Imagine striking up a conversation with other parents while waiting at the gate of your kid’s play school and hitting upon a business idea that helps schools, students and parents connect on a common platform online.

That is what Chandrasekar B. did. “I used to chat with a lot of parents. That is when the idea originated. We should create a platform connecting parents of a child’s classmates with the objective of helping the child be successful. We built a basic version of the product and showed it to the play school where my child was studying. They liked it and immediately started using it,” says Chandrasekar.

Putting it together

Thus was born Yokibu. What’s behind the name you may wonder, but there is an interesting story behind it. “We didn’t want a descriptive name. We wanted a short and sweet name. We wanted a neat name,” he explains.

On a trip to Singapore, Malaysia and Thailand, Chandrasekar had found the word “ibu” in several rest rooms. He found out that ibu means ‘mother’ in the Indonesian language, an extended meaning being ‘parent’. “Because we were connecting parents, connecting schools with parents, we just thought we will use the English word ‘yoke’ in the sense of binding and connecting.” Yoke combined with ibu became Yokibu!

A mathematics graduate from the Vivekananda College in Chennai, Chandrasekar completed a diploma computer course and worked in the software industry before heading to the US as a software engineer. He moved back to India in 2005 after nearly 10 years in the US and launched his venture after a couple of years.

In four-and-a-half years Yokibu has evolved and the company – Pasonet Technologies Pvt Ltd – has been signing up more schools. “We now have over 650 schools using our platform in Chennai, Mumbai, Hyderabad and Bangalore,” says Chandrasekar, Founder and CEO, Pasonet.

The company is owned by the 46-year-old Chandrasekar, his family and friends, all of whom have pooled in some money. Chandrasekar says he is now looking to raise some funds, for which he is in talks with a few investors. “We are at a stage where we need to scale really fast. I want to go pan-India,” he says. He hopes to sign up 5,000 schools in two-three years, provided he gets the funds.

The money will be used for reaching out to a larger base and also to introduce new services on Yokibu. One idea is to offer e-books on Yokibu.

Creating Goodwill

According to him, Yokibu does not charge schools or parents a fee for signing up. Instead, it allows a number of other companies that deal with stuff for children to hawk their wares on its site.

Yokibu gets a commission from each transaction that happens on its site. Parents on the Yokibu service can buy things such as a beginner’s robot kit, a construction set, or a pumping heart and a solar bullet train that will be useful in school projects.

There are other companies offering similar services but Chandrasekar believes that Yokibu’s model of being a social platform for schools, parents and students will stand it in good stead against competition. He also does not think it necessary to charge schools for signing up on Yokibu even to ensure that they stay committed to it. “They are far more committed to Yokibu than when I ask money from them because of the value we provide,” he says.

He is also not looking to extend the same platform to colleges, at least for now. “I don’t think you can deliver exactly the same thing to colleges because the colour changes completely there. Here the significance of parents’ involvement is high. Even though the children influence parents, the final decision-maker is the parent. Whereas in a college, the student is the final decision-maker,” says Chandrasekar.

>ramakrishnan.n@thehindu.co.in

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