Suhruta Kulkarni, Alok Shrivastava and Siddhartha Banerjee form the core team of GoCrackIt, a startup that provides personalized mentoring services for students and working professionals.
The startup was founded in 2015 by Suhruta Kulkarni, an IIM Ahmedabad alumna. Alok, her husband, and an IIM Bangalore alumnus, supported her while pursuing his job in a management consulting firm. Harshit, Alok’s batchmate from IIM Bangalore, actively supported them in the initial phase and is now their advisor. In 2017, the company started to gain traction and Alok joined in full time. Soon, Siddhartha, Suhruta’s batchmate from IIM Ahmedabad, with rich experience across marketing, branding and operations joined in.
The company provides mentoring services for students in MBA schools and working professionals who are trying to make a major career shift. The company will connect these working professionals with mentors who have undertaken a similar career shift. GoCrackIt provides insights regarding the process of transitioning and conducts resume reviews and mock interviews for working professionals to help them make the shift. Specific mentors, who are industry and functional experts, provide these services. GoCrackIt provides value not only to its users who avail mentoring services, but also to the institutes where the users study and the companies, which recruit the users. Institutes get a first hand report on its students’ competencies, while companies get employees who have carefully chosen the job and are better prepared to succeed in their careers.
Although they are not the first in the market, they have many differentiating factors that make them unique. They are a primarily B2B company, working to provide mentoring services to the students of business schools. They plan to start getting into the B2C business model as well, since working professionals are now looking at career transitions, thanks to rapid changes in the economic environment. GoCrackIt has a strong network of 300+ mentors, who are alumni of top B-Schools and are passionate about helping others.
The team is extremely dedicated. A beaming new dad, Alok says of his wife and co-founder, that Suhruta continued to work until four hours before she delivered their baby! In the next five years, GoCrackIt plans to have over 100 employees and expects to have helped lakhs of customers.
What NSRCEL is doing for them
The founders are very thankful for the help they received from IIM Bangalore’s incubator – the N.S. Raghavan Center for Entrepreneurial Learning (NSRCEL). They credit NSRCEL for giving them structure and keeping them on the right path in their entrepreneurial journey. They also value the advice given to them in order to grow their business. However, they believe that an in-house team that can help them with website development services, app development services or manpower will be very valuable for the team.
To other budding entrepreneurs, the founders say that the most important ability of any entrepreneur is to work very hard and persevere through hard times. They should always be willing to learn. They should also be able to scale their idea and talk as much as they can with their customers.
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