INNOVATORS VS COVID 19

The Impact of the Pandemic on Online Tutoring Company

Published

3 years ago

04/19/2021

Kossi Adzo

Mohil Shah and Kunal Dasani of Medic Mind on how to secure your place in medical school.

First of all, how are you and your family doing in these COVID-19 times?

Mohil Shah: Thank you for asking! It is a difficult time for everyone at the moment. Personally, I work as a junior doctor in the NHS full-time and balance working with my start-up on the side, and it has been particularly taxing. No one could have anticipated the impact COVID-19 would have on the National Health Service in the United Kingdom, and it has been overwhelming at the worst of times. I am glad to say our families have stayed safe in this period too.

Tell us about you, your career, how you founded Medic Mind.

Kunal Dasani: We came up with the idea in our 3rd year of medical school at the age of 20. We started by writing our own e-books and producing our own YouTube videos. Since then, we have grown to over 1 million views on YouTube with over 10,000 students across the world with our 1-1 tutoring and online courses. Our company specializes in providing support to students applying for university, in particular for medical school. We provide a wealth of free resources, which you can find here.

How does Medic Mind innovate?

Mohil Shah: We aim to constantly be ahead of the curve with the growing number of competitors in our field. We try and remain personalized with our services as we feel it is important for our customers to be treated well, and each customer has a unique story and background. We provide each of our customers with their personalized WhatsApp group where they can ask questions whenever they need. We are looking to expand our services with the same model to other areas such as law by launching our website Law Mind or school subjects such as Biology on our website Study Mind.

How does the coronavirus pandemic affect your business finances?

Kunal Dasani: We noticed that our customers, many of whom are parents, were struggling financially, and we had to adapt accordingly. For example, we offered flexible installment plans, and we had to extend the terms of many of these contracts. For tutors, it was a great opportunity for employment as many of their in-person studies were canceled. On the plus side, attitudes towards online teaching have improved, and customers who were previously skeptical of it have warmed to it. Since most of our tutoring was online, we were less affected by the pandemic and so find ourselves fortunate.

Did you have to make difficult choices regarding human resources, and what are the lessons learned?

Mohil Shah: There were a few difficult decisions we had to make during the height of the pandemic when demand for our services fell. We found this difficult as we consider many of our team family. We hope to welcome them back once things have settled down.

How did your customer relationship management evolve? Do you use any specific tools to be efficient?

Kunal Dasani: Before the pandemic, 30% of our tutoring took place face-to-face and the rest remotely. Since then, all of our tutoring takes place remotely now. We have had to adapt to this by improving our material to tailor it to an online platform and also to provide additional training to our tutors. Zoom has been particularly helpful with the number of features it has. We also communicate with our team via Slack which has been very helpful as well. We also ran free weekly webinars for students to raise awareness of our brand, which was particularly helpful.

Your final thoughts?

Mohil Shah: We firstly want to thank startup.info for providing us this opportunity and want to take this moment to appreciate the hardships small businesses have had to face over the last few months and to