CHENNAI: Charan Lakkaraju, a Hyderabad-based entrepreneur, after giving up his high profile job from Infosys three years ago, worked as a soft skill trainer and wanted to connect different colleges and companies on one digital platform. He wanted to bring out the hidden talents of many youngsters in college. That’s when Charan ’s dream project took shape as ‘StuMagz’.
StuMagz is a play on the words ‘student magazine. It’s a social networking platform for colleges focusing on intranet solutions like publishing, management, discovery and networking in a college and across colleges. Currently, stuMagz is caters to more than 280 colleges and above 1.8 lakh students.
Under the guidance of Charan, teams of enthusiastic young talent who are working day in and out to bring the entire students community under one umbrella, to build their careers. While explaining this unique model of work, Charan explains, “The team will approach colleges and select a bright bunch of students with the help of faculty.
Those selected students will work offline and receive write-ups, stories from other students of the college, which will be edited and published on Stumagz. This platform is highly beneficial to the colleges who are connected because, they get to see what’s happening in other colleges and students get direct information about events and extracurricular activities. This increases the participation from students across India.”
Stumagz despite initial hurdles is growing in leaps and bounds in both the Telugu states and soon will spread all over India. “Our networking system is different from other social networking sites like Face book & linked In, where there is no control over the content people publish on college pages, and there is possibility of duplication of pages too, but with stumagz we have proper monitoring system in place preferred by the institutions themselves which is the best part of the discovery,” says the 29-year-old.
Stumagz is also tied up with other companies, and every students profile along with their special skills is shared with them so that the companies and candidate have direct communication. “We have already helped UBER get 90 interns in our city and want to do more,” says Charan.
START SMALL, DREAM BIG
StuMagz was started on a bootstrap funding by friends and family
At TiE-ISB Connect, they raised a spot funding of ` 5 Lakhs
Stumagz is seeking $1 million funding for their premium product
They plan on introducing newer features soon