Google and the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY)'s Startup Hub launched the 'Appscale Academy' — a growth and development programme to train enterprising startups and developers in India - earlier this year. According to Google, the first cohort consisted of 100 startups chosen from over 400 applications following an in-depth selection process that took into account their creative ideas and innovation, product quality, product scalability, and talent diversity.
Among them was Pritesh Sankhe, a former Facebook Software Engineer. Sankhe told CNBC-TV18 that he was at the lowest point in his life four years ago with no sense of purpose; he started writing a gratitude journal and then transformed the idea into an app named Gratitude and published it on Google Play.
"Using the learnings from the programme, (the team) intensely looked at every piece of data provided by the Play console and improved our store listing visitors by 100 percent, acquisitions by 125 percent, grew our monthly revenue by 50 percent, and app rating shot to 4.8," he added.
Talking about his plans for the app, Sankhe said he wants to scale the app and positively impact 100 million people across the globe. He also shared that he hopes to expand to newer verticals where he can provide higher levels of support to people who need help, like coaching programs, courses, and platforms.
The cohort spanned critical sectors, including Education, Health, Finance, Social, E-commerce, and Gaming. It also included startups supporting core communities in India through creative apps across agriculture, B2B, parenting, and more. Thirty-five percent of this group came from Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities, including Surat, Vadodara, Kanpur, Lucknow, Meerut, Morbi, and many others.
Anshul Agarwal was another developer who was a part of the programme for his app Stamurai. As a kid, Agarwal struggled with stuttering, and hence he developed an app that enables accessible and affordable speech therapy to people worldwide, he told CNBC-TV18.
"India has just 4,000 licensed therapists to cater to 60 million people with a speech disorder. With an automated solution like Stamurai, this demand-supply gap can be bridged with speech therapy available to anyone with a smartphone. In addition, speech therapy is now available at less than 10 percent of the original cost," Agarwal added.
He also said that through Appscale Academy, he and his co-founder are now better educated in subjects like UI/UX, marketing, security, etc. "We will soon be making Stamurai available in different languages and expanding its scope to all speech disorders and eventually to all special needs, including those with Autism, and attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), among others. Through our Android app, we aim to be the one-stop solution for all speech disorders and, eventually, for all special needs," he said, talking about the future of Stamurai.
Duo, Kapish Saraf and Amritanshu Kumar, with their app KidEx, were also part of the programme. They define KidEx as a data-driven ed-tech platform focused on creating a learners' ecosystem and enabling holistic development for children and youth through extracurricular, co-curricular, and life-skill activities.
"We witnessed exponential growth during the Appscale Academy programme with improvements in our store presence, app performance, and a reduction in acquisition costs by 50 percent. It helped us visualise our journey for the next two to three years more efficiently. We realised during the course that our tech stack could be used to serve many other different customer segments," they said about the programme.
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Talking about the programme, Aditya Swamy, Director, Play Partnerships, Google Play, said that India is evolving from a leading app consumption country to an emerging app development hub. "We’ve had the privilege of working with many of the creative minds behind these apps as part of our growth and accelerator programmes, and a rewarding moment for us was to see 100 enterprising app-preneurs learn, scale, and thrive as they graduated from the Appscale Academy," he added.
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