community, we were able to convert them,” he said, calling it the main source of students.
His co-founder Srimai Somani also brought students through his YouTube and Instagram presence. Somani’s YouTube channel, Hemkesh said, had more than 10,000 subscribers and focused on content similar to JEE preparation. Delta Education was also listed on the Scaler website, from where it received some students.
It was, in its first form, a business built around a community that already existed.
A STARTUP GROWING BESIDE COLLEGE
Hemkesh’s college life continued alongside the company.
Scaler’s innovation lab helped students who were trying to build startups. Hemkesh said the students had weekly meetings where they could discuss their difficulties and receive help. The institute also provided contacts through its network and opportunities to speak with and pitch their startup to other institutions.
He was also involved in student administration. As a member of the first batch, he became the first general secretary and spent almost two years working with the student council. He remembers staying awake for several nights with volunteers while preparing events for the next batch.
The work was therefore not done after college hours. It was part of college.
For Hemkesh, the question of what a student should study is also personal.
In Class 9, he worked on a robotic manhole cleaner after reading in a local newspaper about people dying while cleaning gutters. His team’s prototype reached a national-level CBSE science exhibition in Delhi. They did not win, but the experience made him realise that he wanted to work in technology.
He now wants to provide something similar to students who may not otherwise get such an opportunity to discover where their interests lie.
‘START SMALL’
Hemkesh does not believe that a young founder must begin with a finished idea.
“Nobody is perfectionist,” he said. His advice is to begin with what one has, accept failure and then return to the problem to understand what went wrong.
He has another warning for students.
There is, he says, a form of FOMO in college. A student sees a friend building something and begins to wonder what he or she is doing with their own time.
Hemkesh calls that useful FOMO.
His advice is to keep company with people from whom one can learn. “Do not be the smartest in the classroom,” he said.
He also believes that young founders spend too much time waiting for an idea to become perfect.
“Start small,” he said, arguing that students should first solve a basic problem rather than immediately trying to build another AI product or automated system.
The company is still growing. Hemkesh says Delta Education will continue, while his larger ambition is to work on problems that affect a large number of people and build a profitable business around solving them.
The degree is still being pursued. The business has already begun.
– Ends
