I t took three people and a passion towards the education sector for Think Tankers to materalise and give back to the field that made them who they are. All that the three founders Vaibhav Anand (28), Abhilash Reddy (28) and Udbhav Anand (23) had when they started out were their degrees, “and it was only that which supported us. So we wanted to give back to the sector,” said Vaibhav, the sales and marketing head at Think Tankers. Thus, they let their imagination go wild and came up with Imagine — their bi-monthly 40 page magazine which they intend to get on every student’s desk.
“We realised that the other products in the market either cater to current affairs or academics. We wanted to bridge that gap,” explains Vaibhav, when we asked him how it was different from other educational magazines. Through this publication, their attempt is to try and probe the mind of the young ones in a way education can’t because they feel that “students sometimes lack the ability to think for themselves and don’t question as much as they should,” elaborates Anand.
For every issue, a team of six picks a word and branch it out into different topics. “Like for this issue we chose the word ‘Fall’ which could be connected to everything from gravity to attraction and everything else in between,” Anand elaborates, stating that this one-word-association method is what they used as children to remember concepts.
Currently, Imagine is available in Hyderabad, Indore and Vijaywada schools, with a circulation of up to 5,000. The team intends to reach out to more students, and it is with this intention that they approached the ex-HRD minister Smriti Irani in March 2016. “She loved Imagine but did say that she can’t help us reach out to government schools unless we give the magazine for free. But she did give us insights,” beams Vaibhav.
With the price point of `99 per copy, it does seem like a challenge to reach out to tier-two schools. But Vaibhav assures us that Imagine is a work in progress and they intend to see this problem through in the near future.
Think Tankers goes beyond Imagine and has other verticals like Think Edu, which offers educational consulting and right now they are working with Telangana’s government to develop a bio-metric attendance system for the schools of Ranga Reddy district. Other verticals include Think Branding, Think Digital and Think Consulting. “We are also ready to invest in ideas which bring about change,” says Vaibhav. He states that they are investing in two upcoming tech companies out of which one is a solar company intending to come up with innovative solar power solutions for home implementation.
Coming back to Imagine, they are itching to expand across the geography, having shortlisted up to 50 schools and 100 locations they want to show up in, but distribution remains a challenge. “Everytime we approached a distributor, they demand a bomb,” Vaibhav explains for whom the printing cost per copy is `32. They foresaw that scaling up would pose a challenge. But where there are challenges, there is scope for achievement to and according to Udbhav, the product development and design head, their biggest victory was to be able to convince their present team of 40 employees of their vision and “to make them believe that the products are innovative, new and different and will bring about a difference.” And now they just have to convince the rest of the country.
Reach out: thethinktankers.in