Interview : CATINDIAONLINE Co-Founder

Recently I chatted with Manish Singh, co-founder of Catindiaonline. He is from IITK (2004 Batch) and started his venture along with Kumar Gaurav,Mayank Goel and Santosh Kumar building CAT testing platform with Analytics engine and patent pending Recommendation engine.Some of the CAT 100 percentile scorers helped them in building this platform.Its a free portal for CAT aspirant www.catindiaonline.com .

The site offers online mock CAT tests + Previous CAT papers + Topic wise Test. This site is very different and has many more features than what one may think of. Its test framework is quite cool and analysis part is something that I bet that you can't find anywhere else. Its best part is in-depth analysis that gives gory details of one's performance - topic wise, difficulty wise, time requirements wise, comparative analysis of performance etc… The analysis will precisely point you out the issues with your preparation.In the end, You will find something called recommendations which will recommend CAT aspirant how he/she should have taken the test to maximize his/her score

1. When did you start and from where?

We have a team of 5 individuals based out in Bangalore, who are totally committed to the project. Two of them are working full time for the portal, whereas rest 3 of us are currently volunteering for it. Going forward at least one more of us is planning to work for www.catindiaonline.com full time. Apart from this, a number of other people have volunteered and made great contributions to the analysis and recommendation framework.

2. A bit more about your background and experience.

The core group of consists of IIT & IIM graduates and students. The two dedicated members of the team as well as three Bangalore based volunteers are all graduates of IIT Kanpur, batch of 2004. Among other volunteers we have 3 graduates from IIMs (A & B). One of these got 100 percentile in CAT 2006. These days a lot of other people have shown interest in working with us. We will keep you updated as and when our team expands.

3. What you want to achieve out of this venture?

We have a two fold aim behind CATIndiaOnline. On one hand, we aim to address some of the problems that CAT aspirants, particularly, working professionals, face today in preparing for CAT. Some of these problems include the following:

• Lack of time to take center based tests: Our tests can be taken from anywhere, anytime
• Inflexibility of paper based tests to adapt to personal preparatory needs: Our tests are customizable by topics/sub-topics, difficulty levels etc.
• Lack of proper analysis and feedback on performance: Topic-wise, difficulty-wise, time-management wise performance analysis and feedback is given by us instantaneously.

On the other hand, when CAT goes online, all mom & pop coaching institutes will require to administer computer based tests. It will be challenge for them to develop the required infrastructure. Students of all these coaching classes will need an alternative and we will help them with our free online test solution.

4. How are you going to take this further and compete with biggies like CL, TIME etc.

At this point of time, we are focusing on an aggressive marketing and branding campaign. A number of country's biggest CAT/MBA forums/portals have shown interest in having tie ups with us. This will give us direct access to a large number of CAT aspirants. Therefore, we are strongly considering these tie-ups. As and when we formally tie up with them, we will let you know about it.