Long before he founded Goseeko, Chandrabhanu Pattajoshi spent his days walking into showrooms in Pune in a shirt and tie, asking owners to buy ad space in the Times of India. His school friends were at the IIMs, the IITs and Oxford. He had just been rejected by every MBA school he applied to.
Two decades later, after running sales strategy at Yahoo India, Pattajoshi co-founded Goseeko, an edtech platform that sells syllabus-mapped study material to college students in India’s tier-2 and tier-3 towns. Its parent company, Glossaread Technologies, reported ₹7 crore in revenue and a profit of close to ₹60 lakh in FY23.
Who is Chandrabhanu Pattajoshi, the founder of Goseeko?
Chandrabhanu Pattajoshi, who goes by Bhanu, was born in Odisha. His father was a mechanical engineer who started at SAIL and went on to build steel plants in the private sector, so Bhanu grew up between Odisha and Bihar.
He wanted to be a pilot. He’d trace aeroplanes out of magazines. But he wasn’t a strong student, and when the time came, Science wouldn’t take him. He was pushed into Commerce, which in the east back then marked you as someone who couldn’t get Science. He finished Class 12 in Delhi, couldn’t get into a single college on Delhi University’s North or South Campus, and went to Symbiosis in Pune instead.
What he could do was talk. His parents had him read the newspaper aloud to fix his diction, and he’d rehearse a prepared debate speech hundreds of times. That skill didn’t help with MBA entrance exams. He never made it past a single written test.
A family friend knew the Times of India branch head in Pune and got Bhanu an interview. The branch head kept postponing it. For four to five months, Bhanu called him from STD booths, week after week. When he finally got the job, the branch head told him the follow-up was the reason he’d been hired: that’s what sales is.
The work was selling retail ad space shop to shop, in Marathi and Hindi. He’d come back to his hostel room dejected. But he made himself a promise.
“I will not die a salesman. This is not for me forever. This is my stepping stone, my learning.”
He treated the next two years as his MBA. He read case studies and management books at night. His bosses picked him to assist on the launch of a standalone Times of India Pune edition: sales in the morning, editorial in the afternoon, printing in the evening, distribution before dawn. He learned what every stage of a newspaper cost. Then they moved him to Bengaluru to assist the regional director for the south.
How did a newspaper salesman end up running strategy at Yahoo India?
After a short stint at a soft-skills training company, Bhanu went back to media. He joined STAR TV as regional sales head in Bengaluru. In June 2006, Radio One hired him to launch its 94.3 FM station in Bengaluru from zero. He later became the network’s head of West.
In 2007 he moved to Yahoo India, where he rose to national head of sales and strategy. Print, then TV, then radio, then digital: he’d jumped to each medium as it peaked. He says he only saw the pattern in hindsight.
Yahoo taught him two things. The first was scale: a billion people visiting a day. The second was how that can still go wrong. He watched global CEOs change and leadership churn, and he watched Google, which came later, take everything Yahoo had pioneered. He left in 2013 and joined PrecisionMatch, an audience-data company for display advertising under SVG Media, as business head. Big data for advertising was ahead of its time in India. After about two years, the money was going in faster than the returns were coming out.
What was Glossaread, and why didn’t it work?
Bhanu had started writing a business plan while still at Yahoo. It grew out of a frustration with the media business itself.
Newspapers cost readers a few rupees. Advertisers paid for everything else, and every media company in the world was fighting for the same advertising dollars. Meanwhile Bhanu watched Google and Facebook bill Indian advertisers from thousands of kilometres away with the swipe of a card. If a paper had millions of readers, he reasoned, why couldn’t it charge them properly?
Glossaread’s first version was a pay-per-article wallet. You’d top it up and pay only for what you read: one piece from The Economist, one from a newspaper. No 12-month subscription.
This was 2016 and 2017, before Netflix changed Indian habits. Senior media executives told him flatly that nobody would pay for content. He raised ₹30 to 40 lakh from high-net-worth individuals. It wasn’t enough to wait for the culture to shift.
How did a student’s question turn Glossaread into Goseeko?
While marketing the product on college campuses, the team met a medical student with a question. He’d bought a ₹20,000 textbook and needed only three chapters. If Glossaread could split a magazine into articles, why not split a book into chapters?
Bhanu spent the next 8 to 12 months visiting publishers. One gave him three or four books to try. Copy-protection software cost $6 per user, far more than a tier-2 student could absorb, so the team built its own, blocking downloads, photocopies and copy-paste. That took six months. Chapters went on sale for ₹9 or ₹10 on a revenue share. The money was small, but it taught them the category.
The bigger lesson came from the campuses. In tier-2 and tier-3 colleges, students didn’t study from textbooks. They studied from their professors’ notes. Bhanu puts the market at about 40 million students enrolled in higher education, with only 5 to 8% in tier-1 colleges. The other 90%-plus had no single, reliable place to get their study material.
By then Sonam Choudhary had joined him. She’d consulted for the company for more than a year before coming on as co-founder. She grew up in a small village in Bihar and brought a product mind to the business. Together they visited more than 200 colleges on foot across Bihar and Odisha before the pandemic.
Sonam also had a view on the name: people in small towns couldn’t pronounce “Glossaread.” Bhanu resisted until a student phoned and asked, “Hello sir, grocery technology?” The brand became Goseeko, which reads as the Hindi seekho (learn) and the English seek. The legal entity stayed Glossaread Technologies Pvt Ltd, which owns Goseeko and which Pattajoshi co-founded with Choudhary. (Goseeko is a separate company from Seekho, the Bengaluru short-video learning app founded by Rohit Choudhary and his co-founders.)
What does Goseeko do, and how does it make money?
Goseeko’s study material is mapped to each university’s syllabus and written by college professors. It doesn’t sell its own degrees or courses. Doubt-solving by professors, live lectures and pre-exam crash courses are bundled into a semester subscription.
Professors are paid a fixed fee for their work. Goseeko tried a revenue share first. Bhanu decided it was unfair to put the sales risk on professors whose livelihood depended on the content.
The platform was free for its first year. It grew from zero to 8,000 users in six to seven months, and started charging in December 2019. At the time of the Spotlight interview, during FY22:
Average revenue per paying user was ₹849 per semester, and Goseeko modelled a student’s lifetime value over six semesters.
It had half a million registered students, 1.3 lakh of them paying, and more than a million visitors.
It was live in 73 universities, with a team of 50.
Customer acquisition cost was about ₹800 and falling toward ₹500, as each paying student brought in three to four more.
Growth came through campus ambassadors, student interns and professors sharing links in their WhatsApp groups, the same Bharat-first playbook that Adda247 used for exam prep. Bhanu is wary of paying for growth forever:
“I keep telling my team that the customer has to pay. You have to make the customer pay. You go invest in tech, product and content.”
He names rivals like Notesgen and Last Moment Tuitions, but says his real competitor is a habit:
“Biggest competitor is the mindset of the student today, which is basically going out and saying that I’m happy with the photocopy.”
How much funding has Goseeko raised?
Very little by edtech standards, and on purpose. In the episode, Bhanu says Goseeko had raised a little over half a million dollars, about ₹4 crore, from HNIs and two angel networks. He and Sonam had put in the same amount themselves, taking the total invested past $1 million.
The Digital Futurists Angels Network invested in April 2021, when Goseeko was in 68 universities across 19 states. Tracxn records $730K raised over five rounds from 27 investors, including Onnivation, at a valuation of $4.84 million as of June 2021. Goseeko later added revenue-based debt from Klub, with no equity dilution.
Pattajoshi’s case for this path comes from what he saw at Yahoo. Yahoo pioneered search, messaging and groups, and Google did search better. Nokia was a decade ahead, and Apple still won. His model is Sridhar Vembu, who built Zoho brick by brick without venture money. Founders who keep raising, he warns, can end up owning 2% of a company that no longer answers to them.
“Money has never built businesses. History is replete with examples.”
It’s the same instinct Founder Thesis heard from Novatr’s Harkunwar Singh, who built his edtech on about $1 million of funding.
Is Goseeko profitable, and what happened next?
Yes, on the latest reported figures. In September 2023, Goseeko’s parent Glossaread Technologies reported FY23 gross revenue of ₹7 crore and a profit of close to ₹60 lakh, with a target of turning cash positive by the end of FY24. It reported 42% year-on-year growth, an 80% annual rise in new users and 2 million unique visitors, driven mainly by referrals.
The company credited that profit to a zonal, on-the-ground marketing approach that kept acquisition costs in check, instead of national ad campaigns.
Glossaread has also launched SkillCamper, a skill-building platform for students and young professionals, which moves it from exam preparation into employability, the same shift Sunstone made for tier-2 college students. The company said its next step would be a Series A round in 2024 or a listing on the BSE SME exchange.
Chandrabhanu Pattajoshi got his first job because he kept calling back for four months. Goseeko has been built the same way: slowly, on customers who pay, with the founders’ own money on the line.
Listen to this episode on Apple Podcasts or Amazon Music.
Sources
Glossaread reports being profitable in 2023 with Klub’s debt funding (ANI)
Edtech startup Glossaread reports profit of Rs 60L with a revenue of Rs 7Cr (Indian Startup News)
Digital Futurists Angels Network invests in edtech startup Goseeko (Entrepreneur India)
Yahoo India’s Chandrabhanu Pattajoshi moves to PrecisionMatch (afaqs)
Seekho raises $28 Mn in Series B round led by Bessemer (Entrackr)