Interview with Divisha Agarwal & Shrashti Jain, Founders of Acing CLAT
Content :
1.Tell us about yourself
Acing CLAT is an initiative of Divisha Agarwal & Shrashti Jain (founders from GNLU, Batch 2016-21). It was launched in 2020 with the aim of provide CLAT aspirants with an online platform for self-study where their preparation becomes more practical, feasible and affordable. We aspire to be a friend, philosopher and guide to the aspirants for their all round preparation. To make self-study viable, we provide All India Mock Test Series for CLAT, AILET, SLAT & LSAT along with weekly mentorship calls from top NLUites to the CLAT & AILET aspirants.
2.How did the idea for your business come about?
Being GNLUites, we get a lot of queries from our friends, relatives and juniors who are preparing for CLAT & Other law entrances. The major concern of the aspirants is to get quality materials, test series and personal mentorship from NLUites for guidance and proper preparation. This gave us the idea to start this initiative through which all the aspirants can prepare through self-study at home and we came up with the idea of providing quality mock test series, other study materials curated by GNLUites and personal weekly mentorship calls from top NLUites till their examinations.
3.Can you tell us about your venture ?
"We at Acing CLAT believe in this saying as it is an iron that sharpens another iron. And as we are on our path to becoming lawyers, we want to help others fulfill their ambition of becoming a lawyer as well."
We provide crash course and other programmes of test-series for CLAT, AILET & other law entrances. The All India Mock Test Series are available in both online (PDFs) and offline mode (courier at residence of printed mocks). Acing CLAT promotes self study and therefore to personally guide the aspirants, we provide personal 1-to-1 weekly telephonic sessions by NLUites. These are weekly mentorship calls from NLUites to the individual aspirants till their CLAT examination. With the vision of making quality materials accessible to all the CLAT aspirants in India, we also provide quality Compendiums contain the most important questions of the year in monthly format for Current Affairs and Legal Reasoning (on CLAT & AILET pattern), which have high probability to come in the examinations.
4.What are the challenges you faced till date and presently facing?
All the challenges that came our way, we converted them into opportunities to give our best for this initiative. While we gave complete six months to prepare the quality materials (in 2019), but after the paper pattern got changed for 2020, we had to go through everything from the beginning, i.e. making high quality content on the new paper pattern, etc. Our team from top NLUs after in-depth research has curated the best mocks to be solved for CLAT & AILET on the new paper pattern. Our mentorship team is from India’s top NLUs working day and night to give personal mentorship through weekly calls to the aspirants. This is a unique part of our initiative as we not only solve aspirants doubts, we prepare them for different law entrance examinations through weekly calls – by giving them weekly targets, mentoring and motivating them constantly.
5.What was your key driving force to become an entrepreneur?
The key driving force is working for our own startup, i.e. we are giving all the services to grow our own initiative. Entrepreneurship helps us in becoming job provider and in continuation to that, today Acing CLAT is providing full fledged jobs & legal internships to several NLUites.
6.How did you raise funding for your venture?
GNLU Legal Incubation Centre (GLIC), provided us with the required funding to initiate our startup, under SSIP, Govt. of Gujarat. We are really grateful to our Director who always supported and mentored us in growing this initiative.
7.How do you build a successful customer base?
We provide free video lessons under our CLAT course on YouTube for the students and some relevant quality materials are shared on our telegram channel. We are also on Instagram. These are our primary sources for audience outreach.
8.How do you market your business, and which tactics have been most successful?
We believe that if our content remains relevant and qualitative, aspirants automatically get enrolled with us. We have also provided a lot of aspirants with free mentorship calls so that they can understand the functioning of weekly calls from NLUites and how important it is for their CLAT preparation.
We also promote it on Instagram, YouTube and other social media platforms to reach more and more CLAT & AILET aspirants.
9.What kind of culture exists in your organization, and how did you establish it?
Since the team is of NLUites, we follow a very friendly culture in our organisation. Even the mentorship which NLUites take with the CLAT aspirants is like a friend, philosopher and guide who are always ready to help them in their proper preparation and completion of required syllabus along with improving their scores in mocks with time.
10.How do you generate new ideas?
In our team, whoever comes with a new idea approach the other authorised members for further discussions which are purely based on providing very qualitative content to the CLAT aspirants along with mentoring them with weekly calls. We discuss our ideas and accordingly finalise them if they are fulfilling the objective of Acing CLAT.
11.What are your ideals?
We promote self study among the CLAT aspirants and for making this happen our team of top NLUites are working day and night to mentor the aspirants accordingly and make their preparation & practice for CLAT & Other law entrances viable and feasible.
12.How do you define success?
When the aspirants finish their weekly tasks that we give them during our weekly mentorship calls, and when their scores increases from 40s to 60s to 90s and many of our mentees are now scoring 100+ in different mocks. This improvement gives us the satisfaction and motivation to work even harder to make their preparation successful.
13.Do you believe there is some sort of pattern or formula to becoming a successful entrepreneur?
There is no common pattern or formula. It’s just that if you are honest with your ideals and objectives and without making any compromise with them, if you work hard, we definitely can turn an initiative successful. Also, patience and consistency always lead us to good results.
14.What is your favorite aspect of being an entrepreneur?
Favorite aspect is that we are the decision maker in our startup & consistently working for its growth. We are providing jobs and legal internships to the young NLUites is the amazing aspect of being an entrepreneur.
15.What has been your most satisfying moment in business?
The main objective of running Acing CLAT is providing high quality materials, test series & personal mentorship by NLUites to the CLAT aspirants. So, when our efforts help the aspirants in successfully acing CLAT, AILET & Other Law Entrance Exams, that become the most satisfying moment in the business which motivates us to work more effectively and harder for growing this initiative and reach more and more students.
16.What entrepreneurial tricks have you discovered to keep you focused and productive in your day-to-day busy schedule?
We keep daily targets for ourselves that are pre-decided on the prior day. This helps us in prioritizing our daily schedule and making it productive. So, we keep our focus on one day at a time and accordingly work.
17.Who has been your greatest inspiration?
All of the entrepreneurs who have started their initiative in the ed-tech sector to make education available to all at pan- India level give us the inspiration to improve and grow Acing CLAT.
18.Any message for future entrepreneur
Startups and Entrepreneurship is present & future of India. Just stay true to your objective and keep your work consistent. There may be days, when you will feel that it’s impossible, but believe us, if we (two normal GNLUites) can turn their vision into a real initaitive, then anyone with a clear vision can achieve it. Also, every challenge is automatically resolved with time, so we should just keep our efforts consistent to make our vision a reality.
For more details please visit www.acingclat.com